Scientists and engineers study animal movements for clues on ways to improve lives for humans, such as designing better prosthetics or terrain-conquering robots. But that doesn’t mean fun can’t be a part of the research as well — as in asking kids to see how long they can stand on one leg a la flamingos.
That was the energy on display Saturday, March 11, for Animals in Motion: Biomechanics Day at Zoo Atlanta, part of the 2023 Atlanta Science Festival. With help from biomechanics researchers from Georgia Tech, Clemson University, and the University of Akron, visitors gathered at several demonstration booths around the Zoo to learn more about wildlife and work exploring animal biomechanics.
Joe Mendelson, adjunct professor in the School of Biological Sciences, is also director of Research for Zoo Atlanta. Mendelson says a Biomechanics Day was first scheduled for 2020 but ran headlong into the beginnings of the pandemic.
“Finally, we get to assemble our colleagues and highlight their fun and innovative projects,” he said, adding that the Atlanta Science Festival is the perfect place to attract researchers studying biomechanics of creatures as different as snakes, elephants, centipedes, and humans, as well.
There are many benefits to knowing more about animal locomotion. “Allowing people to see and understand familiar animals through a different light and comparing, for example, their locomotion to your own can be an effective way to generate interest and caring about animals by people,” Mendelson said.
Zoo Atlanta frequently collaborates with biomechanics researchers across Georgia's Tech's College of Sciences and College of Engineering. Animals in Motion: Biomechanics Day highlighted those labs and their various projects, as well as other labs from around the country that are doing similar research.
One of those researchers, Greg Sawicki, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences, used ultrasound imaging to give Zoo Atlanta visitors an “under the skin” look at how animal and human muscles work together with tendons to move the body.
“We will look at, and compare, calf muscles and the Achilles tendon in the leg with the biceps and biceps tendon in the arm,” Sawicki said. “Zoo visitors will be able to see for themselves the wide variety of structural features of muscle-tendon systems, ranging from short muscles and long compliant tendons for the calf to long muscles and short stiff tendons.”
Sawicki hoped his audience learned that different structural features of muscle-tendon systems “may have unique functional benefits in the wild — and an animal’s limb design may be specifically adapted for their environmental niche.”
Simon Sponberg, Dunn Family Associate Professor in the Schools of Physics and Biological Sciences, wasn't able to bring the live animals he works with — hawk moths — to the Animal Biomechanics Day. “It’s for a variety of reasons, but mostly that they don’t fly much during the day,” Sponberg said. But visitors to Sponberg’s booth explored different insect wing shapes to see how they help moths and other insects move.
“What we want students to get out of it is that there are many different forms and functions a ‘wing’ can take,” he added. “So we want people to learn how we can use experiments to understand the link between structure, function, and performance, especially in flight.”
At another section of Zoo Atlanta, adults and kids spent their time trying to balance on just one leg. It’s unclear if any of the nearby flamingos were impressed with the results, but Young-Hui Chang, professor and associate chair for Faculty Development in the School of Biological Sciences, says the balancing act is much easier for flamingos.
“They have to deal with the same physical challenges to stand in a stable way,” Chang said. “Biology tells us that, as vertebrates, flamingos are starting with many of the same muscles and bones of the leg that humans have. But, flamingos have evolved a way to use their limbs such that they can sleep standing on one leg with minimal involvement of the muscles, which would be impossible for us humans to do.”
Chang studies flamingo biomechanics for the sheer sake of gaining knowledge about how nature works. But he adds that there are practical applications to the research. “One that has already been used by roboticists is the development of a ‘flamingo bot’ that uses the principles we’ve discovered in the flamingo leg to help the robot conserve energy,” Chang said.
]]>The ENVS degree will provide a strong foundation in the basic sciences, requiring core content in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, earth sciences, and environmental policy. Flexible electives in upper-level coursework will allow students to customize their program of study to their interest and career goals.
A launch event for the degree program will take place at the Kendeda Building on the afternoon of Friday, August 25, 2023.
“The new degree will prepare students to be future leaders who are well-versed on how the Earth's systems can be influenced by human activity and contribute to human well-being,” says Greg Huey, professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Graduates will be positioned to be leaders in industry, academia, education, and communication to create innovative solutions to the most significant environmental challenges of our time.”
Two faculty members in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) and a faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences will serve as inaugural leadership: Jennifer Glass, associate professor, is program director; Samantha Wilson, academic professional, is director of Undergraduate Studies; and Linda Green, senior academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences, is director of Experiential Learning.
The foundational science classes in this new degree will be complemented by courses in Public Policy and City Planning, including Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Environmental Policy and Politics, before opening up and providing students with flexibility in course options to better fit their career paths and interests.
“Past EAS students have been interested in careers related to environmental consulting, environmental law, and continuing their studies in graduate school,” Wilson says. “The variety of environmental career paths was the driver behind allowing students to diversify their options within the degree.”
“This degree will give Georgia Tech students a unique opportunity to customize their environmental science program of study to their interests and career goals in science, policy, public service, non-profit, government, industry, academia, or beyond,” adds Glass. “We are committed to building an academic community in ENVS that values student leadership, diversity, inclusion, equity, accessibility, and belonging.”
Hands-on learning opportunities will include field station experiences and field trip excursions, study abroad programs, and internships, Green says. “This major sustains the Institute’s strategic plan to lead by example, champion innovation, and connect globally — particularly in an area so critical as addressing Earth’s environmental issues.”
Glass added that the Schools of Chemistry, Biological Sciences, and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences are currently revamping several classes to meet United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Students will advance to be global leaders of environmental solutions that draw upon the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and incorporate awareness of environmental justice issues.
“We can’t wait for August to celebrate the ENVS launch with our incoming and current students,” Glass says.
More information on the Environment Science (ENVS) degree:
General information: jennifer.glass@eas.gatech.edu
Curriculum and enrollment: samantha.wilson@eas.gatech.edu
Co-curricular initiatives: linda.green@gatech.edu
Learn more: Three new EAS undergraduate degrees
Beginning Summer 2023, prospective and current Georgia Tech students will have three new Bachelor of Science degrees to choose from in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The expanded undergraduate offerings target a wider range of job and research opportunities — from academia to analytics, NASA to NOAA, meteorology to marine science, climate and earth science, to policy, law, consulting, sustainability, and beyond.
The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia has approved two new specific degrees within the School: Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences (AOS) and Solid Earth and Planetary Sciences (SEP). Regents also approved Environmental Science (ENVS) as an interdisciplinary College of Sciences degree between the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences. The existing Earth and Atmospheric Sciences B.S. degree will sunset in two years for new students. Learn more.
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A total of 21 projects from all six Georgia Tech colleges will reach an estimated 22,500 students. The collaborative effort is focused on a key goal of the Institute’s Sustainability Next Task Force: to produce graduates who are committed to making a positive difference in their communities, their organizations, and the world.
“The overall goal is that all of our students understand the societal context for their work, as well as the scientific, environmental, economic, and social aspects of sustainability,” says Jennifer Leavey, assistant dean for Faculty Mentoring for the College of Sciences and co-chair of Sustainability Next.
Leavey and Rebecca Watts-Hull, assistant director of Faculty Development for Sustainability Education in the Center for Teaching and Learning, served as liaisons for the Undergraduate Sustainability Education Committee, which judged the proposals.
Leavey also coordinates College of Sciences educational programs related to science and sustainability, including the Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project and the Living Building Science Vertically Integrated Project Team.
Leavey said the UN SDGs — which ask world citizens and their governments to consider ambitious solutions to longstanding problems such as hunger, poverty, climate damage, inequality, and lack of quality healthcare — are clear and compelling. “These are things we want for a better world,” she shared. “Every field has some connection to them. And it's just a very easy framework to get behind and understand. I would love it if all Georgia Tech graduates could leave feeling well versed in that understanding, and how their work connects to it.”
The Sustainable Education Committee chose projects that impacted the greatest number of students, including classes that are required for all Georgia Tech undergraduates.
Learn more about the College of Sciences’ six selected proposals:
On April 27, the Undergraduate Sustainability Education Committee hosted a Jamboree, which featured faculty from each Georgia Tech college that won grants — making brief presentations, and engaging in networking discussions.
“For the College of Sciences, it's really exciting to see the connection between different disciplines,” Leavey said. “We’ve been doing work on climate and the environment for a long time, but to see the connection with sustainability work at other colleges at Georgia Tech is very gratifying.”
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A School of Biological Sciences postdoctoral scholar will have a chance to help the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) fill in the blanks in that knowledge, thanks to a two-year fellowship from the agency’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).
Sarah Orr, who researches in Professor Michael Goodisman’s lab, receives the grant for her project proposal, “Effects of Pesticide Exposure on Developmental Genetics in Bumblebees.” The award is part of a new USDA/NIFA $11.6 million funding initiative for projects that promote healthy populations of animal pollinators in agricultural systems where reliance of crops on pollinators is increasing, but pollinator numbers are declining.
“I am honored and ecstatic to have received this prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from USDA,” Orr says. “It’s rewarding to see how my research can have important implications in agriculture broadly in the U.S. Being able to bring in my own funding and serve as the project director on a grant as a postdoc has also been exciting. It’s a brief glimpse into what it will be like to hopefully be a faculty member myself in the future.”
Orr knows that pesticides play an important role in agricultural production and human food supply. Her scientific goal is to help find a balance between the risks and benefits of pesticide use.
“My investigation into the genetic effects of pesticides is unique and somewhat novel,” she says. “Beyond traditional toxicological methods, my project will improve our understanding of how pesticides may affect the developmental genetics of bumblebees.”
Homing in on key pollinators
Bumblebees are social insects native to North America and important pollinators for food crops including tomatoes, blueberries, and eggplant. As with most social insects, bumblebees live in colonies made up of a single queen and hundreds of sterile workers. “This genetic structure provides a really interesting model to study integrated development,” Orr says.
Orr’s project will investigate how pesticides affect the integrated developmental processes of Bombus impatiens bumblebees by examining changes in gene expression. Orr’s research will attempt to determine if pesticides impact the ratio of males to females in bee colonies, and how pesticides affect morphological traits of both worker and queen bees.
Orr says that new chemicals are approved before science can fully explore all of the potential environmental impact from their use. “For example, a lot of my research will focus on sulfoxaflor, a relatively new pesticide on the market,” she says, “and scientists are continuing to discover negative consequences of sulfoxaflor on native bee populations.”
USDA/NIFA New Contract/Grant/Agreement No. 2023-67012-39886, Proposal No. 2022-09642, Effects of Pesticide Exposure on Developmental Genetics in Bumblebees
Initial Award Year: 2023
Investigator: S.E. Orr
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
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John McDonald, professor emeritus in the School of Biological Sciences, founding director of the ICRC, and the study’s corresponding author, explains that the new test’s accuracy is better in detecting ovarian cancer than existing tests for women clinically classified as normal, with a particular improvement in detecting early-stage ovarian disease in that cohort.
The team’s results and methodologies are detailed in a new paper, “A Personalized Probabilistic Approach to Ovarian Cancer Diagnostics,” published in the March 2024 online issue of the medical journal Gynecologic Oncology. Based on their computer models, the researchers have developed what they believe will be a more clinically useful approach to ovarian cancer diagnosis — whereby a patient’s individual metabolic profile can be used to assign a more accurate probability of the presence or absence of the disease.
“This personalized, probabilistic approach to cancer diagnostics is more clinically informative and accurate than traditional binary (yes/no) tests,” McDonald says. “It represents a promising new direction in the early detection of ovarian cancer, and perhaps other cancers as well.”
The study co-authors also include Dongjo Ban, a Bioinformatics Ph.D. student in McDonald’s lab; Research Scientists Stephen N. Housley, Lilya V. Matyunina, and L.DeEtte (Walker) McDonald; Regents’ Professor Jeffrey Skolnick, who also serves as Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology; and two collaborating physicians: University of North Carolina Professor Victoria L. Bae-Jump and Ovarian Cancer Institute of Atlanta Founder and Chief Executive Officer Benedict B. Benigno. Members of the research team are forming a startup to transfer and commercialize the technology, and plan to seek requisite trials and FDA approval for the test.
Silent killer
Ovarian cancer is often referred to as the silent killer because the disease is typically asymptomatic when it first arises — and is usually not detected until later stages of development, when it is difficult to treat.
McDonald explains that while the average five-year survival rate for late-stage ovarian cancer patients, even after treatment, is around 31 percent — but that if ovarian cancer is detected and treated early, the average five-year survival rate is more than 90 percent.
“Clearly, there is a tremendous need for an accurate early diagnostic test for this insidious disease,” McDonald says.
And although development of an early detection test for ovarian cancer has been vigorously pursued for more than three decades, the development of early, accurate diagnostic tests has proven elusive. Because cancer begins on the molecular level, McDonald explains, there are multiple possible pathways capable of leading to even the same cancer type.
“Because of this high-level molecular heterogeneity among patients, the identification of a single universal diagnostic biomarker of ovarian cancer has not been possible,” McDonald says. “For this reason, we opted to use a branch of artificial intelligence — machine learning — to develop an alternative probabilistic approach to the challenge of ovarian cancer diagnostics.”
Metabolic profiles
Georgia Tech co-author Dongjo Ban, whose thesis research contributed to the study, explains that “because end-point changes on the metabolic level are known to be reflective of underlying changes operating collectively on multiple molecular levels, we chose metabolic profiles as the backbone of our analysis.”
“The set of human metabolites is a collective measure of the health of cells,” adds coauthor Jeffrey Skolnick, “and by not arbitrary choosing any subset in advance, one lets the artificial intelligence figure out which are the key players for a given individual.”
Mass spectrometry can identify the presence of metabolites in the blood by detecting their mass and charge signatures. However, Ban says, the precise chemical makeup of a metabolite requires much more extensive characterization.
Ban explains that because the precise chemical composition of less than seven percent of the metabolites circulating in human blood have, thus far, been chemically characterized, it is currently impossible to accurately pinpoint the specific molecular processes contributing to an individual's metabolic profile.
However, the research team recognized that, even without knowing the precise chemical make-up of each individual metabolite, the mere presence of different metabolites in the blood of different individuals, as detected by mass spectrometry, can be incorporated as features in the building of accurate machine learning-based predictive models (similar to the use of individual facial features in the building of facial pattern recognition algorithms).
“Thousands of metabolites are known to be circulating in the human bloodstream, and they can be readily and accurately detected by mass spectrometry and combined with machine learning to establish an accurate ovarian cancer diagnostic,” Ban says.
A new probabilistic approach
The researchers developed their integrative approach by combining metabolomic profiles and machine learning-based classifiers to establish a diagnostic test with 93 percent accuracy when tested on 564 women from Georgia, North Carolina, Philadelphia and Western Canada. 431 of the study participants were active ovarian cancer patients, and while the remaining 133 women in the study did not have ovarian cancer.
Further studies have been initiated to study the possibility that the test is able to detect very early-stage disease in women displaying no clinical symptoms, McDonald says.
McDonald anticipates a clinical future where a person with a metabolic profile that falls within a score range that makes cancer highly unlikely would only require yearly monitoring. But someone with a metabolic score that lies in a range where a majority (say, 90%) have previously been diagnosed with ovarian cancer would likely be monitored more frequently — or perhaps immediately referred for advanced screening.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ygyno.2023.12.030
Funding
This research was funded by the Ovarian Cancer Institute (Atlanta), the Laura Crandall Brown Foundation, the Deborah Nash Endowment Fund, Northside Hospital (Atlanta), and the Mark Light Integrated Cancer Research Student Fellowship.
Disclosure
Study co-authors John McDonald, Stephen N. Housley, Jeffrey Skolnick, and Benedict B. Benigno are the co-founders of MyOncoDx, Inc., formed to support further research, technology transfer, and commercialization for the team’s new clinical tool for the diagnosis of ovarian cancer.
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Hughes and his students sought to answer questions about reproduction and food supply, as they worked to add new complexities to the VERA application from different species of trout, circumstances, to changes. According to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), an international effort, led by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, brook trout are found in three types of aquatic environments: rivers, lakes, and marine areas and their living requirements in these environments.
“Originally when we populated the brook trout, we noticed the brown trout shared the same life history and ecological information, but we were able to find enough information from the Encyclopedia of Life to differentiate those species,” said Hughes. “I had my students run through the process of building these components through an instructional-based format by having them manipulate some of the parameters and probabilities.”
VERA was developed by the Design & Intelligence Lab at Georgia Tech in collaboration with EOL. The technology is being used by students as an assisting tool and is publicly accessible. The data being collected from their usage is part of the research conducted at the NSF AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE).
“Users can jump into our program and conduct ‘what if’ experiments by adjusting simulation parameters. This is our way of providing an accessible and informal learning tool,” said Ashok Goel, director and co-principal Investigator of AI-ALOE and computer science professor at Georgia Tech. “Using VERA as an assessment tool is excellent. These students are using VERA in a way we are not.”
Goel was recently joined by Georgia Tech graduate researcher Andrew Hornback, research scientist Sandeep Kakar, and staff member Daniela Estrada at NGTC to learn more about the work in VERA and challenges Hughes and his students faced while using the application.
“The main struggle is limitation with the EOL and database,” said Hughes. “There are some species that we just can’t find, and sometimes it is glitchy and doesn’t work right away, but it is not insurmountable.”
Another challenge Hughes’ students found was not being able to find what they wanted to complete certain tasks, such as stream and environmental patterns of comparative fish ecosystems.
With that being known, AI-ALOE is working to address these issues and more to build and cater to specific student and teacher needs. At this time, the Design & Intelligence Laboratory is in the process of expanding VERA in the capability of its on-demand agent-based simulation generator, which would enable users to divide components into separate habitats.
“It was very interesting to see the results because antidotally through much research we were able to set up all these relationships and let them run the model, and the results were exactly what we would have hypothesized what they would be given those perimeters,” said Hughes.
The technical college has plans to introduce VERA to another classroom this semester held by Natural Resource Management instructor, Kevin Peyton.
About VERA
Interested in trying out VERA? Create an account at https://vera.cc.gatech.edu/. You can also find VERA’s user guide as well as a step-by-step tutorial at http://epi.vera.cc.gatech.edu/docs/exercise.
About AI-ALOE
The NSF AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE) is developing an AI-based transformative model for online adult learning through research and data collection.
About NGTC
North Georgia Technical College is a residential, public, multi-campus institution of higher education serving the workforce development needs of Northeast Georgia and part of the Technical College System of Georgia.
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breon.martin@gatech.edu
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In a new paper published in eLife, researchers in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Computer Science have shown that AF2Complex may be able to lend a hand.
Building on the models of DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2, a machine learning tool able to predict the detailed three-dimensional structures of individual proteins, AF2Complex — short for AlphaFold 2 Complex — is a deep learning tool designed to predict the physical interactions of multiple proteins. With these predictions, AF2Complex is able to calculate which proteins are likely to interact with each other to form functional complexes in unprecedented detail.
“We essentially conduct computational experiments that try to figure out the atomic details of supercomplexes (large interacting groups of proteins) important to biological functions,” explained Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor and Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, and one of the corresponding authors of the study. With AF2Complex, which was developed last year by the same research team, it’s “like using a computational microscope powered by deep learning and supercomputing.”
In their latest study, the researchers used this ‘computational microscope’ to examine a complicated protein synthesis and transport pathway, hoping to clarify how proteins in the pathway interact to ultimately transport a newly synthesized protein from the interior to the outer membrane of the bacteria — and identify players that experiments might have missed. Insights into this pathway may identify new targets for antibiotic and therapeutic design while providing a foundation for using AF2Complex to computationally expedite this type of biology research as a whole.
Created by London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, AlphaFold 2 is a deep learning tool able to generate accurate predictions about the three-dimensional structure of single proteins using just their building blocks, amino acids. Taking things a step further, AF2Complex uses these structures to predict the likelihood that proteins are able to interact to form a functional complex, what aspects of each structure are the likely interaction sites, and even what protein complexes are likely to pair up to create even larger functional groups called supercomplexes.
“The successful development of AF2Complex earlier this year makes us believe that this approach has tremendous potential in identifying and characterizing the set of protein-protein interactions important to life,” shared Mu Gao, a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech. “To further convince the broad molecular biology community, we [had to] demonstrate it with a more convincing, high impact application.”
The researchers chose to apply AF2Complex to a pathway in Escherichia coli (E. coli), a model organism in life sciences research commonly used for experimental DNA manipulation and protein production due to its relative simplicity and fast growth.
To demonstrate the tool’s power, the team examined the synthesis and transport of proteins that are essential for exchanging nutrients and responding to environmental stressors: outer membrane proteins, or OMPs for short. These proteins reside on the outermost membrane of gram-negative bacteria, a large family of bacteria characterized by the presence of inner and outer membranes, like E. coli. However, the proteins are created inside the cell and must be transported to their final destinations.
“After more than two decades of experimental studies, researchers have identified some of the protein complexes of key players, but certainly not all of them,” Gao explained. AF2Complex “could enable us to discover some novel and interesting features of the OMP biogenesis pathway that were missed in previous experimental studies.”
Using the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the team, which included computer science undergraduate Davi Nakajima An, put AF2Complex to the test. They compared a few proteins known to be important in the synthesis and transport of OMPs to roughly 1,500 other proteins — all of the known proteins in E. coli’s cell envelope — to see which pairs the tool computed as most likely to interact, and which of those pairs were likely to form supercomplexes.
To determine if AF2Complex’s predictions were correct, the researchers compared the tool’s predictions to known experimental data. “Encouragingly,” said Skolnick, “among the top hits from computational screening, we found previously known interacting partners.” Even within those protein pairs known to interact, AF2Complex was able to highlight structural details of those interactions that explain data from previous experiments, lending additional confidence to the tool’s accuracy.
In addition to known interactions, AF2Complex predicted several unknown pairs. Digging further into these unexpected partners revealed details on what aspects of the pairs might interact to form larger groups of functional proteins, likely active configurations of complexes that have previously eluded experimentalists, and new potential mechanisms for how OMPs are synthesized and transported.
“Since the outer membrane pathway is both vital and unique to gram-negative bacteria, the key proteins involved in this pathway could be novel targets for new antibiotics,” said Skolnick. “As such, our work that provides molecular insights about these new drug targets might be valuable to new therapeutic design.”
Beyond this pathway, the researchers are hopeful that AF2Complex could mean big things for biology research.
“Unlike predicting structures of a single protein sequence, predicting the structural model of a supercomplex can be very complicated, especially when the components or stoichiometry of the complex is unknown,” Gao noted. “In this regard, AF2Complex could be a new computational tool for biologists to conduct trial experiments of different combinations of proteins,” potentially expediting and increasing the efficiency of this type of biology research as a whole.
AF2Complex is an open-source tool available to the public and can be downloaded here.
This work was supported in part by the DOE Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (DOE DE-SC0021303) and the Division of General Medical Sciences of the National Institute Health (NIH R35GM118039). DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554
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Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
Offered as a one-credit College of Sciences special topics course, Explore LLC undergraduates who are interested in research and pre-health studies get to learn about special science and mathematics topics that are not regularly offered in a typical curriculum.
The instructors for the new course are postdoctoral scholars and research scientists in the College, including Peter Conlin, the first instructor to participate in the course.
In addition to research and pre-health course opportunities, Explore LLC gives first-year students majoring in College of Sciences-related disciplines (biology, chemistry and biochemistry, earth and atmospheric sciences, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and psychology) a unique opportunity to live among the highest concentration of science and math majors on campus in the same residence halls.
“Georgia Tech undergraduates often take general education/core classes in year one and two of their studies. However, undergraduates are also curious about research and advances in science and mathematics, especially in health-related areas and in improving the human condition,” said Cam Tyson, College of Sciences Assistant Dean. “A special topics course offered for Explore LLC participants was the perfect setting to bring together students with these interests, along with postdoctoral scholars and research scientists interested in sharing their knowledge and experience.”
Conlin’s inaugural course, COS 3801 HP: Special Topics: Evolutionary Biology in Health and Disease, hosted 16 Explore LLC students in the spring of 2023. Below are some of his comments:
Tell me how you approached developing this course in a way that would make the subject matter relevant to the Explore students?
Peter Conlin:
The original call for proposals requested “courses that will be of interest to first-year and sophomore students with a specific interest in a healthcare career and/or performing undergraduate research.” So, my course, Evolutionary Biology in Health and Disease, was designed from the ground up with this purpose in mind.
I wanted to connect the basic biological research with its medical applications, and encourage students to pursue undergraduate research opportunities. To this end, our in-class discussions, the homework assignments, and the final presentations for the class were all centered on reading and interpreting results from scientific literature and medical case studies. I also featured ongoing research at Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection whenever possible.
I made a point to advertise upcoming out-of-class seminars each week (especially those featuring speakers from Georgia Tech labs). Students could attend and summarize the talk they heard for extra credit points.
Any lasting lessons?
Initially, I think some of the students were a little shocked that their first assignment was to read a scientific paper for class. (Admittedly, the paper was not an easy one!) But by the end of the semester, after reading seven more papers for class and likely several others for their final presentation, I think they all felt much more confident about their ability to pick up an article, even on an unfamiliar topic, and work their way through it.
How did teaching the course help you as an instructor?
At the beginning of the semester, I was consistently overestimating how much material I could get through in a single 50-minute class period. By the end of the semester, I felt that I had a better understanding of how long different activities would take, and we ended up finishing on time much more frequently.
I was so thankful for the Tech to Teaching for Postdocs class taught by Tammy McCoy (Teaching Assistant Development and Future Faculty Specialist at the Center for Teaching and Learning) while I was developing my syllabus. McCoy and College of Sciences Assistant Dean Cam Tyson really helped me to make this course a reality, so I’m very grateful to both of them for giving me this opportunity.
The feedback from the students?
The feedback from my students was critical to my success as an instructor. I explained to the students at the start of the course that I wanted to improve my teaching, that I would be actively seeking their feedback, and that I would do my best to make changes based on the feedback I received. Some of the changes included modifying the course content, as I did when I saw the level of enthusiasm and participation when we discussed cancer evolution. I revised my syllabus to continue discussions on this topic.
I also changed up homework assignments and in-class activities based on student feedback. This gave students more experiences with reading and discussing research papers.
I tried to experiment with different in-class activities and teaching styles, ranging from primarily lecture-based classes with occasional discussion questions, to a “flipped” classroom where students spent the majority of the time discussing the papers they had read in small groups. It was such a great experience to watch the students take such an active role in their learning.
Sebastian Horbulewicz, a second-year biochemistry major, was a student in Conlin’s Special Topics course:
I enjoyed the fact that we delved into a wide variety of topics, giving us small pieces with which we could use to build a broader understanding of evolution. Dr. Conlin’s succinct lessons gave me a lot to think about, and introduced me to new aspects of cancer, antibiotic resistance, virulence, and more. I think the course really shined in its ability to draw from current literature and the subsequent discussions we had in class.
For more information on Explore LLC and College Sciences Special Topics Courses:
The Explore Living Learning Community (LLC) of the College of Sciences strives to connect undergraduate students with faculty, and staff across the institute in order to encourage learning of career options, develop technical and team-building skills, and promote early access to undergraduate research and/or health-care affiliated co-curricular activities. The LLC fosters a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and self-discovery through a range of courses and activities offered to its participants.
A request for 2024-2025 academic year CoS special topics course proposals is expected to be distributed to CoS postdoctoral fellows and research sciences in February 2024.
Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
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Diggle is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the principal investigator for the Diggle Lab. He takes over the CMDI leadership position from Biological Sciences Professor Sam Brown, who has served as CMDI’s director since January 2020.
Founded in 2018, CMDI seeks to understand the chemical, physical, and biological connections that together underpin microbial dynamics. The Center’s science research includes a wide variety of disciplines — microbial ecology, microbiome dynamics, biogeochemistry, microbial biophysics, socio-microbiology, infection dynamics, host-pathogen interactions, marine and aquatic microbiology, microbial evolution, viral ecology, spatial imaging, and math/computational modeling.
“It’s an honor to be chosen for this,” Diggle said. “I think that what’s really exciting is that when I joined Georgia Tech in 2017, we were only just developing microbiology here. What’s happened since is that microbiology has taken on a much bigger profile at Georgia Tech. We’re now at the point where we are attracting really strong graduate students specifically to do microbiology, which is great. CMDI is more visible now, and I think that’s one reason graduate students are applying.”
“Steve Diggle is a perfect fit to lead CMDI forward,” Brown said. “Steve's research showcases impactful interdisciplinary research, combining molecular biology with ecology and evolution to understand what makes microbes tick, and how we can better control them. Steve has also shown a lasting commitment to mentorship and scientific service, and so I'm sure CMDI is in very good hands.”
Growth of the Center
Brown said the Center continues to add key personnel. In the past year, CMDI announced its inaugural Early Career Award Fellow in Ellinor Alseth, and its first grant writing specialist, Senior Research Scientist Carina Baskett. “Dr. Alseth is leading through her science, pulling multiple labs together to form new collaborations. Thanks to Dr. Baskett, we have substantially increased our rate of applications for both postdoctoral and postgraduate fellowships, and she has also led the pursuit of multi-principal investigator grants,” Brown added.
The CMDI has also boosted inclusive resources that supported trainee and staff recruiting visits to underrepresented minority-serving conferences and local institutions, and provided additional stipends to help underrepresented minority recruits with relocation costs to Atlanta. The Center has also re-launched its showcase public event, MicrobeATL, a speaker series designed to integrate the microbiology research community across Atlanta that was paused during the pandemic.
CMDI targets models of human disease, but also complex microbial communities in a range of aquatic and terrestrial environments. This research is united by the beliefs that studying across systems is essential for identifying organizing principles, and fully understanding microbial ecology and evolution requires knowledge of social interactions over space and time.
Diggle added that the CMDI’s research priorities include climate change’s impact on the microbial world, and searching for new drugs that can tame antibiotic-resistant pathogens. “Antibiotic resistance is one of the great problems we're facing in the future,” he explained. That problem is why CMDI scientists like Julia Kubanek, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Tech’s Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research, are scouring oceans for natural antibacterial alternatives.
Diggle also hopes to continue attracting the world’s top microbiology researchers to join the CMDI faculty while seeking out more external funding. “The ultimate goal is to make Georgia Tech one of the best places to come and do microbiology research in the U.S. Given what we’ve accomplished so far, I think that's a reasonable goal.”
Meet Steve Diggle
Diggle’s research interests focus on cooperation and communication in microbes, and how these are related to virulence, biofilms, and antimicrobial resistance. He has a longstanding interest in understanding how the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes disease, and is especially interested in how this organism evolves during chronic infections such as those found in cystic fibrosis patients and chronic wounds.
Diggle received his B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of Salford in the United Kingdom, and earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Microbiology from the University of Nottingham in 2001. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Nottingham before obtaining a Royal Society University Fellowship (2006-2014). He joined the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech in 2017 and was named a full professor in 2022.
Diggle currently serves as a senior editor on the editorial board of the journal Microbiology. He has previously served on the editorial boards of FEMS Microbiology Letters, BMC Microbiology, Microbiology Open and Royal Society Open Science. He served as an elected member of the Microbiology Society Council from 2012-2016, and was also on their conference and policy committees. In 2020, Diggle received the Cullen-Peck Scholar Award, which recognizes research accomplishments led by College of Sciences faculty at the associate professor or advanced assistant professor level. Diggle was selected as an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer in 2021.
Learn more about Diggle’s research:
CMDI: Mighty Microbial Dynamics for a Healthier People and Planet
A Problematic Pathogen Develops Antibiotic Tolerance — Without Previous Exposure
About Georgia Tech
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 44,000 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.
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The creation of C-PIES is a new milestone in the College’s long standing inclusive efforts, as well as a key pillar of its 10-year strategic plan.
With a mission “to recruit, support and retain a diverse population for all sectors of our community ― staff, faculty, and students ― and build an inclusive community that broadens access to science and mathematics and creates opportunities for advancement,” C-PIES will continue to expand programming across the College of Sciences community.
Prior to the creation of C-PIES, Keith Oden, who retired in December 2020 following a 35-year career with Georgia Tech, served as director of Academic Diversity for the College for ten years. With a focus on student recruitment and retention, Oden’s expertise, outreach, and mentoring transformed the lives of students and the College of Sciences community.
“From reflections and conversations with College of Sciences colleagues, I became convinced that a center focused around broadening access and creating a diverse community would be more effective than tasking a single individual with all programmatic elements needed to advance our mission,” said College of Sciences Dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair Susan Lozier in a community letter this summer.
Now, working in tandem with Dean Lozier, ADVANCE Professor Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, and the College’s associate and assistant deans, as inaugural C-PIES Director, Wheaton will lead the Center in implementing recommendations from the College’s Task Force on Racial Equity, coalescing collaborative work across the College’s six schools, and leading new and ongoing efforts.
“I am excited about this new direction and its potential for making significant progress toward our goal of creating a diverse and inclusive community,” Lozier noted in sharing Wheaton’s appointment with the College of Sciences community earlier this August.
Along with leading C-PIES, Wheaton will continue his focus on research and community leadership beyond Georgia Tech. Since joining Georgia Tech in 2008, Wheaton has directed the Cognitive Motor Control Lab, where he strives to improve the lives of people with upper-limb amputations and those who have had strokes through a deeper understanding of the neurophysiology of motor learning.
Outside the lab, Wheaton has worked across communities on campus – serving on the College of Sciences Task Force on Racial Equity and Georgia Tech’s working group on Race and Racism in Contemporary Biomedicine, and being named the 2021 Faculty Diversity Champion for Georgia Tech – as well as throughout Georgia.
Along with serving as a member of the Smyrna City Council since first elected in 2019, Wheaton also helped shape rehabilitation policy and management in the state of Georgia as a Governor-appointed member of the State Rehabilitation Council during a six-year term.
We recently spoke with Wheaton about C-PIES, serving on NIH’s National Advisory Board on Medical Rehabilitation Research, and progress and service across Georgia Tech, and beyond.
Q: What was your initial reaction to the creation of the C-PIES, when it was announced in April?
A: Probably a mix of excitement, enthusiasm, and a little bit of trepidation to be honest. I think when you start talking about equity and inclusion, those are loaded concepts and very loaded terms, and people define them very differently. So, the trepidation side was more ‘Okay, how is the community going to receive something like this center as a whole?’
At the same time, I reflected on a lot of the conversations that I had with people one-on-one, and also as a result of being a part of the [College of Sciences Task Force on Racial Equity], and there’s a lot of encouragement there. This is the kind of thing that I think, by and large, people in the College want to see and are excited about. It’s a new type of opportunity for the College and it’s something that people want to rally around. So, it was a constellation of all of that all at once.
Q: What interested you about the opportunity to direct the Center?
A: Similarly, my initial feelings, honestly, including the trepidation.
I love science. I’m really, really passionate about what I do, and I’m passionate to the point of wanting to make sure that everyone gets the opportunity to at least be exposed to the possibility of doing science – and specifically doing it here at Georgia Tech. That means a lot to me. Given where [Georgia Tech is] seated within this community, within this region, within this area, we have a unique opportunity here. We should be an attractive force for doing not only science that focuses on or considers equity and inclusion, but that is being done by a population of scientists that is reflective of the broader community around us.
Those opportunities really jumped out to me as something that would be exciting to me – exciting to lead, exciting to figure out how to collaborate with other groups to [accomplish these goals]. Pulling from some other experiences that I’ve had at other places, I just thought, “you know, this could be fun.” And I think we are at a good time to do something like this.
Q: You’ve been involved in a lot of community efforts – a race and racism in biomedicine working group, middle school outreach with Georgia Tech CEISMC (Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing), Science Day in the Park with GTRI (Georgia Tech Research Institute), and more. What is your approach to promoting this work, as well as a sense of community?
A: I think it starts with having honest conversation. By that, I mean really getting past statistics, talking points, and all these other things. Really get to understanding what the challenges are and what the perceptions are.
Also, because I tend to like to know how we’re going to move forward, it’s being very focused on very actionable goals. Being very clear about “Okay, these are the things that we can do now, these are the things that we can maybe target down the line, and these are the things that will be in our 10-year plan.”
We have very concrete, actionable steps that we can take to move things forward. But at the same time, also always communicating with people about what we’re doing, maybe even sometimes what we’re not doing. That clarity and that focus are, I think, what you have to have when you’re dealing with this type of issue, unfortunately because it is sensitive sometimes. But I think that’s what’s needed here.
Q: What are some of the main challenges you see this center as a whole facing?
A: You know, I think perception is everything. I’m going to be honest, [this topic] can be very uncomfortable for some people, and something that some people just disagree with – or that they think they disagree with, I should probably say.
Perception suggests that this center might focus on one thing, but in reality, the perspective is usually much broader. I think a lot of people will immediately think “Oh, this is just about bringing in more women or more people of color into different units.” It could include that. But it could also be, “What scientific questions are we asking? How are we responding to equity needs of our immediate community? To the state? To the nation? Are we asking sharp enough scientific questions that are immediate to some of the needs that are clearly emerging from funding agencies and other organizations that focus on inequity?” That is a part of this, too.
Q: As the inaugural leader of the Center, what immediate goals do you envision for yourself? Your long-term goals for C-PIES?
A: To start with the latter, I hope that the Center, as it evolves, turns into a real catalyst for change. Change not just in building a better community, diversifying our community, and promoting better inclusion, but also creating a catalyst for new questions, new horizons that we should be pursuing that are really addressing the needs of the community. I would love to see the Center evolve in that direction.
To get there though, the first things I’m excited about doing initially are having conversations. Let’s, as campus leaders, get people together and really, just conversate about these issues. Let’s see what our various levels of comfort and sensitivity are around these things. Do we even understand some of these words and phrases and what they mean? Because they’re complicated and they come with a lot of emotion.
Also, starting to identify opportunities for growth within various units within the College that are ripe for development in this area, and going after resources nationally or at the state level to try to move the needle forward in terms of the type of people we have in our labs, the type of people we have teaching, the types of folks that we have sitting in faculty units across campus. Let’s really think innovatively about how we can be a leader in this area.
What’s exciting and inspiring to me is that we see a lot of other universities around the country, and even some of our competitors, that are boldly pursuing sustainable efforts. That tells me it can be done — we just have to do it. That’s all it is, it’s very simple. It sounds complicated and messy, but in reality, it’s incredibly simple. You just have to want to do it.
Q: What are you most looking forward to as you start this new position?
A: I’m just excited to get started. I’m excited to do the work and see the change.
I am convinced that once we, as a community, acknowledge that this is not as hard and messy and complicated as it sounds – once we’re over that barrier, then we can really have progress. But we still have to make sure that we are all united, and clear on that barrier. And that’s what I’m excited about.
Q: As a member of NIH’s National Advisory Board on Medical Rehabilitation Research board, you will be advising the directors of NIH, National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Can you elaborate on what that will entail?
A: A lot of this really focuses on trying to get feedback from the scientific community about the types of discoveries that we need to be making to really move the rehabilitation needle forward. Rehabilitation, in the broadest terms, includes disorders, nervous system injuries, all kinds of things that need rehabilitation.
That’s a broad aspect of NIH’s portfolio. This board will be critical to ensuring that NIH-funded medical rehabilitation research continues to be at the tip of the spear of innovation. I am excited to be on the Advisory Board to make sure that we are thinking proactively about the way that science is emerging, even how our trainees are emerging, to make sure that the funding priorities are aligned with the questions that we need to ask on the ground.
Q: What was your reaction to NIH asking you to serve on this board?
A: I was kind of surprised, actually. I think this is a really exciting opportunity, and it felt good for NIH to reach out and ask me to do something like this. To me it was absolutely a no-brainer to accept it.
Q: What are your main goals as an advisor?
A: I’m certainly in a space where I care a lot about rehabilitation, particularly with limb loss and stroke. But I’m also very interested in understanding how we can better intersect computational and engineering aspects into sciences to ask better questions — and how we can use all these things together to understand how to move rehabilitation forward. I’m excited to share my perspective from this space, and to really get at the root of some of these questions.
Another big area is “telerehab” – it’s taking off as an industry and taking off as a science, as well. That’s great, but we still have bedrock scientific questions that we need to understand about the efficacy of telerehab approaches. So those are the types of things I’m excited to think about on this advisory panel, and to try to hopefully have some influence on how we’re shaping these types of things and the funding priorities that need to emerge from NIH.
Q: In addition to these new positions, you are also a member of Smyrna City Council — and you teach, advise students, and run a research lab. How do you balance all of that?
A: I have a wonderful wife – we are very supportive of each other when it comes to this kind of stuff.
Also, it’s really seeing the common threads of thought between everything. Being on City Council, in many ways, is not unlike being in academia. There are a lot of meetings, that’s very similar. But the thought process, the way you’re doing things, the way you’re going about trying to solve problems is very scientific. So, it feels kind of natural. When I go into all of the spaces that I’m in, I try to at least have that as a common thread, where I’m approaching things in the most genuine way that I can. I’m a scientist, so that’s how I’m going to approach things.
At a practical level, it’s finding balance between these things so that I can honestly give them my full commitment and know that in that moment, that’s what I’m focusing on. If I’m talking to one of my students, in that moment they have all of my attention. If I’m talking to a constituent in my ward, they have my full attention. I want to be actionable and responsive to all the needs of that person. It’s not easy — I’m not going to say it’s trivial, but it’s a balance that you just learn how to strike.
As well, I’ll say, in all aspects of these areas, there are great people. The staff that I get to work within each one of these spaces is exceptional. I’d be lying if I said I was doing it all myself – there are a lot of people that help pull me through all these areas. They really deserve a lot of credit.
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Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
“HHMI’s challenge to us addresses a critical need in U.S. higher education, and it is aligned with Georgia Tech’s strategic plan,” says David Collard, senior associate dean in the College and lead researcher for effort at Tech. “The grant to Georgia Tech will support a team effort in pursuing a number of complementary projects.”
Collard is joined by College of Sciences co-investigators Jennifer Leavey, assistant dean for Faculty Mentoring; Carrie Shepler, assistant dean for Teaching Effectiveness; and Professor Lewis Wheaton, inaugural director of the Center for Promoting Inclusion and Equity in the Sciences at Georgia Tech. Collard and Shepler also serve as faculty members in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Leavey and Wheaton in the School of Biological Sciences.
As the third phase of the HHMI program, Inclusive Excellence 3, known as IE3, challenges U.S. colleges and universities to “substantially and sustainably build their capacity for student belonging, especially for those who have been historically excluded from the sciences.”
IE3 is also distinct from previous HHMI science education initiatives because it begins with a learning phase and, during that phase, learning communities envision how to move cooperatively into an implementation phase.
The grant uniquely challenges groups to work collaboratively to address one of three broad efforts. At Georgia Tech, the College of Sciences will work with institutions across the country to help empower colleges and universities to develop and support systems that cultivate teaching and learning in tandem with key concepts in inclusion and equity.
At Georgia Tech, each IE3 team member will concentrate on a distinct area of work.
Leavey will focus on “working with collaborators from other institutions to share faculty development strategies focused on inclusive teaching, such as the Inclusive STEM Teaching Fellows program ,” she shares, “which the College of Sciences piloted last spring along with the Center for Teaching Learning, the College of Engineering, the College of Computing, and the Office of Institute Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”
Leavey adds that, a semester after its launch, the Fellows program is already generating interest across campus and at collaborating institutions.
Shepler will help faculty assess the impact of their inclusive teaching efforts, working with collaborators to develop an iterative process to help institutions create formative assessment methodologies for teaching and learning that both facilitate and prioritize inclusion and equity in a manner that is consistent with institutional values and missions.
“Throughout the project, our aim is to make sure that students have a voice in defining what it means for them to experience teaching that centers” on these concepts, Shepler says.
The work coincides with a goal of the College of Sciences’ new Teaching Effectiveness, Advocacy, and Mentoring (TEAM) committee, which Shepler leads, to “develop and adapt new processes for the evaluation of teaching that are inclusive and equitable for all faculty.”
Meanwhile, Wheaton’s work as the director of the Center for Promoting Inclusion and Equity in the Sciences — C-PIES, for short — will inform and supplement Leavey and Shepler’s goals for the grant.
Wheaton will also lead a competitive C-PIES Faculty Fellows program that focuses on innovative teaching and research ideas that can transform student learning using key principles.
“The Center will sponsor approximately five C-PIES Inclusive Excellence Faculty Fellows in this effort,” he says. “This is an exciting direction that will provide the tools to develop assessments in our curriculum, leading to a culture that emphasizes and facilitates a growth mindset of continued development.”
Ultimately, the researchers hope to leverage the Inclusive Excellence Grant to transform teaching and learning for faculty and students of today — and of tomorrow.
“Though much of the HHMI work will focus on faculty, particularly those in instructional roles, the potential impact of these efforts is on the learning experiences of future generations of students,” adds Collard, the grant lead. “I look forward to seeing how the project develops — and how it fosters changes that support student, and faculty, success.”
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Housley, who received his Ph.D. in Applied Physiology at Georgia Tech in 2020, has been awarded a Jack and Dana McCallum Early Career Award for postdoctoral researchers. The goal of the program is to strengthen research in neurorehabilitation and the relationship between Georgia Tech and Emory University. The program supports graduate students and will now also support some postdoctoral scholars through Early Career Awards.
Housley’s research intersects neuroscience and cancer biology. “I am genuinely honored to have my work recognized and acknowledged through [this] support,” Housley says. “The sort of high-reward studies that I pursue are often perceived as risky. Having this support will enable me to pursue ambitious projects and expand on the breadth of studies.”
The new award from alumnus and College of Sciences Advisory Board member Jack McCallum, M.D., Ph.D. (BIO ‘66) is part of a $1 million gift committed in 2022 for the creation of the Jack and Dana McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program facilitated by Georgia Tech and in partnership with Emory University and The Shepherd Center’s Crawford Research Institute. This funding will be used over the next two years to support graduate student, postdoctoral and faculty research, as well as train new scientists in neurorehabilitation.
The McCallum Family Foundation has previously provided scholarships to reward outstanding undergraduate students for their academic excellence and performance in Georgia Tech research labs. The McCallum scholarships enable undergraduates to engage in research earlier in their academic careers than many colleges and universities. And scientific research is a defining characteristic of the undergraduate experience in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, where young undergraduate researchers are provided access to experienced faculty mentors and research labs with cutting-edge equipment, which are critical to their training as scientists.
About Stephen Housley
Stephen (Nick) Housley is a clinician-scientist focused on cancer neurobiology with specialty training in treating neurological disorders. Housley is also a fellow in both the Sensorimotor Integration Lab and the Integrated Cancer Research Center at Georgia Tech.
Housley’s research centers on how the nervous system, cancer, and its treatment interact in mammalian systems. “My research interests rest on my recent discoveries that securely establish the existence of reciprocal interactions between cancer, cancer treatment and the nervous system,” he explains. “In addition, my other area of study centers on how the nervous and musculoskeletal systems interact to encode sensorimotor information, and how integration in the mammalian spinal cord results in physiologically relevant movement.”
As part of his research into cancer neurobiology, Housley is also developing therapeutic nanohydrogels: microscopic polymer-based particles that may serve as next-generation drug delivery vehicles. “I have been exploring the use of my nanohydrogel platform to deliver therapeutic payloads to solid tumor cancers,” he says.
Housley wishes to thank M.G. Finn, who serves as professor and chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech and James A. Carlos Family Chair for Pediatric Technology, for Finn’s mentorship and support of nanohydrogel research. Housley also thanks Timothy Cope and John McDonald, both professors in the School of Biological Sciences, “who provided the intellectual and practical environments focused on neuroscience and cancer biology. Their support enabled me to pursue a new research field at the intersection of both — namely, cancer neurobiology,” Housley adds.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>“This is the first year the College of Sciences has been involved with UCEM, and it will be very impactful for the professional development for these students,” says Lewis Wheaton, C-PIES director and professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “The process for selection was highly competitive and these students really demonstrate strong scientific ability, have compelling research, and are having a powerful impact in the college community and beyond.”
The new UCEM/C-PIES Fellows:
The Georgia Tech UCEM Ph.D. Fellowship program has the goal of increasing the number of outstanding engineering, science, and computing Ph.D. students from underserved populations. The program seeks to support students from backgrounds that include African American/Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander. The Georgia Tech UCEM Ph.D. Fellowship provides three years of support for students who have recently completed the Ph.D. Qualifying/Preliminary exam.
C-PIES at the College of Sciences works in collaboration with the College of Engineering and the College of Computing — through the Georgia Tech Underrepresented Minority (URM) Graduate Leadership Initiative — to support the Expand Access focus area of the Institute’s strategic plan for graduate student enrollment and retention.
Meet the College of Sciences UCEM Fellows
Sarah E. Gonzalez
“I was excited and relieved to find out I was a UCEM Fellow. As everyone knows, being a grad student isn’t the most financially stable position, so anything extra is a big help,” Gonzales says.
Gonzalez researches in the lab of Associate Professor Elisabetta Matsumoto, studying knitted fabrics and their mechanical behavior. “She is my biggest supporter at Georgia Tech. We have a very tight-knit and supportive research group.”
Danielle Grau
“I was shocked and elated when I received the email with the news, and excited about the opportunity to be a part of such a prestigious fellowship,” Grau says. “I am excited to see what opportunities and relationships it will forge in the future.”
Assistant Professor Alexander Robel is Grau’s thesis adviser. “I am extremely grateful and appreciative for all the support, guidance, and encouragement he has given me throughout my time at Georgia Tech. He's a phenomenal mentor and advisor, and I wouldn’t have had any success without him.”
Sierra A. Knavel
“I was enthusiastic to hear about receiving the award,” Knavel says, “and eager to join a community that wants to help each other succeed while at Georgia Tech.”
Knavel, whose research interests include low-dimensional topology, has Professor John Etnyre as an adviser. “He is the reason I can say I'm in the math Ph.D. program, and that I know I belong here.”
Tony Lemos
“When I applied to the UCEM fellowship, I had doubts that I was accomplished enough to be chosen for this fellowship,” Lemos says. “When I received the email announcing that I had been selected for this award, it was a great surprise, and I was immediately filled with immense gratitude. I am very thankful to be one of the students to receive this gift that will help me become the first in my family to obtain a doctoral degree.”
Lemos is a research assistant in the biophysics lab of Professor Harold Kim, who is his adviser. “He has been a great mentor who helped me get this far at Georgia Tech. He is a great role model that showed me what it means to be an effective scientist. He also challenged me to grow in areas I was uncomfortable with in the lab. I am thankful for his mentorship and unending support.”
Autumn Peterson
“I was super excited to hear that I was named a UCEM Ph.D. Fellow,” Peterson says. “Mentorship has always been important to me. I would not be in the position I am in now without mentors who have supported me throughout my academic career. I am looking forward to strengthening my mentorship skills and serving as a role model for aspiring scientists coming from underrepresented backgrounds like I do.”
Peterson’s adviser is Associate Professor William Ratcliff, who is also Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences. ‘I want to thank him for his immense support throughout my academic journey. I would also like to thank Anthony Burnetti, a senior research scientist in the Ratcliff lab. Both Ratcliff and Burnetti are both extremely supportive, kind, and knowledgeable, and I am grateful to have them as mentors.”
Earlier this year, Peterson and Ratcliff were co-awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Gilliam Fellowship for Advanced Study.
“We are so proud of our UCEM/C-PIES Fellows," says Lea Marzo, C-PIES Program Operations Director. "The students selected for this fellowship are brilliant researchers and we are delighted that Georgia Tech’s Office of the President is making an investment in their success. We cannot wait to see what the future has in store for these fellows."
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The new Haley Fellows are:
Haley scholars receive a one-time merit award of up to $4,000 thanks to the generosity of the late Marion Peacock Haley. Haley’s estate established the creation of merit-based graduate fellowships at Georgia Tech in honor of her late husband, Herbert P. Haley (ME 1933). It is an award which may be held in conjunction with other funding, assistantships, or fellowships, if applicable.
Meet the Haley Fellows
Jessica Deutsch is a fifth-year Ph.D. student studying analytical chemistry. “One of the most intriguing aspects of analytical chemistry is that the field focuses on studying invisible things in order to make sense of the visible,” Deuthsch says. “I am researching a deadly coral disease that affects Florida and Caribbean reefs. I aim to provide insight into how this disease impacts the production of small molecules using a mass spectrometry-based approach, which can provide insight into how relationships between the coral animal, algae, and bacteria may be impacted by this disease.”
She wishes to thank Assistant Professor Neha Garg “for her mentorship and the opportunities she has provided that have enabled me to develop my research skills.”
Quynh Nguyen is a third-year Ph.D. student looking into phase- and shape-controlled synthesis of nanocrystals for catalysis and energy-related applications. “What fascinates me is the ability to manipulate matter at the nanoscale to drive sustainable advances,” Nguyen says. “This field places me at the exciting intersection of chemistry, materials science, and nanotechnology, aiming to address current challenges in sustainability and renewable energy.”
Nguyen’s Ph.D. advisor is Younan Xia, professor, Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine. “Xia's guidance and expertise have been instrumental in shaping my research focus and methodology. Beyond the lab, he has consistently encouraged me to pursue opportunities that contribute to both my academic and professional development, for which I am immensely grateful.”
Eliza Gazda, a fifth-year graduate scholar, is working in the field of multi-messenger particle astrophysics.
Gazda designed, tested, and integrated a telescope camera which was the payload on a scientific balloon launched in May. “The telescope launched is the first optical balloon of this type that operated at high altitudes over 30 kilometers,” Gazda says. “Our telescope observed radiative air showers from high energy cosmic rays and particles which travel across the Earth from extreme astrophysical objects like neutron stars and black holes. Once analyzed, this work will give us insight into high energy events that occur in space, and allow us to design and launch future similar telescopes.”
Gazda’s mentor is Associate Professor Nepomuk Otte, “who guided me in the past through a summer internship at Georgia Tech and inspired me to come back to work on my Ph.D. here. Not only has he taught me lab skills, but he helps me with my career goals, and guides me in exploring our research field, networking, and learning about various disciplines within the field.”
A fifth-year Ph.D. student, Sydney Popsuj is researching the gene Dkk3 and how it might regulate neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration in tunicates, close siblings to vertebrates. “This gene is implicated in Alzheimer's disease and dementia, but because it is hard to study in disease models, we don't have a strong grasp on the general functionality of the gene. I am using tunicates as a model system to study because they are biphasic, meaning they have both a larval and adult stage. This work is very exciting to me because it incorporates large scale evolutionary questions, while also having an impact on better understanding a gene that seems quite important to diseases and disorders.”
Popsuj thanks Georgia Tech faculty members Shuyi Nie, Joe LaChance, Patrick McGrath, Tim Cope, and Billie Swalla at the University of Washington “for pushing me to find new and exciting avenues into how to relate and generalize my work. These mentors have also encouraged me to expand outside my comfort zone in academics and to embrace new technologies and approaches that will hopefully further expand methods and protocols available to tunicate researchers.”
A third-year graduate scholar, Jose Luis Ramirez-Colón “has always been fascinated by the question of where we come from, and my time at Georgia Tech has been dedicated to using science as a tool to further explore this question.” His research focuses on exploring the organic inventory present in carbonaceous chondrites, meteorites that are like time capsules from the early days of the Solar System.
“Many organic classes present in all life as we know it, such as amino acids, sugars, and nucleobases, have been detected in these meteorites; therefore, there’s this idea that these meteorites might've delivered these essential building blocks to early Earth to kick-start life as we know it,” Ramirez-Colón says. His mission at Georgia Tech is to develop methods to detect, extract, and characterize those building blocks.
Ramirez-Colón wants to acknowledge “the remarkable contributions of my advisor and mentor, Christopher Carr, who has played a pivotal role in propelling my journey as an advancing Puerto Rican scientist. Carr not only granted me the freedom to pursue the questions that have always ignited my passion for science, but also equipped me with the essential tools and resources needed to conduct meaningful research.”
Sidney Scott-Sharoni is entering her fourth year of Ph.D. studies. An engineering psychology major, Scott-Sharoni focuses on “understanding how humans interact and conceptualize artificial intelligence devices,” she explains.
“Specifically, I investigate creative methods to convey information to calibrate users’ trust, and understand their psychological well-being, most often in automated vehicles,” Scott-Sharoni says. “I love my area of research because it combines the study of people with the study of innovative technology. I feel like I am researching the people of the future!”
Scott-Sharoni’s advisor, Professor Bruce Walker, “has significantly helped my personal and professional development as a researcher. I am very grateful for his continued mentorship throughout my graduate education.”
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“We now know that bacteria can lead complex social lives, communicating and cooperating within multicellular groups,” says Sam Brown, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a member/past director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI).
Getting out and about in the microbial world leaves bacteria facing challenges such as competition from other bacteria, threats from bacteria-eating viruses, drugs that target them, and starvation when they can’t find a host organism. Brown and his fellow CMDI scientists now want to know how bacteria modify their behaviors in response to their social and physical environments.
Two new grants totaling nearly $1.5 million will give them that chance.
One of the grants, a National Science Foundation award, focuses on how bacteria use clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats — better known as CRISPR, a cellular immune system that helps bacteria ward off threats. CRISPR is perhaps best known as a gene editing tool.
The NSF grant also includes Rachel Kuske, professor in the School of Mathematics and a CMDI member, and Edze Westra, Professor of Microbiology at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. The NSF is partnering with the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) for this grant.
The other grant from the Army Research Office (ARO) will study quorum sensing, a form of cell-to-cell communication, to determine how bacteria use it to “count” cells so that collective behavior can be turned on.
Both grants can help CMDI understand microbial behavior in ways that could eventually lead to manipulating or controlling bacteria, says Steve Diggle, CMDI director and a professor in the School of Biological Sciences.
“We are delighted by these new grants as they align closely with the core mission of CDMI because they will advance our understanding of microbial interactions, behaviors, and community dynamics,” Diggle says. “The knowledge generated could have transformative impacts on both academic research and practical applications.”
CRISPR protections, but only in a crowd
Brown wants to make it clear that he and his colleagues won’t be doing any CRISPR gene editing themselves. “Our questions are more basic, focused on how the ‘inventors’ of CRISPR, bacteria, use this system to protect themselves from infection by phages (viruses that attack bacteria) and other molecular parasites of cells,” Brown says.
CRISPR’s role is to recognize and cut out specific sequences of foreign DNA within bacteria. Yet what Brown calls the “dirty secret” of microbiology is that lab bacteria rarely use CRISPR to deal with novel viruses.
“Instead, they use the simple trick of deleting the surface receptors that the virus uses to gain entry to the cell,” he explains. Previous work by CMDI Early Career Award Fellow Ellinor Alseth found an answer to this puzzle: bacteria are more likely to use CRISPR as an immune mechanism when they are living in a multi-species community. What Brown hopes to decipher are the molecular and ecological mechanisms that determine how life in a community can activate CRISPR functions.
“We further aim to build mathematical models of community dynamics, capturing both species interactions and evolutionary changes in a focal species undergoing viral attack,” Brown says. “This will have applied significance by helping the design of more robust microbial communities.”
Quorum sensing = a bacterial census
Regarding the ARO grant, Brown says the standard view for quorum sensing is that bacteria use those signals as a way of counting cells. When the extracellular signal is above a certain threshold, the population is “quorate” (that is, reaches a certain number of cells), and collective behaviors can be turned on.
Yet an increasing body of theory, along with experiments in Brown’s lab and others, has challenged this view “by highlighting that quorum sensing behaviors can also be shaped by the physical environment, such as diffusion, flow rate, and containment,” he says.
Also, behaviors are not “turned on” in a threshold manner with increasing density. “In a high density ‘quorate’ environment, not all cells are expressing canonical quorum sensing-controlled behaviors. These challenges leave us with limited understanding of the functional roles of QS.”
“By examining the balance between intracellular mechanisms and multicellular behaviors, we will obtain a more comprehensive understanding of how bacteria collaborate and respond collectively to their environment,” Diggle adds.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have received funding to study the concept of using modified strains of probiotic bacteria – that are already part of the human gut microbiome – to stimulate the formation of antibodies against the flu virus in the body’s mucosal membranes. Respiratory viruses like influenza infect the body through mucosal membranes, and the proof-of-concept project will help evaluate whether snippets of influenza proteins – tiny fragments of the virus – could be added to two common bacterial strains to create the antibody response. Antibodies in the mucosal membranes might then complement those created by traditional intramuscular injections to head off flu infection.
The research, supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), will study whether or not the harmless bacteria can be successfully modified to carry snippets of a viral coat protein that could stimulate the desired response in mucosal membranes lining the gut. Beyond reducing influenza infection in the general population, improved protection against the flu could have a significant impact on the U.S. military, which wants to provide the best possible protection for its warfighters to reduce possible impacts on readiness and training from influenza outbreaks.
At Georgia Tech, the project is a collaboration between researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences. All of the research at Georgia Tech will be done using BSL-2 facilities designed for this type of study. The award does not include research on animals or humans.
“Ultimately, this could one day make vaccination programs much more effective,” said Michael Farrell, a GTRI principal research scientist. “This isn’t going to be a replacement for flu vaccines as they currently exist, but it could act as an adjuvant – something that’s done in addition to vaccination to increase the overall immune response. To benefit from it, you might take a pill like you do with probiotics now.”
Using Common Probiotic Bacteria as Vehicles
The project will focus on two common probiotic bacteria: Escherichia coli – a gram-negative bacterium better known as E. coli – and Lactococcus lactis, a gram-positive bacterium found in cheese, buttermilk, and other dairy food items. The researchers will attempt to coax the bacteria to express the influenza virus’ Hemagglutinin (HA) receptor protein on their outer cell surface. There, the protein would stimulate an antibody response in the gut mucosal membrane as it passes through the body’s gastrointestinal tract.
“We’re using some well-established probiotic bacteria that have been utilized for dozens of years, are well vetted and safe for humans,” said Brian Hammer, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences who specializes in bacterial genetics. “Ultimately, the idea is to use these bacteria as a chassis to create living vaccines, since the body already tolerates them both well.”
Researchers at AFRL and Georgia Tech envision that a single pill or capsule would carry the bacteria into the gastrointestinal tract to provide the necessary antibody stimulation. The bacteria would be modified so they could not reproduce, preventing them from becoming part of the body’s gut microbiome – a diverse collection of bacteria that live in the body and help carry out specific functions, including metabolizing food and modulating the immune system.
“We know the human microbiome is intimately involved in human health and disease, influencing processes in ways that have both positive and negative outcomes for us,” said Richard Agans, senior research biological scientist at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine (USAFSAM). “Recently, we have started to better understand how the microbiome communicates with our bodies and how we can identify, target, and promote the beneficial aspects. Currently, we are working to determine how to utilize these microbial communities to better protect our warfighters as well as the general public.”
Overcoming Challenges of Manipulating Bacteria
Hammer’s lab specializes in manipulating proteins of organisms such as bacteria and viruses to create novel fusions. Among the techniques available is the new CRISPR-Cas, the gene-editing technology that was the subject of a Nobel Prize in 2020, but other more traditional techniques may also be used to get the influenza surface protein where the researchers want it to be.
Among the challenges ahead is that adding a new component to bacterial organisms can be difficult.
“In general, bacteria have evolved with the genetic components they need to survive,” Farrell explained. “If you add something else, they may just kick it out. It’s very hard to find a neutral location in the bacterial genome where we can stably add new functionality. This is especially true for this effort, in which there will be no cointroduction of antimicrobial resistance markers.”
In addition, the probiotic bacteria strains that are widely used in research as model organisms, or “lab rats,” are adapted to living in laboratory conditions. This project, however, will use natural commensal strains that co-exist in humans. That approach may make it even more challenging to add the appropriate material for expressing the viral proteins on the bacteria cell surfaces, Hammer said.
“We used to perceive that genes could be shuffled around in the bacteria without much effect on them, but we’re learning now that location really matters,” he said. “One of the concerns is that tools that work on the ‘lab rat’ versions of these bacteria will not be as readily accepted by these commensals.”
As part of the project, the researchers will have to show that the addition of the protein doesn’t cause instability in the bacteria, and that the modified bacteria generate the correct response when exposed to human immune cells in culture.
Proof of Concept Could Lead to Broader Vaccine Therapies
Beyond its importance to the military, influenza was chosen to study this adjuvant approach because a number of vaccines exist for this virus, and they have been well studied over the years. If this approach works with influenza, the combination of pill and injection might be useful for vaccines against other respiratory viruses.
“If this is ultimately successful, it could be the first foray into showing that these vehicles, these probiotics, could potentially be scaled up for lots of different therapeutic uses,” said Hammer. “By customizing the cargo, this approach could be rapidly adapted to address new and emerging threats that may arise in the future.”
Project Provides Student Opportunity
The two-year project life was chosen because of the expected difficulty – and because another of its goals is to train a master’s degree student in the bacterial modification techniques being utilized.
The Georgia Tech researchers have chosen an underrepresented minority student who holds an undergraduate degree in biology from Kennesaw State University and has worked in a commercial DNA laboratory. Katrina Lancaster will begin work on this project during fall semester, collaborating with both Hammer and Farrell – and the students and other researchers in their labs.
“This student will have excellent opportunities, not only to learn the skills in the lab and take the coursework, but also to develop a rich network of connections, both in the School of Biological Sciences and at GTRI, that will be helpful in moving forward and advancing their career,” Hammer said. “It’s a really beautiful combination of components for this project.”
The project is funded through the AFRL’s Minority Leaders Research Collaboration Program (ML-RCP).
“Partnering with academic institutions, such as GTRI, presents great opportunities for our team to interact and work with top minds in these fields to develop better outcomes for everyone,” Agans said. “We are especially grateful for the opportunity to mentor and provide opportunities for underrepresented students with STEM aspirations. We are excited to work with GTRI in this endeavor and envision this being just the first step.”
USAFSAM is part of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing.
Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia
The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.
]]>Michelle Gowdy
Michelle.Gowdy@gtri.gatech.edu
404-407-8060
]]>“In this new role,” Chang says, “I am looking forward to learning about how our faculty are leading and excelling across the College of Sciences. My hope is to support each school in recruiting the best faculty possible, to increase the diversity of our ranks, and to help our faculty succeed at Georgia Tech.”
The associate dean for Faculty is responsible for developing, implementing, and assessing programs that enhance the instructional, research, and career opportunities for faculty. Key areas of responsibility include faculty hiring, mentoring of faculty, faculty retention, promotion, and tenure; and diversity, equity, and inclusion at the faculty level.
“Because of his service to Biological Sciences as the associate chair for Faculty Development over the past six years, Young-Hui will bring a wealth of experience to this new position,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences, Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair, and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS). “He impressed the search committee and me with his commitment to faculty excellence, support and advancement.
“I am grateful to Greg Huey, chair of EAS, for chairing the search committee and to Jennifer Leavey, Wing Li, and Lewis Wheaton for serving on the committee. Thanks also to Juliet Dawson-Dyce for providing administrative support to the committee,” Lozier added.
“I was really humbled, and [am] honored to be taking on this role,” Chang says. “I see it as an opportunity to support my colleagues in the College and give back to the Institute that has supported me through my own academic journey.
“In my role as associate chair for Faculty Development in Biological Sciences, I was able to see how exceptional our faculty are,” he added, “from the ones dedicated to teaching and serving our students, to those on the leading edge in their respective fields of research — and how I could use my position to support their individual professional goals.”
The College’s inaugural associate dean for Faculty, Matt Baker, appointed 2018, is one of 39 researchers around the country named to the 2023 Class of Simons Fellows. Baker, a professor in the School of Mathematics, will use the fellowship and a Georgia Tech Faculty Development Grant for a sabbatical in 2023-2024.
“We will soon have a proper send-off to thank Matt Baker for his service over the past five years, but I would be remiss if I did not also take this opportunity to thank him for his many contributions to the College,” Lozier says.
About Young-Hui Chang
Chang is the director of the Comparative Neuromechanics Laboratory in the School of Biological Sciences, where he also currently serves as a professor and as associate chair for Faculty Development.
His research program focuses on trying to understand how animals move through and interact with their environment. He integrates approaches and techniques from both biomechanics and neurophysiology to study both passive mechanical and active neural mechanisms that control limbed locomotion in humans and other vertebrates.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
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Despite the progress in healthcare over the last century, resulting in longer life expectancy and better disease survival outcomes, significant disparities between various population groups remain a major global health issue.
A new study by Georgia Institute of Technology researchers in the open-access journal PLOS Global Health probes ethnic health disparities and mortality risk factors in the United Kingdom. Their work points to mortality risk factors that are group-specific, but modifiable, supporting the notion of targeted interventions that could lead to greater health equity.
“Different ethnic groups show very different levels of disease-specific mortality along with distinct mortality risk factors,” said I. King Jordan, professor in the School of Biological Sciences, and principal investigator on the study. “Unfortunately, when it comes to health, ethnicity still matters.”
Both environmental and genetic factors, and the interaction between them over time, have been cited as main contributors of health disparities. Closing the gap will require a long-term, complex series of solutions.
“Taking a one-size fits all approach to healthcare will only exacerbate the very health disparities that already disproportionately burden ethnic minorities,” said Jordan, whose collaborators on the study were lead author Kara Keun Lee, as well as Emily Norris, Lavanya Rishishwar, Andrew Conley, and John McDonald, emeritus professor in the School of Biological Sciences and founding director of Georgia Tech’s Integrated Cancer Research Center.
The work was done in collaboration with, and with support from, the NIH’s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and Leonardo Mariño-Ramírez, a researcher working on epidemiology and genetics research at NIMHD’s Division of Intramural Research (DIR).
The research team analyzed data on 490,610 Asian, Black, and White participants from the UK Biobank, a study that enrolled 500,000 people in the UK aged 40 to 69 between 2006 and 2010. The UK Biobank includes data spanning physical measures, lifestyle, blood and urine biomarkers, imaging, genetic, and linked medical and death registry records.
Certain causes of mortality were more common among the different ethnic groups: Asian individuals had the highest mortality from ischemic heart disease, while individuals in the Black community had the highest mortality from COVID-19, and White individuals had the highest mortality from cancers of respiratory/intrathoracic organs.
In addition, some preexisting medical conditions and biomarkers showed specific associations with ethnicity and mortality. Mental health diagnoses, for instance, were a major risk factor for mortality in the Asian group, whereas parasitic diseases and C-reactive protein (CRP) serum levels were associated with higher mortality in the Black group.
“These results underscore the importance of population-specific studies that can help decompose health disparities and inform targeted interventions towards, shrinking the health disparity gap,” said Jordan, who praised Lee’s approach to the study, “which highlights the importance of considering individuals’ self-reported identity as it relates to their health outcomes, disease risks, and exposures.”
For future work, the team plans to look at racial and ethnic health disparities in the US, in collaboration with the NIMHD.
CITATION: Kara Keun Lee, Emily T. Norris, Lavanya Rishishwar, Andrew B. Conley, Leonardo Mariño-Ramírez, John F. McDonald, and I. King Jordan. “Ethnic disparities in mortality and group-specific risk factors in the UK Biobank.” doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001560
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There are times when John McDonald, emeritus professor in the School of Biological Sciences and founding director of Georgia Tech’s Integrated Cancer Research Center, is asked to share his special insight into cancer.
“Over the years, I’ve gotten calls from non-scientist friends and others who have been diagnosed with cancer, and they call me to get more details on what’s going on, and what options are available,” said McDonald, also a former chief scientific officer with the Atlanta-based Ovarian Cancer Institute.
That’s the primary motivation why McDonald wrote A Patient's Guide to Cancer: Understanding the Causes and Treatments of a Complex Disease, which was published by Raven Press LLC (Atlanta) and is now available at Amazon or Barnes and Noble in paperback and ebook editions. The book describes in non-technical language the processes that cause cancer, and details on how recent advances and experimental treatments are offering hope for patients and their families.
A book for the proactive patient
McDonald said he couldn’t go into detail for every type of cancer, but provides a generally applicable background for the disease. For those who want more information, he provides links to other resources, including videos, that provide more detail on specific types of cancer. “There’s not much out there in one place for patients who want to understand the underlying causes of cancer, and the spectrum of therapies currently available,” he said.
McDonald, who was honored in January by the Georgia Center for Oncology Research and Education (CORE) as one of “Today’s Innovators,” also didn’t want A Patient’s Guide to Cancer to be a lengthy book, and it checks in at only 86 pages.
McDonald believes that when patients talk to their physicians about cancer treatments, they should ideally have a basic understanding of the underlying cause of their cancer, as well as a general awareness of the range of therapies currently available, and what may be coming down the road in the future.
“My book is specifically designed to provide newly diagnosed cancer patients who are not scientists with this kind of background information, empowering them to play a more informed role in the selection of appropriate treatments for their disease”.
The current experimental treatment landscape; McDonald’s 2023 research goals
McDonald’s own cancer research has led to two related startup companies, co-founded with School of Biological Sciences colleagues.
McDonald is working with postdoctoral researcher Nick Housley on using nanoparticles to deliver powerful drugs to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue. The other company, founded in collaboration with Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents' Professor, Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair & Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology, uses machine learning to create personalized diagnostic tools for ovarian cancer.
He and his lab team are also preparing to submit a research paper that builds off their 2021 study on gene network interactions that could provide new chemotherapy targets for breast cancer. That paper focuses on the three major subtypes of breast cancer. McDonald and his colleagues will also soon submit another study detailing genetic changes that happen with the onset and progression of ovarian cancer.
When it comes to current experimental treatments, McDonald says he’s especially excited about the potential of cancer immunotherapy, which uses the body’s own immune system to fight cancer cells. But he writes in A Patient’s Guide to Cancer that because these drugs are also delivered systemically, healthy tissues can also be affected, potentially leading to autoimmunity or the self-destruction of our normal cells.
“In the future, I believe many of the negative side-effects currently associated with the system-wide delivery of cancer drugs will be averted by the use of nanoparticles designed to target therapies specifically to tumors”.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston, Communications Director
College of Sciences
Released on March 29, the 2023 U.S. News Best Graduate School Rankings highlights all six College of Sciences schools as best overall science programs for graduate studies:
Biology – No. 37
Chemistry – No. 21
Earth Sciences – No. 28
Mathematics – No. 21
Physics – No. 28
Psychology – No. 39
Biological Sciences rose 17 places (from No. 54) in a nine-way tie with Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Dartmouth College, Indiana University-Bloomington, Ohio State University, University of Utah, and UT Health MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Chemistry and Biochemistry shifted from No. 20 in a four-way tie with Johns Hopkins University, University of California (UC)-San Diego, and Texas A&M University-College Station.
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences rose by 10 (from No. 38) in a tie with Ohio State University, University of Southern California, and Washington University in St. Louis.
Mathematics advanced by five, up from No. 26 in a tie with Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, UC-San Diego, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Physics maintains its No. 28 ranking in a tie with Brown University, Duke University, and Rice University.
Psychology rose six spots to No. 39 in a tie with Arizona State University, Michigan State University, Stony Brook University, University of Florida, University of Iowa, and University of Pittsburgh.
U.S. News previously ranked graduate science programs in their 2019 Best Graduate Schools Edition (published in March 2018) with the exception of Psychology, which is categorized under U.S. News “Social Sciences and Humanities” programs and was last ranked in the 2017 Edition.
Among specialty graduate programs, Analytical Chemistry and Condensed Matter (Physics) both rank in the top 20, while previously unranked Applied Math climbed into the top 16 to No. 11.
Mathematical Analysis and Topology tied for No. 18 and No. 15, respectively, and Tech remains top five in the nation for Discrete Math and Combinatorics. Uniquely organized across the Colleges of Sciences, Computing, and Engineering, the Institute’s Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization program previously held a rank of No. 2.
Analytical Chemistry – No. 17
Applied Math – No. 11
Condensed Matter – No. 18
Discrete Math and Combinatorics – No. 5
Mathematical Analysis – No. 18
Topology – No. 15
“I was very happy to see that several of our schools in the College of Sciences moved up in the rankings, in some cases quite significantly,” shares Matthew Baker, professor in the School of Mathematics and associate dean for Faculty Development in the College.
Fellow colleges on campus are also on the rise in the latest U.S. News “Best Graduate Schools” set, with Engineering remaining in the top ten in its overall disciplines, and Business, Computing, and Public Affairs also ranking among top programs in the nation. The full roster of current Georgia Institute of Technology rankings can be found here, along with U.S. News’ methodology for graduate rankings here.
]]>Neuroscience is the fastest growing undergraduate major in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech, and prospective and current students often enjoy hearing from our alumni about their experiences in the program.
We recently spoke with the NEURO ‘22 Kashlan brothers about their time at Georgia Tech, advice for students, and a look at what’s next on the horizon:
Zane: The Neuroscience program at Georgia Tech is unique in that it's incredibly interdisciplinary. As Neuroscience majors, students can freely take courses in Georgia Tech's top-ranked programs like engineering, computer science, and even business on top of a regular course load filled with biology and other science core curricula.
In addition, the broad nature of the curriculum offers students an opportunity to explore all areas of Neuroscience, including Biological Neuroscience, Neuroengineering, Computational Neuroscience, and several other pathways that help develop essential lifelong skills. It is a fantastic STEM major to pick as students who want to explore different career paths and pick up different skills. We enjoyed charting our individual experiences within Neuroscience and are so grateful for the advisors and professors who supported us along the way.
Zane: Georgia Tech has always felt like a second home to us. We were born and grew up in the Atlanta area. Georgia Tech offered a strong list of notable faculty members. The modern campus is big enough to explore different interests in a wide variety of subjects. Tech offered a special place for us to be challenged, make new friends, and grow independently as a trio.
Rommi: I would add the fact that Georgia Tech offered an unparalleled value of education.
Rommi: There were so many professors and mentors that helped shape me into the person that I am today. For example, my involvement with Dr. Ragan in the BRAIN Initiative helping promote neuroscience to students in schools around the Atlanta area, enforced my love for neuroscience and giving back to the community. Dr. Decker, who mentored me as a TA, instilled and enforced my passion for teaching. Dr. Shepler, who I worked closely with in mentoring students in Chemistry under the PLUS Program, further deepened my love for teaching science. Dr. Harrison, who guided me through my first teaching experience in the biology department, is another example. Like all other professors, they were vital in facilitating an engaging, fun, and highly memorable learning environment.
Zane: From the very long list of professors I had an extraordinary time learning from, I especially enjoyed being a TA for Dr. Decker in Anatomy and Pathology. Dr. Tyson helped develop my interest in mentoring others and deepening my experience in Organic Chemistry. Dr. Senf provided continuous support in sponsoring the Students Against Alzheimer's organization I helped found and fostered my passion for scientific communication and advocacy. Also, a thank you to the GT 1000 program for allowing me to be a part of mentoring the next generation of Yellow Jackets – Sandi Bramblett and Dr. Rafael Bras for showing me the ropes of leading by example and to Savitra Y Dow and Dr. Lacy Hodges for their constant support.
Adam: I'm so grateful for all the professors I had the privilege of learning from and taking classes with over my tenure at Georgia Tech, such as Dr. Decker, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Holder, Dr. Weigel, Dr. Whyte, Dr. Howitz, Dr. Kerr, Dr. Harrison, and Dr. Duarte. I especially value my experience with Dr. Shepler, with whom I took chemistry in my first year because she made the learning of science meaningful and fun. Dr. Senf helped develop my scientific writing skill, which is critical in neuroscience research. Dr. Ragan, with whom I took NEUR 4001, for learning so much about research methods, proper presentation creation and delivery, paper writing, and making the atmosphere of every class fun and engaging.
Rommi: Sometimes it worked out that we would have similar classes since we're all neuroscience majors. Still, most semesters, we would only share a required class or two, while some classes might be with different professors because of time conflicts with other courses. We each prioritized taking whatever classes worked best with our individual schedules and graduation plans, but taking a lesson or two [together] was always fun.
Rommi: The most remarkable thing I've learned about the human brain is how much we don't know about it. Out of every meticulous detail we know about human physiology and function we have barely scratched the surface of our cognition and thinking. This leaves so much room for exploration in neuroscience research because there is so much yet to be uncovered.
Adam: After my first year, my earliest class usually started around 10 a.m. On a typical day, I liked to wake up at around 9 a.m. if I didn't have any events or important assignments to complete. After taking some of my morning classes, I would almost always go to the fourth floor of the Crosland Tower [in the Price Gilbert Memorial] Library to do my assignments and study before lunch or my following classes. After grabbing some lunch and attending the rest of my classes that day, I usually went to the CRC to play basketball with my friends or eat dinner. On busy days though, I went back to studying or completing projects and other longer assignments in preparation for exams or important deadlines.
Adam: I would probably have to say graduation. While it is a bit cliché, knowing that your years of hard work through trials and tribulations have finally amounted to something great is amazing.
Adam: I enjoyed Six Flags Night with my friends in the fall; Lake Lanier to enjoy the water; and the [Atlanta] Beltline, which has an amazing history. I had the opportunity to visit [there] with my English class during my first year.
Rommi: I'll add the Georgia Aquarium to that list — the whale sharks and penguins make it an awesome experience.
Zane: During my first semester, I enjoyed my experience in GT1000 and looked up to my team leader for the class. I joined the GT1000 program because of that experience and served as a team leader for my first two years on campus and then as an ambassador for my last year. I enjoyed helping students work through many of the challenges I had once experienced as a first-year. Since my first year, I have spent a good portion of time outside class as a volunteer and advocate for the Alzheimer's Association, where we urge our national leaders to support increased care and research funding to one day end Alzheimer's.
By connecting with other volunteers in the state and country, I saw the need for younger voices to get involved in the cause. I founded Students Against Alzheimer's, a student-led organization that works with the Alzheimer's Association to get younger advocates involved. I'm also grateful to have had the opportunity to go to Washington D.C. with other advocates, where we met Senator Raphael Warnock and other states/national representatives to push for updates in legislation. I would spend a lot of time with family or having fun in the Atlanta area in my free time.
Adam: I joined and participated in the Georgia Tech Swim Club, founded a GT chapter of the American Parkinson's Disease Association, and was part of Student Government during my first year. Outside of school, I was heavily involved with my research at the Woolf Lab for the past two years. I volunteered as a medical assistant at the Good Samaritan Health Clinic. I was also a part of several organizations where I tutored and supported Georgia's refugee children, which I have been involved in since middle school.
Rommi: The organization I was involved in the most was Teaching and Academic Services at Tech. I participated as a PLUS leader and one-on-one tutor, assisting in events such as Studypalooza. The opportunity to give back to my peers through teaching and guidance was a great experience. Outside the classroom, I helped lead the BRAIN initiative, whereas as a neuroscience student, I went to schools around the Atlanta area to hold activity-filled seminars promoting the learning of neuroscience.
The students observed activities such as a human brain dissection, controlling nerves in your arm, and a "mind control" machine. These activities deepened my love and advocacy for neuroscience. I also discovered my passion for helping others, volunteering as a trained nurse assistant at the Good Sam Health Clinic. I also had the privilege to be part of the task force set up to design the process of Covid-19 testing for the students and the community at GT in preparation for reopening the campus.
Zane: Aside from balancing time and managing classes, the most important and unexpected lesson I have learned is knowing when to ask for help. It was important along our journeys to connect with fellow students and professors to get extra support during the more challenging weeks or when making career plans. I feel that Tech's most valuable resource doesn't come from the new buildings or courses, it's the role models – our peers and mentors – that we engage with daily.
Rommi: GT enforced several lessons — including problem-solving, how to persevere, self-motivation, and putting things into perspective.
Adam: I would definitely have to say that Principles of Neuroscience (NEUR 2001) was the hardest class that I have taken at Georgia Tech. It's a four-credit class I took my first semester and included a lab component. You essentially learn most of the basic neuroscience curriculum in one extremely demanding class. The lab consists of lots of reports that have to be extremely in-depth and are significantly longer than normal papers. The lecture had a significant portion of the grade dedicated to exams which were incredibly detailed and required memorization of the minor details. It was a challenging experience, but looking back I'm grateful because it allowed me to adjust to Georgia Tech's rigorous curriculum early and understand foundational neuroscience, which helped my research.
Zane: I think the most important part of being interested in STEM is just that — curiosity. Being curious about everyday scientific phenomena is the crux of being a good researcher or engineer. Just by staying curious so many doors are open for learning. A student can start with some YouTube videos, hone that passion by taking a course or joining a lab, and who knows, maybe one day that passion will turn into a career.
Zane: Building a career in medicine takes a long time, maybe up to 12 years or more after college. Get involved through internships and research as early as your first year and take the time to figure out what about medicine and health interests you. There are so many opportunities, not only within the scope of being a clinician, but also in medical research; medical technology; medical business; and medical law. Going down the path of a physician is certainly not the only way to have a career in health.
Make sure that you network with your peers and alumni to find out what others have career ideas that can serve as inspiration for yourself. I especially recommend taking a gap year or two before making such an impactful commitment to exploring all potential career opportunities that might interest you before dedicating yourself to a life in medicine.
Adam: I agree with Zane that you must do a lot of soul-searching when you commit to the field of medicine. This is a highly specialized career you will spend the rest of your life doing. Remember that you need to love what you do; otherwise, you will not be happy, and your patients will pick up on that.
Rommi: I'm an early morning person, so most of my studying took place before I began my first class, which was typically in the late morning or afternoon. The rule of thumb is to study for two to three hours for every lecture hour, so I always tried to study the material ahead of the lectures to get familiar with the topics being presented in class as they are taught and then revisit the material immediately after.
Adam: Spaced repetition, consistency, and time management is the key to excelling in school. I can confidently say that you don't need to be the smartest person to get the best grades because you can outweigh that by being more disciplined and efficient. Finding a study habit that works for you is the key. Oftentimes, what works for one person most likely won't work for another. You must learn and discover what works best for you through iteration in your first semester.
Discover the studying habit that helps you perform best on exams and assignments. What worked for me was spacing out my studying ahead of exams and using spaced repetition, so I would revisit concepts multiple times before taking an exam rather than moving through the material progressively and not reviewing old lectures.
In addition, I would ramp up my studying a few days before an exam with the most time spent the day before and the day-of, because I found it easier to recall small details from a PowerPoint slide when reviewing it an hour prior to taking the exam (after multiple run-throughs, though).
The strategy can sometimes vary between classes: brute repetition and memorization works in a subject like biology — but not so much in a conceptual subject like physics and math that requires more practice than learning.
The second half of doing well in classes is understanding the syllabus and finding what assignments or exams you need to score well on. Maximizing your grade in non-exam/quiz assignments gives you the highest chance of getting an A in the class and oftentimes gives you a buffer to score an 80 or 85 exam average.
Adam: My favorite study spots on campus would have to either be the fourth and fifth floor of the Crosland Tower Library or the third floor of the CULC. The Library's first floor is always packed, so the quiet upper floors were great for studying. The bridge connecting the two main libraries was also a relaxing spot to study since the windows give a nice view of the city and keep the area well-lit.
Rommi: I'm a big sandwich guy; throughout my time at Georgia Tech, I've probably had upwards of a thousand sandwiches between classes. You can always count on the 14th Street Jimmy John’s.
Rommi: I crashed a lot on the beanbags on the fourth floor of CULC building, hung around the dorms a lot, tried to forget about it, and worked towards the next assignment or class to study for.
Adam: When struggling in a class, I always reminded myself that I wasn't alone. I stressed that I should continue to persevere and not get demoralized if I got a bad exam grade, or didn't understand some concept right away. I noticed that classes at Georgia Tech usually got harder as the semester progressed, until the eighth or ninth week, then eased off significantly as the final exam approached.
My biggest piece of advice for all students would be to focus on scoring as high as possible on all non-exam grades, like participation and homework assignments that you have the most control over. Getting close to a 100 percent in those sections carries your average significantly and allows you to have the room to tank a few bad quiz or exam grades, and gives you lots of buffer for the final exam.
It's also important to keep track of your grade in the class and what grade section you're underperforming in (homework, quiz, test, etc.). This lets you know what assignments mean the most to your grade and prioritize time between different classes and assignments to maximize your chances of keeping your averages high.
Rommi: I think not falling too far behind made it much easier to prepare and be ready. Don't wait; go seek help if you don't understand a topic fully. GT has a lot of resources for help when needed. Take advantage of all that is available. A key piece of advice, read your syllabus at the beginning of the semester and fully understand the professor's expectations. Study ahead and follow the syllabus.
Adam: Balancing school, sleep, and a social life can be challenging. I always liked to keep a few consistent hobbies fit into my schedule, like playing basketball at the CRC or even just walking around campus at night so I could have some escape from the pressure of school.
I learned that getting into a routine and set schedule also helps with this balance because you get more hours out of your day when your time is managed properly. Unfortunately though, there will be times when you will have to sacrifice going out on a Friday night to complete a project or make sure that you perform well on an exam.
I encourage you not to feel bad about making these hard decisions because it all becomes worth it come graduation day. That said, having some avenue to de-stress from school and have fun is super important, even if it's a small activity for a few minutes a day because studying at Tech without taking a break will burn you out quickly.
Also, sleep is your friend — don't ignore it. It's a cheat code to improve your mood and mental health, reflect on your school performance and social relationships, improve your mood, etcetera.
What are your plans for the rest of 2022 and beyond?
Adam: After graduating in the spring, I moved to Boston to work as a research assistant in the Woolf Lab at Harvard Medical School. We study non-opioid-based analgesic drugs used in the treatment of chronic pain. I will apply to medical schools next summer and want to pursue a career as a physician focusing on improving immigrant and refugee health in the United States- my passion since middle school.
Zane: In late April, I switched my research work from Yale Medical to the Woolf Lab at Harvard Medical. In the future, I plan to combine my passion for research and medicine as a physician-scientist to improve patients' lives suffering from neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's.
Rommi: I moved to Boston with Zane and Adam and have been focusing on volunteering at various clinics and studying for my MCAT exam. After taking the MCAT exam this fall, I will start working as a research assistant.
Zane: The decision has to be between making great friends and calling such an amazing school home.
Rommi: The best part of being a Yellow Jacket is knowing that I am ready to face any new challenge, confident that I will do well.
Adam: Developing many relationships and connections with friends, mentors, and professors at the school have continued to benefit me even after graduation. Also, coming from Georgia Tech opens up many doors and opportunities that you otherwise wouldn't get at other schools — the name and prestige of the school mean a lot to employers and graduate schools.
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Special thanks to Dean Kashlan for organizing this interview, and to Georgia Tech Office of Undergraduate Education and our College of Sciences student writers for sharing questions for this story.
]]>Mycorrhizal symbiosis — a symbiotic relationship that can exist between fungi and plant roots — helps plants expand their root surface area, giving plants greater access to nutrients and water. Although the first and foremost role of mycorrhizal symbiosis is to facilitate plant nutrition, scientists have not been clear how mycorrhizal types mediate the nutrient acquisition and interactions of coexisting trees in forests.
To investigate this crucial relationship, Lingli Liu, a professor at the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) led an international, collaborative team, which included School of Biological Sciencesprofessor Lin Jiang. The team studied nutrient acquisition strategies of arbuscular mycorrhizae (AM) and ectomycorrhizal (EcM) trees in the Biodiversity–Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) experiment in a subtropical forest in China, where trees of the two mycorrhizal types were initially evenly planted in mixtures of two, four, eight, or 16 tree species.
The researchers found that as the diversity of species increased, the net primary production (NPP) of EcM trees rapidly decreased, but the NPP of AM trees progressively increased, leading to the sheer dominance (>90%) of AM trees in the highest diversity treatment.
The team's analyses further revealed that differences in mycorrhizal nutrient-acquisition strategies, both nutrient acquisition from soil and nutrient resorption within the plant, contribute to the competitive edge of AM trees over EcM ones.
In addition, analysis of soil microbial communities showed that EcM-tree monocultures have a high abundance of symbiotic fungi, whereas AM-tree monocultures were dominated by saprotrophic and pathogenic fungi.
According to the researchers, as tree richness increased, shifts in microbial communities, particularly a decrease in the relative abundance of Agaricomycetes (mainly EcM fungi), corresponded with a decrease in the NPP of EcM subcommunities, but had a relatively small impact on the NPP of AM subcommunities.
These findings suggest that more efficient nutrient-acquisition strategies, rather than microbial-mediated negative plant-soil feedback, drive the dominance of AM trees in high-diversity ecosystems.
This study, based on the world’s largest forest BEF experiment, provides novel data and an alternative mechanism for explaining why and how AM trees usually dominate in high-diversity subtropical forests.
These findings also have practical implications for species selection in tropical and subtropical reforestation—suggesting it is preferable to plant mixed AM trees, as they have a more efficient nutrient-acquisition strategy than EcM trees.
This study was published as an online cover article in Sciences Advances on Jan. 19 and was funded by the Strategic Priority Research Program of CAS and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
]]>We recently heard from three appointees — Karla Haack, Kelly Sepcic Pfeil, Christa Sobon — on wisdom for current students, their own educational and career paths, their plans as new board members, and about the legacy and impact of giving back at Georgia Tech.
Karla Haack, Ph.D. BIO 2009
Karla Haack is an associate medical writer at Merck with more than 10 years of previous experience in research and teaching in academia. Karla utilizes her background in physiology to assist in the composition of regulatory documents. Haack is the current chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for the American Physiological Society.
Kelly Sepcic Pfeil, M.S. CHEM 1992, Ph.D. CHEM 2003
Kelly Sepcic Pfeil is president of ArrowInno, specializing in product design and innovation consulting. She served as vice president for Frito Lay North America and PepsiCo Research and Development from 2007-2015. Prior to joining Frito Lay in 2007, she spent 14 years with The Coca-Cola Company.
Christa Sobon, M.S. PSYCH 1996
A native of Atlanta, Christa also spent part of her childhood in the suburb of Chicago. Christa is a program manager in Manheim Digital for Cox Automotive, where she leads IT and process change implementations. In that role, she delivers large scale change programs that impact operations and drive measurable business results.
Why did you want to attend Georgia Tech?
Haack: I chose to attend Georgia Tech for its reputation as an Institute where curiosity and problem solving go hand in hand. I also knew that at Tech I would be trained in the specifics of my discipline, and I would learn how to be a scientist — how to think in a cross-disciplinary way and how to engage in scientific inquiry.
Sepcic Pfeil: While completing my undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of South Carolina, I completed summer internships at Milliken Research Center. Milliken had a liaison with a Georgia Tech chemistry professor, Charlie Liotta. He encouraged me to apply for graduate school.
Sobon: Having attended Emory University for my undergraduate degree, I wanted to attend another world-class institution to round out and augment my education.
What was it about your major or discipline that attracted your interest?
Haack: I love the field of physiology because it is the study of the interdependent mechanisms a functioning organism uses to maintain homeostasis. I was able to pursue a cell physiology project within the School of Biological Sciences.
Sepcic Pfeil: Initially I wasn’t sure if I would go to medical school or work in science research. As I furthered my education, I was more attracted to chemistry than biology. I ended up majoring in chemistry and minoring in biology in my undergraduate degree. I was always interested in the ingredients inside of products and what made them work. As a child, I read the back panel of ingredients of shampoo bottles!
Sobon: I loved that the School of Psychology was in the College of Sciences. Additionally, I was drawn by the opportunities for hands-on research and professors who were well known and well regarded in their field.
What was the most important lesson you learned from your time at Georgia Tech?
Haack: To be successful, you have to work smart and hard.
Sepcic Pfeil: The most important lesson I learned while completing M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry at Georgia Tech was a realization that science is ever-changing and you have to continue to learn and grow in your field of science. I realized I needed advanced degrees to continue to understand and grow in the field of chemistry and further my career. My Ph.D. degree certainly helped me to advance throughout the executive roles with both PepsiCo and Frito Lay research and development departments.
Sobon: Georgia Tech pushed me as a student and stretched me well outside of my comfort zone. I really developed a confidence that I could do challenging things and solve hard problems, whatever they may be.
Haack: Innovation comes when individuals with diverse perspectives and experiences work as a collective. Bring your authentic self and experiences to your work.
Sobon: There is a lot more you can do outside of research. If research is your passion, then that’s wonderful. However, if you want to contribute in ways outside of that, there are a lot of opportunities!
What do you hope to accomplish as a member of the College’s Advisory Board?
Haack: I hope to continue to make CoS and Tech a place where any student can feel valued and succeed. I look forward to helping create additional professional development opportunities for students.
Sepcic Pfeil: I hope to contribute to the College of Sciences Advisory Board to help shape the future pipeline of students. Recently my husband and I endowed a faculty chair fund to the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The endowment is designed to increase the number of women faculty within the school. So few women obtain chemistry degrees and work in the field of chemistry. I hope to make a difference for our future female scientists.
Sobon: I’m truly honored to serve on the CoSAB. My hope is to stay even more well informed of the many great things happening within the CoS and figure out how I can help the College and the associated professionals achieve goals there. To me, giving back to Georgia Tech is a combination of leveraging my time and talent (and treasure too, of course) to be a visible and engaged ambassador for the CoS.
Karla Haack, Kelly Sepcic Pfeil, Christa Sobon are joined in their CoSAB appointments by fellow new board members Mercedes Dullum and Nsé Ufot — look out for more interviews with CoSAB members over the school year ahead.
Mercedes Dullum, B.S. BIO 1975
Mercedes Dullum is a retired cardiothoracic surgeon with over 30 years of clinical practice in numerous leadership roles in hospital settings, private practice, and integrated medical practices. She served as medical director of clinical outcomes at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., and surgical director of the Heart Failure Center at Cleveland Clinic Florida in Weston.
Nsé Ufot, B.S. PSYCH 2002
Nsé Ufot is the chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project and its affiliate, New Georgia Project Action Fund. Prior to joining the New Georgia Project, Ufot worked as the assistant executive director for the Canadian Association of University Teachers, Canada’s largest faculty union. She also served as senior lobbyist and government relations officer for the American Association of University Professors.
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]]>“I was involved in the initial strategic planning efforts for Cultivate Well-being and I think it will have a significant impact on campus,” said Teresa Snow, senior academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences. “Implementation is being rolled out, particularly for students right now, with more information for faculty and staff coming soon. Currently, I co-chair the JED Academic Culture sub-committee and will continue to work with colleagues to improve the academic environment.”
Snow, who is also a 2022 Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS) teaching fellow, credits three Applied Physiology classes, one of which is required for all students before they graduate, for teaching students important practical skills. APPH 1040, 1050, and 1060 teach students how to manage stress and work through anxiety in healthy ways, and come up with resilience strategies they can rely on — not just in higher education, but for the rest of their lives.
“(APPH 1040, Scientific Foundations of Health) is a course that is directly applicable to everyday life,” Snow said, “and we want them to take those concepts and apply them. We try to adapt the curriculum, so we have been focusing more on stress and coping skills, but we also talk about healthy lifestyle, cultural differences, diversity and sustainability.”
Snow is focused on the health and wellness of first-year students, in particular.
“It’s important to get the [first-years] coming in, and help them with the transition to college life. It’s an extreme change for them. That time of adjustment and making new friends is very important,” Snow said. “We’ve been in tune with our student needs and will continue to adapt to them. Certainly we’re having conversations about student stress. We have all of our classes addressing it. We have the newer APPH 1060 class (Flourishing: Strategies for Well-being and Resilience), which is really focused on mental health. As a team we are committed to meeting students' needs and helping them thrive at Georgia Tech.
“On campus we need to do as much as we can to help them make connections, and know the resources that are available to them, and we also need to be flexible,” she said. “In our conversations with students struggling, the focus should be not only on connecting them with resources, but also giving them the flexibility to recover and succeed academically.”
Over the past two school years, she added, “students have dealt with anxiety and social isolation — they’re still trying to adjust — some classes are still in hybrid mode, but I think this semester will be a little bit more of a return to normalcy. We have to watch the Covid rates and see if the guidelines change, but being present in the classroom is important.”
Volunteerism as effective wellness tool
Snow, who used to be the sole coordinator for the Georgia Tech wellness requirement, helped develop the APPH 1050 Science of Physical Activity and Health course. As it grew, she and others in the School of Biological Sciences realized they needed another director. Christie Stewart, senior academic professional, now fills that role. School of Biological Sciences senior lecturers Michele Rosbruck and Adam Decker, and adjunct Leslie Baradel also teach the APPH classes; both Baradel and Stewart are certified Thriving and Resilience Facilitators through the National Wellness Institute.
Snow saw the wellness advantages of having students get off campus and spend time in communities working with community partners. “We give them an opportunity to do basic volunteer work, have fun and socialize,” Snow said. “We also give them opportunities to choose higher-level projects. During Covid, student teams worked remotely designing infographics and other materials with the Fulton County Health Heart Coalition to get messages out about protecting yourself and wearing masks.”
The classes are also working with partners to help children in hospitals, as well as people in between living situations and those without permanent housing in Atlanta. “Some of those [organizations] have specific projects and want to get our students’ ideas and input. They need our help and our students can use these projects to make an impact in the community.”
For several years, students in Snow’s courses have volunteered with local agencies.
In 2019, a team from APPH 1040 volunteered their time to help clean and stock Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, a non-profit home improvement store offering donated appliances, furniture, and other household items. Volunteer and Georgia Tech student Kara Ann said in a YouTube video produced for ReStore that the topic of the health class project “was working with a community partner, creating something special to give back to the community partner.”
In other projects APPH 1040 students volunteer to work on educational and garden maintenance projects at the Friends School of Atlanta, Walter’s Woods (which recently received Audubon Certification in part due to student efforts) and East Decatur Greenway. Snow told the Friends School’s Friendly Light Magazine that Georgia Tech students can use the course “to help them focus outside of themselves and do something useful for their community.”
“These projects build leadership, communication, organizational skills and self-confidence while making social connections,” Snow said. “It's a great way to improve personal well-being and mental health while helping communities and getting real-world experience.”
Links to resources
AAPH 1040 Facebook page shows other partner projects that Teresa Snow’s class have staffed with volunteers.
Georgia Tech Student Engagement and Well-Being
Mental Well-Being for Students — This 45-minute online course helps learners practice self-care strategies, recognize when they or their peers are in distress, and take action to find additional support.
Student Life: Mental Health and Well-Being — A listing of campus resources
Georgia Tech Counseling Center — Counselors available 24/7. Business hours: 404-894-2575. After business hours: 404-894-2575 or 404-894-3498
Georgia Tech Campus Police — on campus, 404-894-2500; off campus, 9-1-1.
College of Sciences satellite counselor Tara Holdampf’s office is in the Molecular Science and Engineering Building (MoSE), Room 1120B. Consulting hours are Mondays, Tuesdays, & Fridays — 10:00 AM-11:00 AM; Wednesdays, & Thursdays — 2:00 PM-3:00 PM. Click here for more info on her satellite counseling services, or call the Georgia Tech Counseling Center at 404-894-2575.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>The Interdisciplinary Health and Environment Leadership Development (IHE-LeaD) Program at Georgia Tech recently welcomed its inaugural cohort of 11 graduate student fellows from the College of Sciences, the College of Engineering, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. The IHE-Lead program is supported by a grant from The Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a non-profit medical research organization supporting biomedical science and STEM education.
The goal of the IHE-LeaD Program
Human and environmental health are intertwined. Early career researchers are acutely aware of ways in which their research has a chance to make a difference, but doing so requires collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and with community stakeholders.
“The IHE-LeaD program is designed to decrease the barriers to the translation of science for the public good”, said Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and the IHE-LeaD Program’s co-principal investigator. “The leadership program is intended to be a critical first step towards building an integrative research and training environment at Georgia Tech that can address some of our most challenging problems, whether in the areas of health disparities, emerging infectious disease, air quality, climate change and beyond.”
Fellows were selected based on their interest for interdisciplinary exchange and their innovative ideas for collaborative, public facing actions that advance human and environmental health. Six faculty advisers will support the researchers with the goal of turning their scientific discoveries into applications that directly benefit communities.
“For me, the responsibility of the scientific enterprise is first and foremost to be of public service for the greater good,” said Gabi Steinbach, scientific project coordinator and data communications specialist in the Weitz Group in the School of Biological Sciences, and the IHE-LeaD Program’s principal investigator. “The fellowship program captures two aspects that directly address this goal. One is the topical focus on interconnected human and environmental health, and the other is the impact-driven nature of the program.”
What to expect in the IHE-LeaD Program
Between August 2022 and May 2023, fellows will receive training in leadership and translational development. Workshops range from team dynamics to community engagement and system thinking, led by local, national, and Georgia Tech experts. The program also features a monthly seminar series with speakers from across the Institute’s colleges. That series will be open “to allow colleagues, partners, and the public to engage with our growing community,” Steinbach said.
During the program, IHE-LeaD fellows will jointly plan and implement activities based on their shared goals related to human and environmental health, which may include collaborative research, outreach events, and the development of online platforms.
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund support will also enable a two-day symposium, planned for early summer 2023. Fellows will invite and engage with regional and national academic experts, trainees, community leaders, and policy makers in their field of interest. That will give them a chance to establish professional networks, develop skills for implementing science-informed actions, and be directly involved in shaping a collaborative, interdisciplinary community.
The inspiration for IHE-LeaD
Steinbach said it is becoming increasingly obvious that human prosperity cannot be addressed effectively without considering environmental aspects such as climate change and air quality. “To reach those goals, it is crucial to focus on the interconnectedness of human health and environmental systems.” The IHE-LeaD program is built around that focus, bringing together experts at Georgia Tech who work at the forefront of advancing and protecting health from different human and environmental aspects.
“While innovative scientific progress is a necessary condition for progress, it does not readily translate into societal impact,” she said. “Established academic training focuses on scientific practice, often separated by disciplines, but can too commonly feel isolated from real-world scenarios. This absence of connection can leave individual trainees and researchers feeling disempowered, and too often disappointed.”
Steinbach and the other IHE-LeaD Fellows believe “the scientific voice” is a crucial component in tackling real-world problems. “With our program, we aim to bridge that gap and provide students with the training and opportunity to connect their passion for science with their desire to contribute to effective impact.”
Interdisciplinary connections
Steinbach said with her background in physical and biological sciences, it has always been her goal to bridge disciplinary boundaries and connect with social scientists and experts from other fields. “This enables me to see my disciplinary blind spot and to jointly work towards truly effective and sustainable innovations,” she said.
For Sonja Brankovic, Ph.D. candidate in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, it’s the translational aspects of the program that got her attention. “ I’m interested in going into industry. I think it’s just a natural fit to learn more about that — how what I study can be more impactful. So this is something I’m really interested in.”
Nidhi Desai, Ph.D. candidate in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences explained her interest. “As an air quality instrumentalist, I feel like we talk a lot about the science, but not about the human health effects as much. So I’m really interested in learning as much as I can from this program and thinking about that more.”
Becoming an IHE-LeaD Fellow proved to be a case of perfect timing for Stephanie Bilodeau, Ph.D. candidate in the School of Biological Sciences. “I’ve just started doing local research on freshwater ecosystems in Georgia. So for the first time, I’m doing research that actually has applications for the community around Atlanta. This opportunity is ideal to help me build my skills and learn to connect my research better to the Georgia Tech community and Atlanta.”
Steinbach, IHE-LeaD’s principal investigator, hopes the initiative becomes an annual program. “We hope that the first cohort fellows will become mentors for following cohorts, and that we can grow a sustainable interdisciplinary network which facilitates public-facing impact and helps fellows develop interdisciplinary and dynamic careers.”
Learn more about the Interdisciplinary Health and Environment Leadership Program (IHE-LeaD) at Georgia Tech.
By: Renay San Miguel
Interviews: Audra Davidson
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>College of Sciences’ 2022-2023 Haley Fellows are Karim Lakhani, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; Cody Mashburn, School of Psychology; Andrew McAvoy, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Joshua Pughe-Sanford, School of Physics; Roberta Shapiro, School of Mathematics, and Cassandra Shriver, School of Biological Sciences.
Haley scholars receive a one-time merit award of up to $4,000 thanks to the generosity of the late Marion Peacock Haley. Haley’s estate established the creation of merit-based graduate fellowships at Georgia Tech in honor of her late husband, Herbert P. Haley, ME 1933. It is an award which may be held in conjunction with other funding, assistantships, or fellowships, if applicable.
Meet the scholars
Karim Lakhani is a 5th-year Ph.D. student who is studying paleoceanography in ADVANCE Professor Jean Lynch-Stieglitz’s lab. The fellowship will allow Lakhani to spend more time on research, where he is currently “looking at the transition between the surface ocean and the deep ocean and how that was different, so the shells I look at are from organisms that floated at specific depths in the ocean in the past.”
Cody Mashburn’s research interest is the cognitive basis of individual differences in intelligence and reasoning. “Basically, why do we see variability in how well people are able to perform on intelligence tests, and how well they are able to problem solve,” he said. Mashburn will use the funds to add “more tools to my research arsenal” and to attend relevant workshops.
Andrew McAvoy is a fifth-year Ph.D. student who plans to use the Haley funds for registration and travel-related expenses so he can present his research at scientific conferences.
“My graduate research involves studying small molecule production in Burkholderia cepacia complex bacteria, one of the most feared pathogens infecting cystic fibrosis patients,” McAvoy said.
Joshua Pughe-Sanford’s fascination with dynamics — how things move, breaking down complex behavior into simpler parts — drives his physics research. “Dynamics can describe how elementary particles collide, how neurons fire in our brain, how traffic accrues, how galaxies collide,” he said. “The list goes on and on and, in essence, the work I do can be applied to all these different fields.”
Roberta Shapiro’s research centers on using topology — the study of geometric properties that stay the same, even when they are distorted — to answer questions in complex dynamics. Saying that “mathematics is all about collaboration,” the fourth-year graduate student plans on using the funds to attend conferences “and make connections with future collaborators. That means there's more math coming soon!”
Cassandra Shriver, who is starting her second year in the Quantitative Biosciences graduate program, studies comparative biomechanics and conservation science. “Specifically, I'm curious how various morphological differences and scaling constraints affect climbing kinematics, and how these strategies might change as you increase in size from something as small as a squirrel to as large as a bear.”
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Georgia Tech scientists, including a researcher from the School of Biological Sciences, have formed the core of an interdisciplinary, inter-organizational team which seeks to prevent disease outbreaks by integrating the study of human behavior with computational data-driven models.
Calling themselves BEHIVE (BEHavioral Interaction and Viral Evolution), the group recently received a $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant toward multidisciplinary team formation and novel outbreak prevention research.
“Our goal is to bring together all these terrific researchers from different disciplines to help bring a paradigm shift in the science of pandemic prediction and prevention,” said B. Aditya Prakash, associate professor with Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).
“While epidemic forecasting is compared to weather forecasting, there is an important difference. Unlike weather, our actions and behavior can change the course of an epidemic.”
Prakash is the principal investigator of the $1 million NSF grant. Fellow BEHIVE members include:
Prakash emphasized BEHIVE’s primary goal to use its interdisciplinary organization to bridge research methodologies between hard and soft sciences.
He explained that human behavior was underutilized in epidemic science before Covid-19, largely due to data scarcity and underdeveloped computational technologies. Behavioral dynamics encountered during the pandemic, such as social distancing, mask wearing, and vaccine hesitancy, has provided new research and data that now can be considered in models and simulations.
Here, BEHIVE will develop high fidelity computational models by designing new artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques that bridge human behavior knowledge and traditional epidemiological theory and models.
“It is still an open question of how we can best incorporate human behavior knowledge into the study of pandemics. That is the challenge,” Prakash said. “Our main idea is to better integrate knowledge from psychology and the humanities into pandemic science using novel computational methods.”
BEHIVE originated when team members met through various workshops held in 2020 and 2021. Prakash was an invited organizer of the National Symposium on Predicting Emergence of Virulent Entities by Novel Technologies (PREVENT).
PREVENT reported that interdisciplinary collaboration was an obstacle in predicting and preventing pandemics. For example, some vocabularies often don’t mean the same thing across disciplines, so a consistent methodology to establish a common language must be developed.
BEHIVE is custom built to solve these challenges PREVENT revealed. Along with a wealth of knowledge learned through past epidemics, each BEHIVE researcher brings to the group experience working across interdisciplinary lines.
Among the Georgia Tech researchers alone, Keskinocak interfaced with policymakers and the public on measures to slow Covid-19's spread.
Prakash’s lab led several high-profile Covid-19 forecasting initiatives, including collaboration with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Weitz teamed with fellow Georgia Tech researchers in the College of Sciences, College of Computing, and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering to create a predoctoral training program that integrates computational modeling and data analytics into bioscience.
Keskinocak, Prakash, and Weitz together are also faculty in the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS), one of Georgia Tech’s ten interdisciplinary research institutes. IDEaS connects research centers and efforts in foundational areas such as machine learning, high-performance computing, and algorithms.
BEHIVE’s $1 million grant is funded through NSF’s Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) initiative. This program supports high-risk, high-payoff convergent research that aims to identify, model, predict, track, and mitigate the effects of future pandemics.
According to Prakash, the PREVENT symposium’s summary report also helped highlight the need for an initiative like PIPP.
PIPP is a two-phased initiative in which NSF selects to fund 25 to 30 project teams, including BEHIVE, for eighteen months through phase one. However, this does not necessarily limit PIPP’s influence to chosen project teams within academia.
BEHIVE intends to partner with industry, governmental, and non-profit organizations to expand its interdisciplinary, interorganizational network.
BEHIVE’s nucleus of Georgia Tech researchers connects the group with the CDC, Georgia Department of Public Health, and numerous hospitals across the state. BEHIVE’s other researchers also serve in leading roles at non-profits, such as the Pathcheck Foundation, and top hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.
Along with developing interdisciplinary methodologies, new disease prevention models, and partnering with external organizations, BEHIVE hopes to develop educational training programs. This would ensure their effort last generations to bring about the necessary paradigm change to prevent future pandemics.
“Our initial projects and research the next eighteen months will help us get a sense of research gaps and enlarge our perspective” Prakash said. “We’re approaching PIPP as a science, and we want to lay the foundation of the science by bringing in many people from different fields for the future.”
]]>“My older brother thought it would be fun to wrestle me holding my dad’s fishing knife,” said Hammer, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences. What wasn’t fun: accidentally ending up with a stab wound in his leg.
The next day he couldn’t walk and had a high fever, thanks to a blood infection caused by Staphylococcus bacteria on his skin ending up in his wound. “Those bacteria can grow very quickly in your blood. And they should never be there,” Hammer said. Doctors gave him penicillin intravenously, and Hammer remained in a hospital for nearly a month before recovering.
Now, this November, Hammer — who performed in high school and college musicals and choruses — will get to sing the praises of Alexander Fleming, the Scottish scientist who indirectly healed him by discovering the antibacterial qualities of penicillin.
Hammer will be in the chorus at the Science Gallery at Pullman Yards Nov. 1-6, 2022 when the musical “The Mold That Changed The World” comes to Atlanta during its U.S. tour. It will be the second stop for the show, which has its stateside premiere in Washington, D.C.
Hammer, who is also a faculty member of Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI), is getting a chance to dust off singing skills because the musical is giving local professionals in science and health-related industries a chance to join the chorus when the show comes to their city. Colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control, which is co-sponsoring the musical’s 2022 U.S. tour, have also successfully auditioned to sing in the Atlanta performances, as have other area scientists and researchers, along with an emergency medical technician and a veterinarian.
For Hammer, there are strong similarities in singing about science, and teaching it at Georgia Tech. “There's a lot of entertainment in teaching, a lot of showmanship. It’s the way I got interested in microbiology, when the teacher was pretty charismatic and dynamic. So I've always wanted to be that kind of teacher.”
Singing for science education
“The Mold That Changed The World” doesn’t just focus on Fleming’s discovery. It also shows how Fleming overcame social obstacles to finding life-saving qualities in a “nasty mold,” as Hammer put it, and conveys in singing and music the dangers of relying too much on antibacterial drugs — an ongoing worry that has Hammer and several other CMDI researchers looking for new treatments.
“Fleming won the Nobel Prize for discovering the first antibiotic, penicillin, and even in his Nobel Prize speech, he predicted the dangers of the emergence of resistant microbes,” Hammer said. “He said then that he can imagine a scenario in the future where if someone doesn't take their antibiotics correctly, you could end up with resistant ‘superbugs’ that get transferred to another person. And then you don't have a treatment. He said that in 1945.”
Warning children about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) was the chief reason the Charades Theater Company in the United Kingdom staged “The Mold That Changed the World,” which was first performed for primary grades. The company thought it would be a fun and effective way to teach children ages 9-12 about the proper use of antibiotics. It was that educational aspect that attracted Hammer.
“It's one way of communicating science,” he said. “We scientists, we have to do a better job of communicating science, in all ways. That may mean different media, different settings. It's just got to be part of what we do now. This is one unusual example of how to do that. But why not, right?”
The musical did prove effective. A 2020 UK study showed that students answered more questions about AMR correctly and retained more of the science information after seeing the musical.
Researching cholera, and challenging stereotypes
As a teenager, Hammer sang in high school musical productions like “Godspell.” He then went to Boston College, where he joined the university chorale and got to sing for Pope John Paul II at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
But Hammer was also busy earning his B.S. in biology. He went on to receive his M.S. in conservation biology and a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of Michigan. He said his desire to sing was overcome by his desire to learn everything about microbes and how they impact ecosystems and biodiversity — and then what they can do to humans.
In the Hammer Lab at Georgia Tech, he and his team study microbial interactions at scales that span genes and genomes, regulatory networks, cells, populations, and communities. His longtime focus has been on Vibrio cholerae, the waterborne pathogen that causes cholera.
“It’s this combination of thinking about pathogens and their ecological environment,” Hammer explained. “It's still fascinating to me how microbes can do all they need to do to live out there somewhere else, and then they can adapt to life in our bodies and wreak havoc. That single cells can do this still blows my mind, and how they do it, and what the consequences are. And cholera was the first 'bug' that I worked on that had this kind of dual lifestyle.”
Hammer was preparing for the Fall 2022 semester when his wife, Tracy, a fifth-grade teacher, said she would be taking her students to a children’s version of “The Mold That Changed The World” when the musical’s cast came to Atlanta. “She found out about it because some of the parents in her school work at the CDC,” he said. “She knew that I had done this (sung in musicals).” A visit to the musical’s website led him to audition for the special chorus.
Hammer said that his chance to perform on stage again isn’t just about educating audiences. It’s also about showing humanity in science, he added.
“I think part of this is also to remind people that we scientists are just normal people too. I think there's this misperception that scientists are elitists who don't know how to interact with other people, or choose not to, or can’t. We're not elitist, we just have an area that we think about a lot – just like everyone else has subjects that they think about, and have strong opinions about and expertise in. So we're no different.”
“The Mold That Changed the World” runs Nov. 1-6 at Science Gallery@Pullman Yards, 225 Rogers St. NE, Atlanta, GA 30317. Tickets go on sale soon and can be purchased here.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
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Kokabi, who graduated with a B.S. in Biology in 2000, credits his time on campus and in the College of Sciences for preparing him to advance in his dentistry career. “The habits I developed during my undergraduate studies enabled me to thrive in dental school,” he said. “I specifically remember thinking biochemistry in dental school was a breeze compared to biochem classes at Tech.” Georgia Tech’s pre-health classes can better prepare medical students for advanced studies at a specialized medical school, he added.
Kokabi and his business partner, Joon Koh, D.M.D., a fellow Georgia Tech graduate with a B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, also enjoy working together on campaigns to help local schools and charities.
The College of Sciences recently talked with Kokabi about his time at Georgia Tech, the ethos of the Institute, generosity and business values, and advice for pre-health students and those interested in a career in health and medical fields.
What was your experience at Tech like? How did it prepare you for your career as a dentist?
My academic experience was top-notch. It was hard and demanding, but looking back at it, that is exactly what my 18-year-old self needed at the time. It was a great introduction into what the real world expects of professionals. Socially, it was wonderful as well. I met people from all around the country. I became friends with people of various backgrounds, and everyone got along. It was right after the Olympics so it was an exciting time.
My time at Georgia Tech also gave me great time management skills. The academic workload of dental school was a breeze compared to Georgia Tech. Meeting people from around the world enabled me to carry on a conversation with just about anyone — this is an important trait that still serves me well today. I meet lots of patients at my dental practice from all over, and I can usually carry on a conversation about their place of origin relatively easily. This helps them feel more comfortable with me, and strengthens the doctor-patient relationship.
What made you want to be a dentist?
My parents are from Iran. As I'm sure most Persian and Asian children will tell you, from birth your parents are pressuring you to be a doctor. I did not want to be around sick people all day and did not want to be on call weekends. So dentistry offers the perfect balance of being a doctor, but having a more normal schedule and not having to treat serious life-threatening illnesses. I am very happy with my decision and cannot think of myself doing anything else.
Georgia Tech's motto, “Progress and Service” — what did that mean to you as a student, and what does it mean as an alumnus?
It meant and still means a great deal. I think people have to start at a young age thinking about how they can serve others. That is where true fulfillment comes from. One reason we have so much depression in our country is our self-absorbed "me, me, me" culture. There is a lot of happiness and joy that comes from helping and serving others.
It's also great for business as well. People want to buy from companies that are doing more than just selling goods and services. They want companies that care about making a difference in the world. Of course, we do quality dentistry, and care about our patients' oral health. But we take it a step further and have a community mission. We strive to be active members of our community and help our local schools and charities. Our Brookhaven community has given us so much, the least we can do is give back.
Tell me about the "Brighten Your Smile, Better the World" campaign and how effective it has been so far.
The "Brighten Your Smile, Better the World'' campaign is one of our two main initiatives. Each month we partner with a different school or charity. Any patient of ours that makes a donation to that month's chosen partner gets a set of custom teeth whitening trays for free. It's a win-win for all parties involved.
In its first year, we have been able to raise more than $15,000 for numerous schools and organizations. Featured partners have included Ashford Park Elementary School, Huntley Hills Elementary School, Montgomery Elementary School, Chamblee Middle School, the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, Giving Grace, and The Kyle Pease Foundation.
You said you talk to many pre-dental students. What advice do you give them about whether or not they should get a degree at Georgia Tech before heading off to dental school?
A science degree from Georgia Tech is extremely valuable. It sets you apart from other candidates applying for the same spot in a specialty program. The healthcare school knows that if someone was able to get a Tech degree, they will be able to handle the academic workload of dental or medical school.
Also, know what you are getting into. Being a healthcare professional means a lifelong pursuit of learning. It is not just a job, but a career. It takes a lot of effort and time even after you have left work for the day (being on call, continuing education, representing your profession in the community, etc).
You should also know that it's worth it. There are not too many jobs that allow you to make as big of an impact in people's lives as being a healthcare professional. I feel truly blessed and honored that I am in my field of work.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>Ten Georgia Tech students, including four from the College of Sciences, were selected for the 2022 Millennium Fellowship, a joint leadership program of the Millennium Campus Network (MCN) and the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI).
The fellowship is an ambitious program to help make the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and UNAI principles a reality. The Class of 2022 Millennium Fellows have been selected among a record-breaking 31,397 applicants from over 2,417 campuses across 140 nations.
Millennium Fellows are university undergraduates selected based on their leadership on sustainable development-related projects that advance the SDGs in their communities. As Millennium Fellows, they will participate in a semester-long leadership development program to improve their student organizing, partnership building, and community impact skills.
"Students' ongoing pursuit of the Millennium Fellowships reflects Georgia Tech's larger commitment to pursuing solutions on a global scale. The fellowship supports real-world initiatives in sustainable development, providing leadership training and a community of like-minded recipients," said Shannon Dobranski, director of Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising in the Georgia Tech Career Center. "Each year, the Millennium Fellowship helps Georgia Tech students invested in sustainability to identify and connect with each other. It also helps them to refine and articulate their own goals related to sustainability and the impact they hope to have on their community now and in the future."
Three School of Biological Sciences students are included in the latest cohort of Millennium Fellows: Shania Khatri, Michelle Seeler, and Mandy Zhu. Biochemistry major Nathan Bowman, also invited to the Fellows program, plans to pursue his project at a later date.
The College of Sciences students join six more Georgia Tech Millennium Fellows:
The Millennium Fellowship Class of 2022 includes over 3,000 Millennium Fellows on 200 campuses in 37 nations that are participating in the program this year. The Class of 2022 is on track to engage in projects collectively advancing all 17 Sustainable Development Goals and all 10 UNAI Principles.
Georgia Tech's fellowship recipients will take part in a semester-long development program divided into three parts:
1. CONVENE
2. CHALLENGE
3. CELEBRATE
Learn more about the Millennium Fellowship here.
How to Apply for This Fellowship and More
Promoting and supporting the Millennium Fellowship is a team effort each year. Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising works with fellowship administrators to host information sessions and Serve-Learn-Sustain reaches out to the SLS community to spread the word. Students interested in the Millennium Fellowship, or any nationally or internationally competitive award, should follow up by scheduling an appointment with Prestigious Fellowships Advisor, Karen Mura, on AdvisorLink.
Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising is part of the Office of Undergraduate Education (OUE). Learn more about OUE by following @gtoue on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
]]>Contact: Renay San Miguel
Communications Officer II/Science Writer
College of Sciences
404-894-5209
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Kostka, a professor and associate chair of research in the School of Biological Sciences with a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, will receive funding as part of a wider $178 million dollar DOE effort to advance sustainable technology breakthroughs that can improve public health, help address climate change, improve food and agricultural production, and create more resilient supply chains. The 37 new projects also include efforts to engineer plants and microbes into bioenergy and improve carbon storage.
Kostka’s wetlands research will continue in the salt marshes off Georgia’s coast, where his team has already conducted studies on the microbial life that benefits Spartina cordgrass in those areas, helping to strengthen resilience of the plant to sea level rise and catastrophic storms.
The DOE’s funding initiative is split into four groups. Kostka’s studies will focus on the role of microbiomes — all the microorganisms living in a particular environment — in the biogeochemical cycling of carbon in terrestrial soils and wetlands by using genomics-based and systems biology.
Other research areas involve renewable bioenergy and biomaterials production; quantum-enabled bioimaging and sensing for bioenergy, and research to characterize gene function in bioenergy crop plants.
“Our project seeks to understand the controls of soil organic matter degradation and the release of greenhouse gasses, both of which are largely mediated by microbes” Kostka said. “And then also, as we've been studying for many years now, how climate drivers — principally the warming of ecosystems and carbon dioxide enrichment in the atmosphere — limit greenhouse gas release to the atmosphere. How might changes in plant and microbial communities lead to climate feedbacks, thereby accelerating the release of greenhouse gasses from soil carbon stores?”
That question has driven much of Kostka’s research team in the past as they focused on how soil microbes break down biomasses like woody plants and peat mosses, at an Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility in northern Minnesota called Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE). Kostka’s team is using genomics to study all the genes that code for microbial enzymes that decompose biomass in soil and how plants, which are also changing with climate, impact microbiomes by providing carbon sources that fuel microbial activities. In particular, the work is focused on lignocellulose or lignin, which gives plants their rigidity or structure and arguably comprises the most abundant renewable carbon source on the planet.
“We're just at the point now where we finally have the tools to unlock the black box of soil microbiology and chemistry,” Kostka said. “Recent advances in sophisticated analytical chemistry methods used to quantify microbial metabolites along with improved metagenome sequencing approaches enable us to better uncover metabolic pathways.”
Kostka will serve as principal investigator of the research team for the grant. That team includes School of Biological Sciences researchers Caitlin Petro, research scientist, and Katherine Duchesneau, a third-year Ph.D. student; co-principal investigator Kostas Konstantinidis, Richard C. Tucker Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Rachel Wilson, research scientist, Florida State University; Malak Tfaily, associate professor, University of Arizona; and Chris Schadt, senior staff scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Unlocking the “enzyme latch” hypothesis
As part of his new research, Kostka will revisit what scientists call the “enzyme latch” hypothesis. This could help uncover the mechanisms by which soils and plants capture harmful greenhouse gasses, and what prompts their release into the atmosphere.
The idea behind this hypothesis is that when soils are wet, they lack oxygen, which suppresses a specific class of enzymes, oxidases, that catalyze the beginning steps in the microbial breakdown of organic compounds produced by plants in soil. When oxidases are suppressed, the breakdown products of lignin, phenolic compounds, accumulate and poison the rest of the microbial carbon cycle. Thus a single class of enzymes may be responsible for keeping greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane captured within the soil.
“The climate linkage here is that it's thought that as the climate warms, we'll get more greenhouse gas production, because simply it'll be warmer, and microbial enzymes work faster at higher temperature. But then also, in wetlands in particular, the hypothesis is that as wetlands warm, they're going to dry out. And so when a wetland dries out, you're going to get more injection of oxygen-rich air into the soil, which would then accelerate the breakdown of organic matter.”
When that happens, it could also mean different plants having an impact on carbon storage and the breakdown of biomass. “As wetlands dry out, plant communities in northern peatlands where most of Earth’s soil carbon is stored, are expected to shift from a dominance of mosses, which do better when it's wet — to woody plants, shrubs, and trees that do better with less water, when it's drier. That would in turn potentially spark the release of more reactive carbon compounds from plant roots — mosses don’t have roots — which would likely accelerate organic matter decomposition and the production of more greenhouse gas in a feedback loop with climate.”
Kostka’s research may also help to develop new approaches for converting woody biomass into potential alternative energy sources. “To make our society more sustainable, we have to basically recycle everything, or reuse as much as we can. And that includes the biomass from plants that can be grown on more arid lands that are less suitable for food crops,” he said, referring to plant-based materials that can be used to produce biofuels and bioenergy. “And so the DOE is leading research efforts to understand the controls of biomass degradation in plants such as switchgrass and poplar.”
Kostka and Konstantinidis will develop a database of genes that code for the breakdown of lignocellulose and lignin, compounds that largely make up plant biomass and for which metabolic pathways of degradation have been elusive. Kostka and his colleagues will also have access to the extensive resources of the DOE Genomic Sciences program, including a collaboration with the agency’s Joint Genome Institute.
“We hope that information generated from our project can be used to improve methods for breaking down woody biomass so that it can be used in a sustainable way to produce biofuels,” Kostka said.
Public abstract of Department of Energy grant DE-SC0023297
About Georgia Tech
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 44,000 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.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>Ever stare at those last few pieces of breakfast cereal and watch them seemingly clump together or cling to the side of the bowl?
Scientists have dubbed it the “Cheerios effect,” the combination of forces causing those clumps. Researchers at Georgia Tech have discovered those same forces draw small numbers of ants together to begin to form water-repellent ant rafts — even though the ants seem to be uninterested in collaborating with their neighbors for survival.
Described in the journal Physical Review Fluids, their study explains for the first time the underlying forces at play in attracting ants to each other. Ants clump together into rafts to survive during flooding, and the team determined it takes exactly 10 ants to form a stable raft.
“I think the surprising thing here is that ants prioritize exploration, actively avoiding each other on the water surface. They instead rely on physical forces to bring them together — the Cheerios effect,” said Hu, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences. “Previously, we only studied the change in the shape of the raft once formed; we never asked how ants find each other on the water surface.”
The climate crisis is one of the greatest threats facing public health, natural resources and the economy worldwide, and ocean ecosystems are not only at risk, but also offer the potential of climate mitigation solutions.
The primary focus of the Center is to help co-design, develop, test, fund and deliver scalable and equitable ocean-based solutions to reduce the effects of climate change and build climate-resilient marine ecosystems and coastal communities. There are also tremendous opportunities to accelerate carbon clean-up and advance sustainable ocean economies.
“A diverse approach is critical to address today’s serious threats to ocean health,” said Brian Davis, Ph.D., president and CEO of Georgia Aquarium. “As a mission-focused conservation leader, Georgia Aquarium is keen to host this multinational center that will connect innovative researchers with the resources to create and launch projects that may solve ocean-climate issues.”
In affiliation with the Ocean Decade, run by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Center’s work will contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to achieve by 2030 that are a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.
“In response to the need for partnership and investment in ocean science, and to help urgently mitigate the impact of climate change on the ocean, the Ocean Decade movement thanks Ocean Visions, Georgia Aquarium, and Georgia Institute of Technology for this generous support and long-term commitment,” said Julian Barbière, Ocean Decade Global Coordinator and Head of the Marine Policy and Regional Coordination Section, IOC-UNESCO. “Such exemplary leadership by our Decade Collaborative Centers, spearheaded by the OV – UN DCC in the U.S. is an important step towards developing effective ocean-climate solutions.”
The ocean nurtures 80% of all life on Earth. Billions of people rely on food from the ocean, and world economies depend upon it for fishing, tourism, shipping, energy and more. It is the world’s largest carbon sink, vital to curbing the impacts of climate change. Healthy marine habitats defend coastal communities from intensifying storms and flooding.
“The ocean crisis and the climate crisis are two sides of the same coin, and we cannot have a healthy ocean without resolving the climate crisis and the greenhouse gas pollution causing it,” said Brad Ack, executive director and chief innovation officer at Ocean Visions, a nonprofit that develops solutions to complex ocean challenges.
“This work will take bold imagination, greatly expanded innovation, and many more people from around the world engaged in this effort collectively. This new Center will give us a framework to build the innovation ecosystem we desperately need,” said Emanuele Di Lorenzo, Ph.D., chairman and co-founder of Ocean Visions.
The ocean has buffered humanity from the worst effects to date of climate disruption by directly absorbing about 30 percent of humanity’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and trapping more than 90 percent of the excess heat in the biosphere caused by CO2 pollution. However, both of these climate-buffering functions have come at a high cost – unraveling marine ecosystems and crippling the ability of the ocean to support the billions of people and other creatures dependent upon it.
The Ocean Visions – UN Decade Collaborative Center will work with an emerging global network of experts and collaborators associated with projects and programs to design, test and deploy viable solutions, such as Ocean Visions’ Global Ecosystem for Ocean Solutions, 1000 Ocean Startups and Stride.
For example, one issue being solved is securing investment in ocean solutions. The Center is helping advance the development of a new open-source tool called The Ocean Impact Navigator, which consists of 30 prioritized key performance indicators (KPIs), grouped in six main impact areas. It captures effects that innovators are driving across ocean health, climate change, human wellbeing and equity.
“This Center signals an urgent, strategic commitment to finding climate solutions,” said Susan Lozier, Ph.D., dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair at Georgia Tech and President of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). “Ocean health is also human health, and we must find effective ways to protect waters around the planet.”
“At this Center, the best and brightest minds—including our researchers, staff and students—will ensure that our ocean will remain vital for generations to come,” added Tim Lieuwen, Ph.D., executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech who also serves as Regents’ Professor and David S. Lewis Jr. Chair in the Institute's Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. “The solutions are there, and we look forward to working alongside Georgia Aquarium and Ocean Visions to find them, with the support of the Ocean Decade movement.”
For more information about the Ocean Visions – UN Decade Collaborative Center for Ocean-Climate Solutions, visit the website at oceanvisions.org/undcc/.
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About Ocean Visions – UN Decade Collaborative Center for Ocean-Climate Solutions
The Ocean Visions – UN Decade Collaborative Center for Ocean-Climate Solutions is an innovative partnership between Ocean Visions, Georgia Tech and Georgia Aquarium, with headquarters at the Aquarium in Atlanta. The Center, endorsed by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, leads and supports processes to co-design, develop, test, fund and deploy scalable and equitable ocean-based solutions to reduce or reverse the effects of climate change, enhance food security and build climate-resilient marine ecosystems and coastal communities. The Center’s work contributes to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to achieve by 2030 that are a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.
About the Ocean Decade:
Proclaimed in 2017 by the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) (‘the Ocean Decade’) seeks to stimulate ocean science and knowledge generation to reverse the decline of the state of the ocean system and catalyse new opportunities for sustainable development of this massive marine ecosystem. The vision of the Ocean Decade is ‘the science we need for the ocean we want’. The Ocean Decade provides a convening framework for scientists and stakeholders from diverse sectors to develop the scientific knowledge and the partnerships needed to accelerate and harness advances in ocean science to achieve a better understanding of the ocean system, and deliver science-based solutions to achieve the 2030 Agenda. The UN General Assembly mandated UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) to coordinate the preparations and implementation of the Decade.
About Georgia Aquarium
Georgia Aquarium is a leading 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in Atlanta, Ga. that is Humane Certified by American Humane and accredited by the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. It is also a Center for Species Survival by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Georgia Aquarium is committed to working on behalf of all marine life through education, preservation, exceptional animal care, and research across the globe. Georgia Aquarium continues its mission each day to inspire, educate, and entertain its millions of guests about the aquatic biodiversity throughout the world through its hundreds of exhibits and tens of thousands of animals across its eight major galleries. For more information, visit georgiaaquarium.org.
About Georgia Tech:
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a 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 44,000 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.
This press release is shared jointly with the Georgia Aquarium and Ocean Visions newsrooms. Learn more: oceanvisions.org/undcc
]]>ARCS Scholars are selected annually by qualifying departments of science, engineering, and medical research within the ARCS Foundation’s 51 academic partner universities. The ARCS Scholars Award recognizes outstanding students who have a record of past achievement and who show exceptional promise of making a significant contribution to the worldwide advancement of science and technology. The ARCS fellowship is made possible each year by way of the fundraising and continuous generous support of the ARCS Foundation Atlanta Chapter.
“I am honored to be recognized for my previous achievements and grateful to be joining a wonderful community of people passionate about advancing science and technology,” said Shriver.
Her proposed research is to analyze how scaling affects mammalian climbing mechanics, with emphasis on conservation applications.
“I plan to observe and compare gait kinematics for mammals of various sizes, with the understanding that scaling relationships may require alternative postures or strategies to overcome gravitational forces,” Shriver explained. “This research will require extensive collaborations with zoological and wildlife institutions, which are often more willing to collaborate when efforts are made to include conservation and animal welfare initiatives in research proposals.”
“Specifically, I'm curious how various morphological differences and scaling constraints affect climbing kinematics,” she explained, “and how these strategies might change as you increase in size from something as small as a squirrel to as large as a bear.”
“Cassie is an ideal student for this project in the biological sciences, combining her technical engineering background with her interest for studying natural systems,” said Professor and Associate Chair for Faculty Development in the School of Biological Sciences Young-Hui Chang, Shriver is co-advised by Chang and David Hu, professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of Biological Sciences.
“In particular, Cassie has a passion for understanding animal behavior and impacting conservation efforts, which has led to her research on climbing biomechanics,” Chang added. “I have no doubt that the ARCS scholarship will play a major role in helping Cassie continue to develop as a scientist that will work to grow the conservation technology community in metro-Atlanta and make Georgia Tech an industry leader in sustainable and evidenced-based technology solutions for wildlife and beyond.”
In her first year of graduate school at Georgia Tech, Shriver engaged in a project mentoring students to create a solution to solve an urban human-wildlife conflict, designing an open source automated rabies vaccine dispenser for foxes.
Ph.D. candidate Noam Altman-Kurosaki, a graduate research assistant in the School of Biological Sciences added on receiving the ARCS Award, “I'm very excited and honored to have received it.”
Most of Altman-Kurosaki’s work takes place in Mo'orea, French Polynesia, studying the mechanisms that drive coral reef decline and recovery, often focusing on how anthropogenic stressors alter the interactions between corals, algae, and fishes.
“As you can imagine, doing work out here can get quite costly,” Altman-Kurosaki explained, adding that the award will also “help me cover the difference in the cost of living and supplies for my work.”
Working in the lab of Professor Mark Hay, an experimental marine ecologist known for his work on community, marine, and chemical ecology, Altman-Kurosaki said that Hay, who also holds the Teasley Chair in Environmental Biology and is a Regents’ Professor, has encouraged his curiosity and independence. This has made him a much stronger and more creative scientist overall, he said.
“Mark is really good at making sure I ‘couch’ my ideas in broader theory and ecological phenomena — and making sure that I can test them through manipulative experiments, not just correlative and comparative survey techniques,” said Altman-Kurosaki of his mentor and research advisor.
“Noam is innovative, energetic, resourceful, and a tireless researcher that is discovering new approaches to retain or recover the critical ecosystem services that threatened coral reefs provide to tropical human populations,” Hay added.
Altman-Kurosaki’s science career actually began with a pre-university trip to an aquarium. “I saw a Mola mola and couldn't believe something so ridiculous existed on this planet,” he said of the ocean sunfish. “So I decided on a lark to take the classes I'd need for my university's summer marine biology course. I ended up falling in love with the general field of ecology, and that love only deepened when I finally got hands-on field experience in marine biology.”
As he continued to gain experience and learn more about the field, Altman-Kurosaki began to realize that this was what he wanted to do with his life, and ultimately decided to pursue a graduate education to keep conducting research.
The ARCS® Foundation, a national organization started by a group of women “who focused upon the future” in 1958, has granted more than $120 million to over 10,000 ARCS Scholars in top-rated STEM programs at leading US universities who are “determined to be the best and the brightest in their fields.” The awards are given to outstanding students who are U.S. citizens studying to complete degrees in science, engineering, math, technology, and medical research.
ARCS® Foundation Atlanta, comprised of about 150 philanthropic women, supports scholars from Emory University, Morehouse College, and the University of Georgia, in addition to Georgia Tech. The Atlanta chapter has awarded more than $4.5 million to over 400 scholars since it was incorporated in 1992.
]]>Editor and Contact:
Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia
The meeting supports DARPA’s mission to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for U.S. national security. “We defend against technological surprise by creating our own,” said Stefanie Tompkins, DARPA’s director. “In DARPA’s search for transformative solutions, what we worry most about are the ideas we never hear. Ultimately, our goal with DARPA Forward is to reach more ideas, connect with more talent, and generate more surprises.”
The DARPA Forward conference in Atlanta will be held at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center and will include talks by researchers from Georgia Tech and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Several hundred attendees are expected.
Among the speakers is Renee Wegrzyn, the newly-named director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, also known as ARPA-H. Wegrzyn holds a Ph.D. and bachelor of science degree in applied biology from Georgia Tech and will give a keynote talk on Wednesday, October 26.
Read the full story in the Georgia Tech Research Institute newsroom.
]]>Faculty may nominate candidates pursuing doctoral studies for the prestigious fellowship. The Graduate Education Fellowships Selection Committee, established by the Vice Provost for Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, reviews the candidates for final selection.
This year, twelve scholars will receive $7,500 per year and three will receive the Global Impact Award of $10,000 per year. The Foundation grants the Global Impact Awards to students working on research problems having a broader global context or addressing global issues.
A scholars award ceremony will be held in November at Georgia Tech to honor the Atlanta chapter’s recipients.
Congratulations to the following Georgia Tech 2022-23 ARCS Scholars:
• Noam Altman-Kurosaki is a first-year ARCS Scholar who received the Herz Global Impact Award. Altman-Kurosaki is a Ph.D. candidate in biology with a research interest in understanding the processes that drive coral reef decline and recovery.
• Nolan Barrett is a second-year ARCS Scholar. Barrett is a Ph.D. candidate in ocean science and engineering with a research interest in marine natural products chemistry and chemical ecology.
• Kenneth De Jesús-Morales is a second-year ARCS Scholar. Jesús-Morales is a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering with a research interest in optimizing a bio-printed aortic heart valve model capable of regeneration and repair for the pediatric population.
• Anjana Dissanayaka is a first-year ARCS Scholar. Dissanayaka is a Ph.D. student in biomedical with a research interest in leveraging and applying microfluidic techniques to develop low-cost diagnostic devices.
• Hannah Holmes is a third-year ARCS Scholar. Holmes is a Ph.D. candidate in chemical and biomolecular engineering with a research interest in improving the efficiency of CO2 capture technologies using solid adsorbents in structured contractors.
• Tawfik Hussein is a first-year ARCS Scholar. Hussein is a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering with a research interest in simulating computationally the mechanical changes in the heart of patients with heart failure to help predict early stages of heart failure.
• KC Jacobson is a first-year ARCS Scholar who received the Herz Global Impact Award. Jacobson is a Ph.D. student in bioengineering with a research interest in the neural mechanisms of impaired sensory processing in a human-relevant mouse model of autism spectrum disorder.
• Kantwon Rogers is a third-year ARCS Scholar. Rogers is a Ph.D. student in computer science with a research interest in artificial intelligence and robotics with a focus on investigating the influences that prosocial deception has on human-robot interaction.
• Christopher Roper is a second-year ARCS Scholar. Roper is a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering with a research interest in plasma instabilities in high-speed plasma dynamics sources for propulsion.
• Cassandra Shriver is a first-year ARCS Scholar. Shriver is a Ph.D. student in quantitative biosciences in biological sciences with a research interest in comparative biomechanics, specifically mammalian climbing mechanics with an emphasis on conservation applications.
• Kevin Shu is a second-year ARCS Scholar. Shu is a Ph.D. student in algorithms, combinatorics, and optimization with a research interest in applying ideas from pure math, in particular algebraic geometry, to solve optimization problems more efficiently.
• Eudorah Vital is a first-year ARCS Scholar. Vital is a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering with a research interest in understanding the biophysical processes that underlie blood diseases/disorders and developing point-of-care diagnostics for them.
• Tony Wang is a third-year ARCS Scholar. Wang is a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering with a research interest in developing micro-robots to perform neurosurgery.
• Naoki Yokoyama is a first-year ARCS Scholar. Yokoyama is a Ph.D. student in robotics in electrical and computer engineering with a research interest in training virtual robots within realistic simulators using deep reinforcement learning and deploying them on robots in the real world.
• Nathan Zavanelli is a first-year ARCS Scholar who received the Imlay Foundation Global Impact Award. Zavanelli is a Ph.D. student in bioengineering in mechanical engineering with a research interest in studying soft, skin-like electronics and sensors for wearable healthcare.
The ARCS fellowship is made possible each year by way of fundraising and the continued generous support of the ARCS-Atlanta Foundation.
The mission of the ARCS Foundation is to advance science and technology in the United States by providing financial rewards to academically outstanding U.S. citizens studying to complete degrees in science, engineering, and medical research.
Since its inception in 1992, the ARCS Foundation Atlanta has awarded more than $4.5 million to over 400 science scholars at Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Morehouse College, and the University of Georgia.
For more information about the 2022-23 ARCS Atlanta Scholars, please visit www.atlanta.arcsfoundation.org/scholars/current-scholars-4.
The Fellows are a governing group of more than 450 distinguished scientists and other leaders who have made notable contributions to scientific research, education, and communication, according to the CAS: “Nominated by their colleagues and selected by the CAS Board of Trustees, the Academy Fellows are partners and collaborators in the pursuit of the Academy’s mission to regenerate the natural world through science, learning, and collaboration.”
“This was quite a surprise to me, and a really welcome connection with the CAS, which I came to know well as a student across the bay at (the University of California at) Berkeley,” Montoya said. “I was of course deeply honored to be named a CAS Fellow.”
“On behalf of the School of Biological Sciences, I congratulate Joe on his selection as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences,” said Todd Streelman, professor and chair of the School of Biological Sciences. “The Academy recognized Joe’s long-term impact in studying nitrogen cycles and energy flow in the world’s seas and rivers. We’re thrilled that the Academy has shone a spotlight on Joe and his lab group’s work.”
Montoya is a biological oceanographer with research interests at the interface of biology and geochemistry. His lab specializes in studies of the marine nitrogen cycle, using a combination of direct rate measurements and stable isotope natural abundance methods to explore the role of biological dinitrogen (N2) fixation in structuring the flow of nitrogen and energy through planktonic ecosystems. The metabolic capability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support biological production plays a key role in supporting diverse ecosystems in many offshore and coastal waters.
“I’m excited at the chance to interact with old and new colleagues studying the marine nitrogen cycle who are also CAS Fellows,” Montoya said. “The CAS will give us new opportunities for developing collaborations and sharing our work with the public, as well as with other scientists.”
The Montoya Lab has also been deeply involved in studies of the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on offshore ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico. His group’s research program is highly interdisciplinary, incorporating work in plankton biology, marine chemistry, and isotope biogeochemistry both at sea and in the lab.
Streelman also noted how the CAS highlighted Montoya’s work in diversity, equity, and inclusion, citing Montoya’s strong interest in education and outreach, and role as a founding member of the Georgia Tech College of Sciences Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council.
“I firmly believe that we have a duty as scientists and educators to share our work broadly and to ensure that our scientific community is open, welcoming, and supportive,” Montoya said.
Montoya received an A.B. in Biology at the University of California and a Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University. He served on the faculty of the Departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998.
]]>Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>Now, what started as a citizen science initiative led by George has turned into a $2.6 million National Fish and Wildlife Association effort to restore degraded salt marshes in Charleston, South Carolina. As part of the project, Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair of Research in the School of Biological Sciences, will lead a team of researchers to not only monitor these restoration efforts, but gain insights into why the marshes degraded in the first place — and how to prevent it from happening in the future.
Over the past three years, Kostka, who has a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has worked with SCDNR and Robinson Design Engineers, a local firm co-led by Tech alum Joshua Robinson (CEE 2005), to develop engineering and design plans for the restoration of the salt marshes.
“That project went really well,” shared Kostka, “and now we have developed engineering and design plans for the actual restoration as we are moving forward with the next phase.”
Work for the current phase of the project is set to begin soon. Over the next four years, community volunteers will work to plant marsh grasses, restore oyster reefs, and excavate the tidal creeks that supply the marsh with sea water.
“Because if we don't do this work,” George shared, “then basically it means a place that I grew up in and a place that I call home will no longer exist.”
]]>Editor and Contact:
Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
The BBISS Faculty Fellows program has been in place since 2014. Fellows will number between 10 and 15, will be drawn from across all 6 colleges and GTRI at Georgia Tech. It is expected that annual allowances provided to each BBISS Fellow will range from $1000 to $1500 depending on number of fellows in the program and availability of funds.
The new BBISS Faculty Fellows are:
These faculty members join the current roster of Faculty Fellows:
More information can be found on the BBISS website.
]]>This semester's ceremonies celebrate 1,690 summer graduates and 3,930 fall graduates — 1,500 bachelor’s students, 3,760 master’s students, and 360 doctoral students across both semesters.
As part of the ceremonies, three distinguished speakers will address graduates as they embark on their post-graduate lives and careers. All three are familiar with the Georgia Tech experience, either as a student or faculty member — and one is a College of Sciences alumna.
]]>Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and Biological Sciences Graduate Committee Chair Ingeborg Schmidt-Krey first met Shi during her recruitment into the Bioinformatics (BINF) Ph.D. program, which is directed by Professor King Jordan, and is one of five Ph.D. programs and two M.S. programs in the School of Biological Sciences at Tech. Shi impressed Schmidt-Krey during her second semester as an engaged student — particularly in research ethics discussions.
“Bree’s background in mathematics coupled with her passion for applying mathematical approaches to biological research made her a fantastic match for such an interdisciplinary program,” said Schmidt-Krey. “Bree has a particular interest in using machine learning in her research and making her skills accessible to other students via her symposium, outreach activities, and teaching.”
Shi first contacted Biological Sciences Associate Professor Patrick McGrath about coming to Georgia Tech to join the Bioinformatics program. “With her mathematical background and interest in genomics, I thought that she would be a great match for this program and Georgia Tech in general,” McGrath said.
“Now in her second year, Breanna is fully participating in our lab’s research,” he added. “She’s using her skills in machine learning and computational biology to understand the evolution of behavior in Lake Malawi cichlids, a large flock of species that have evolved a variety of new social behaviors.”
Schmidt-Krey shared that Shi advocates for graduate students via the Georgia Tech Student Government Association (SGA), is working towards the Tech to Teaching certificate in preparation for her plans to become a professor, participates in several underrepresented minority recruitment activities, and is an instructor in the VIP program, where she will involve undergraduates from various backgrounds in her research.
“Bree is currently supported by a GEM Fellowship and GAANN award. Bree's symposium impressively shows a second-year Ph.D. student's initiative and commitment to equity in our community.”
Shi has also been awarded the Graduate Fellowship for STEM Diversity (GFSD) and the Graduate Retaining Inspirational Scholars in Technology and Engineering (Grad RISE) from Georgia Tech’s Center for Engineering Education and Diversity (CEED).
“Bree’s research includes looking for particular neurons in the brain that are activated during reproductive behaviors,” said McGrath, who is now Shi’s advisor.
McGrath added that Shi is also passionate about using new technologies to study aggression behaviors, simulating virtual fish to induce and learn from aggressive behaviors in other fish.
Currently overseeing a large group of undergraduate and master’s students, Shi is also passionate about mentorship, adding that she became interested in education research through her time with the Georgia Tech Center for Teaching and Learning.
“While I was initially nervous about having her overseeing so many students so early in her career, Breanna has really done an outstanding job of overseeing this group,” McGrath shared. “Her goal is to become an academic professor, so it's great to see her display these skills. I am very proud of what Breanna has accomplished in such a short time.”
Shi’s mentorship will continue with the IAS workshop. “[The workshop] will be a partnership with Christin Salley, a third year Ph.D. student in Civil Engineering who is also a GEM fellow,” Shi said.
“Our hope is to get graduate students interested in using mathematics and computer science into their research,” Shi said. “As diversity fellows, Christin and I are making it a priority to include students from diverse groups and to facilitate mentoring.”
They also hope to provide a collaborative environment where students can network and learn. “Our goal is to host this event annually,” Shi added.
Shi, who has two degrees in mathematics, has been interested to understand why some students find math and computer sciences (CS) difficult to master. She hopes to employ a few non-traditional techniques that will allow students to feel less resistant and more understanding of the subjects. “We hope to provide greater outcomes for the participants than their past experiences with math and CS.”
]]>Editor and Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston, College of Sciences
]]>Using a mix of experimental studies and computational models, the researchers show that somatosensory feedback, or neural signals from specialized sensors throughout a cat’s body, help inform the spinal cord about the ongoing movement and coordinate the four limbs to keep cats from falling when they encounter obstacles. Research suggests that with those motion-related sensory signals the animal can walk even if the connection between the spinal cord and the brain is partially fractured.
Understanding the mechanisms of this type of balance control is particularly relevant to older people who often have balance issues and can injure themselves in falls. Eventually, the researchers hope this could bring new understanding to somatosensory feedback’s role in balance control. It could also lead to progress in spinal cord injury treatment because the research suggests activation of somatosensory neurons can improve spinal neural networks’ function below the site of spinal cord damage.
“We have been interested in the mechanisms that make it possible to reactivate injured networks in the spinal cord,” said School of Biological Sciences Professor Boris Prilutsky. “We know from previous studies that somatosensory feedback from moving legs helps activate spinal networks that control locomotion, enabling stable movement.”
The researchers presented their findings in “Sensory Perturbations From Hindlimb Cutaneous Afferents Generate Coordinated Functional Responses in All Four Limbs During Locomotion in Intact Cats” in the journal eNeuro.
Coordinated Cats
Although genetically modified mouse models have recently become dominant in neural control of locomotion research, the cat model offers an important advantage. When they move, mice remain crouched, meaning they are less likely to have balance problems even if somatosensory feedback fails. Humans and cats, on the other hand, cannot maintain balance or even move if they lose sensory information about limb motion. This suggests that larger species, like cats and humans, might have a different organization of spinal neural network controlling locomotion compared to rodents.
Georgia Tech partnered with researchers at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and Drexel University in Philadelphia to better understand how signals from sensory neurons coordinate movements of the four legs. The Sherbrooke lab trained cats to walk on a treadmill at a pace consistent with human gait and then used electrodes to stimulate their sensory nerve.
The researchers focused on the sensory nerve that transmits touch sensation from the top of the foot to the spinal cord. By electrically stimulating this nerve, researchers mimicked hitting an obstacle and saw how the cats stumbled and corrected their movement in response. Stimulations were applied in four periods of the walking cycle: mid-stance, stance-to-swing transition, mid-swing, and swing-to-stance transition. From this, they learned that mid-swing and the stance-to-swing transition were the most significant periods because the stimulation increased activity in muscles that flex the knee and hip joints, joint flexion and toe height, step length, and step duration of the stimulated limb.
“In order to maintain balance, the animal must coordinate movement of the other three limbs, otherwise it would fall,” Prilutsky said. “We found that stimulation of this nerve during the swing phase increases the duration of the stance phase of the other limbs and improves stability.”
In effect, when the cat stumbles during the swing phase, the sensation triggers spinal reflexes that ensure the three other limbs stay on the ground and keep the cat upright and balanced, while the swing limb steps over the obstacle.
Computational Cats
With these Canadian lab experiments, the researchers at Georgia Tech and Drexel University are using observations to develop a computational model of the cat’s musculoskeletal and spinal neural control systems. The data gathered are used to compute somatosensory signals related to length, velocity, and produced force of muscles, as well as pressure on the skin in all limbs. This information forms motion sensations in the animal’s spinal cord and contributes to interlimb coordination by the spinal neuronal networks.
“To help treat any disease, we need to understand how the intact system works,” Prilutsky said. “That was one reason why this study was performed, so we could understand how the spinal networks coordinate limb movements and develop a realistic computational model of spinal control of locomotion. This will help us know better how the spinal cord controls locomotion.”
CITATION: Merlet AN, Jéhannin P, Mari S, Lecomte CG, Audet J, Harnie J, Rybak IA, Prilutsky BI, Frigon A (2022) Sensory Perturbations from Hindlimb Cutaneous Afferents Generate Coordinated Functional Responses in All Four Limbs during Locomotion in Intact Cats. eNeuro 9: 0178-22.
DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0178-22.2022
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“My lab moved to Cherry Emerson late last year. So, this year I am looking forward to hallway conversations with my new neighbors, and I am hoping to strike up some new collaborations at the interface between biophysics, microbiology, and evolutionary biology.”
—Peter Yunker, associate professor, School of Physics
“I’m looking forward to shaping a more fulfilling and engaging employee experience at Georgia Tech. In Human Resources, we’ve been working tirelessly to develop programs and practices that will help Tech recruit, support and develop our talented workforce. I’m excited for faculty and staff to experience positive culture shifts and hope we inspire enthusiasm as we share and celebrate the deep love that exists for working at Tech.”
—Skye Duckett, vice president and chief human resources officer, Georgia Tech Human Resources
“Personally, I am looking forward to spending more time with my wife, Amanda, and our dog, Buzz, at our family place on the coast. I'm also looking forward to watching my fellow 2001 alumnus, Coach Brent Key, lead our Yellow Jackets this fall!”
—William Smith, director, Office of Emergency Management and Communications
“I am very much looking forward to taking the Cultivate Well-Being strategic focus to the next level as we are able to start planning and implementation in earnest, guided by our roadmap. I am also excited about the prospect of enhancing our efforts to promote student belonging and facilitate student success as we launch the new John Lewis Student Leadership Pathways and move toward making the Black cultural center a reality. I am also planning to visit the Georgia Tech-Europe campus for the first time! On the personal front, I can’t wait for Season 7 of Outlander (Starz) or Season 2 of Shadow and Bone (Netflix). I also get to celebrate my blue point Siamese kitten turning one year old in February.”
—Luoluo Hong, vice president for Student Engagement and Well-Being
“I am looking forward to all that 2023 has to offer me personally. I am the one who’s usually immersed in my professional career and family and friends. However, this year, it’s all about me, and accomplishing some of the personal goals that I’ve set for myself. So, I am excited and looking forward to the completion of my first children’s book series. I have been working on it for a few years and it’s finally coming together. It will be released in August 2023.”
—Quinae’ A. Ford, administrative manager, GTRI Project Management Office
“The Georgia Tech Alumni Association has named this the Year of Engagement. I am excited about connecting with even more alumni and inviting them to gather on campus and with Yellow Jackets in their community, to grow together with our professional education programs, and to give back to each other and the Institute. We are closing in on 200,000 living alumni this year, so we are grateful for the partnerships we enjoy across campus to help us reach our vast constituency. We are striving to build an Alumni Association that is with our alumni in 2023 and for a lifetime. Go Jackets!”
—Dene Sheheane, MGT 1991, president of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association
]]>Institute Communications
]]>McDonald, who also served as the chief scientific officer of the Ovarian Cancer Institute, will be honored during the “Toast to the Trailblazers” event that is part of CORE’s 20th Anniversary Celebration, set for Saturday, February 18 of this year, at the Atlanta History Center.
“For me, it's always an honor — and often a surprise! — when I receive an award, as was the case for this award from the Georgia CORE,” McDonald said. “It's certainly encouraging to know that others believe what I'm doing is worthwhile. At the same time,” he added, “I'm acutely aware that nothing in life, and especially in science, is accomplished in isolation. Whatever I've been able to accomplish is, in large measure, because I have had great students and collaborators to work with over the years here at Georgia Tech.”
Also chosen as a “Today’s Innovator” this year is Lynn Durham, CORE’s president and CEO. Before joining CORE in 2021, Durham served as vice president for Institute Relations at Georgia Tech. Across 25 years on campus, Durham also worked as chief of staff and led the Institute’s legislative advocacy program.
Individuals selected as “Today’s Innovators” by CORE have “embraced the original vision of collaboration and advancement throughout the state’s cancer care ecosystem and are working today to continue to enhance cancer research and exceptional care for all Georgians.”
Durham noted that McDonald was chosen because of his past leadership of Georgia Tech’s Integrated Cancer Research Center and his scholarship in ovarian cancer detection and treatment.
“He is the leader of a cancer research center in one of our state’s most respected higher education institutions, and I hope this recognition will demonstrate the important connection between basic science and the remarkable innovations in cancer care during the past 20 years,” Durham added.
McDonald is engaged in translational research, which seeks to quickly move more basic science discoveries into actual practice to help patients. The challenge, McDonald explained, is how to best get those discoveries and technologies into clinical practice. This requires connections between research scientists, clinicians, and appropriate patients. While the scientist/clinician connection is relatively easy to establish at medical schools, it is not as easy for researchers at non-medical schools like Georgia Tech, he added.
“The Georgia CORE was designed to address these challenges by facilitating connections between scientists and clinicians while at the same time providing Georgia citizens access to the latest trials,” McDonald said. “These efforts have been tremendously successful over the last 20 years.
“I have tried to play some role in improving communication and encouraging collaboration among Georgia Tech researchers doing cancer-relevant research,” McDonald added, “by establishing the Integrated Cancer Research Center (ICRC) and connecting our scientists and engineers with clinicians, all with the assistance of the Georgia CORE.”
McDonald became an emeritus professor in January 2023. Now, he’s focused on writing a book, and still working to get discoveries made in his lab into clinical practice. For that effort, McDonald has established startup companies with two colleagues in the School of Biological Sciences, postdoctoral researcher Nick Housley and Jeffrey Skolnick, who serves as Regents' Professor, Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair, and as a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology.
“One effort is focused on a drug delivery nanoparticle, and the other is focused on our machine learning-based personalized diagnostic tool,” McDonald said. “Collaboration with Georgia CORE is proving essential in moving both of these projects forward into clinical trials.”
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Most NSF REU programs are designed to pair students attending smaller and undergraduate-only schools with faculty and lab groups at larger host institutions for mentorship and a meaningful research experience.
Importantly, as NSF notes, the inclusion of historically under-represented groups in STEM (minorities, low socio-economic status, first generation students, veterans and women) will serve to broaden the STEM talent pool.
As such, most REU programs in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech host a diverse cohort of approximately ten non-Georgia Tech undergraduates, who have limited research opportunities at their current institution. Each unique program's focus and requirements vary, so check individual program links for application guidelines and deadlines. Each of the six schools in the College of Sciences participate in the eight to 10-week program. The REU supplements — which include stipends, housing, and travel allowances — engage students in research related to a new or ongoing NSF research award. Application deadlines are typically in January and February each year, depending on the program.
“Georgia Tech has had a long, outstanding record of hosting REU students,” said College of Sciences Assistant Dean for Academic Programs Cameron Tyson. “We are delighted that we can offer programs affiliated with each of the six schools in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech.”
Summer 2023 NSF REU programs in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech are:
Aquatic Chemical Ecology (ACE) Summer Research Program
(Co-hosted by the Schools of Biological Sciences, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and from the College of Engineering: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.)
Students participate in research with one or more faculty, and learn about careers in science and engineering, and see how scientists blend knowledge and skills from physics, chemistry, and biology to investigate some of the most challenging problems in environmental sciences. Three areas of research activities covered by faculty in the Aquatic Chemical Ecology program include biological and geochemical transformations of chemicals in aquatic ecosystems, sensory biology and ecology of aquatic chemical communication, and ecological roles and consequences of chemicals in aquatic environments.
Broadening Participation Summer Undergraduate Research Program in Physics
(Hosted by the School of Physics)
This program includes a hands-on computational workshop, an overnight trip to a National Laboratory, a weekly Physics Frontiers Lunch and Learn seminar series, a half-dozen professional development seminars, and social activities with other REU students. At the end of the summer, participants will present their research to the School of Physics community and at a Georgia Tech REU Poster Symposium that includes REU participants from all the REU programs in the Georgia Tech College of Sciences.
Mathematics Research Experiences for Undergraduates
(Hosted by the School of Mathematics)
REU summer projects in mathematics are mentored by many different faculty, on topics ranging from fad formation, to random walks, tropical geometry, one bit sensing, extremal graph theory, and convex polyhedra. Students will have the opportunities to publish papers, win awards, and succeed in graduate school applications.
Broadening Participation in Atmospheric Science, Oceanography and Geosciences Research
(Hosted by the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)
Each participant will work with a faculty member or research scientist and focus on a single research project, but will also gain a broad perspective on research in Earth and atmospheric sciences by participating in the dynamic research environment. This interdisciplinary REU program has projects spanning topics related to the geosciences, planetary science, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, and climate science. In addition to full-time research, undergraduate researchers will participate in professional development activities, seminars with faculty and research scientists, presentation and research poster symposiums, and social activities with other summer REU students.
Chemistry Function, Application, Structure and Theory (FAST)
(Hosted by the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry)
The Chemistry Function, Application, Structure, and Theory (FAST) Program’s objective is to provide a high-quality research experience, augmented by experiential learning components, for a diverse group of undergraduate students. The program will provide participants with encouragement and preparation to pursue advanced studies and/or careers in the sciences while emphasizing the importance of collaboration and interdisciplinarity in chemistry.
Human Neuroscience Research and Techniques
(Hosted by the School of Psychology)
Working with Georgia State University, this program gives students the opportunity to gain knowledge and hands-on experience with human neuroscience techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants will also perform exciting research in the laboratories of Georgia Tech or Georgia State faculty mentors. Students will learn about neuroscience careers and tips for succeeding in graduate and medical school. The research areas of the faculty mentors are organized around three core neuroscience themes: Human Motor Control, Cognitive Processing, and Human Neurophysiology.
“These programs are an excellent opportunity for students, especially those from colleges and universities with limited research opportunities, to gain an immersive experience working alongside Georgia Tech faculty and their team on cutting-edge projects in science and mathematics,” added Tyson, who is also a faculty member in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “We often see participants having a transformative experience and continuing on to graduate studies and pursuing a career in research.”
For more information on REU summer program details, requirements and application deadlines, interested students should visit the links to individual programs listed here.
]]>Editor/Media Contact: Renay San Miguel
Communications Officer II/Science Writer
College of Sciences
404-894-5209
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The portal is open to anyone with an active Georgia Tech login. It offers information for students on every step of the journey, including finding undergraduate legal internships, preparing for the LSAT, getting letters of recommendation, and writing personal statements for law school applications. According to Chad Slieper, LST director, scholarship opportunities will be added soon.
“This resource is a great way to start learning what you need to do to prepare for law school,” Slieper said. “We’re excited to give more options to students and provide a 24/7 supplement to the in-person counseling and advice we’ve always offered.”
LST also offers the Minor in Law, Science, and Technology, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, as well as pre-law advising, a pre-law newsletter, and events of interest to members of the Georgia Tech community with an interest in the intersection of law and technology.
The School of Public Policy is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
]]>This annual event aims to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists and share the breadth of Georgia Tech’s research activities with the local community. Last year more than 500 attendees, ranging from toddlers to retirees, explored the campus and participated in hands-on STEAM activities, tours, and demonstrations designed to engage and educate participants. While attendees were able to get a glimpse into one of the nation’s most research-intensive universities, the community-wide event also allowed Georgia Tech students, researchers, and staff members the opportunity to share their work with the public.
Seeking Demo Groups
To continue the success of Science and Engineering Day, we need members of the Georgia Tech community — including student groups, labs, staff, and faculty — to participate in this year’s event. Last year, 26 units and student organizations across campus provided activities in biology, space, art, nanotechnology, paper, computer science, wearables, bioengineering, and chemical engineering just to name a few.
Taking part in Science and Engineering Day gives Georgia Tech students and researchers a unique opportunity to share their work with the community and inspire attendees. Demo space is limited, so reserve your spot today. Opportunities include hands-on STEAM activities, exhibits, demonstrations, and opportunities to meet student researchers. If you have questions about how you can participate, reach out to Leslie O’Neil. All demo groups must register by February 20, 2023.
The Atlanta Science Festival is engineered by Science ATL and community partners, with major support from founders Emory University, Georgia Tech, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber, and from sponsors UPS, International Paper, Georgia Power, Cox Enterprises, Lockheed Martin, Lenz Marketing, and Mercer University.
Learn more and register to demonstrate at research.gatech.edu/ATLscifestGTday23
]]>Jenny McGuire, assistant professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, spearheaded a special feature on the topic of biodiversity in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with colleagues in Texas, Norway, and Argentina. In the special feature, “The Past as a Lens for Biodiversity Conservation on a Dynamically Changing Planet,” McGuire and her collaborators highlight the outstanding questions that must be addressed for successful future conservation efforts. The feature brings together conservation research that illuminates the complex and constantly evolving dynamics brought on by climate change and the ever-shifting ways humans use land. These factors, McGuire said, interact over time to create dynamic changes and illustrate the need to incorporate temporal perspectives into conservation strategies by looking deep into the past.
One example of this work highlighted in the journal is McGuire’s research about plants in North America, which investigates how and why they’ve moved across geography over time, where they’re heading, and why it’s important.
“Plants are shifting their geographic ranges, and this is happening whether we realize it or not,” McGuire said. “As seeds fall or are transported to distant places, the likelihood that the plant’s seed is going to be able to survive and grow is changing as climates are changing. Studying plants’ niche dynamics over thousands of years can help us understand how species adapt to climate change and can teach us how to protect and maintain biodiversity in the face of rapid climate change to come.”
Climate Fidelity: A New Metric for Understanding Vulnerability
The first step is to understand which type of plants exhibit what McGuire terms “climate fidelity,” and which do not. If a plant has climate fidelity, it means that the plant stays loyal to its preferred climatic niche, often migrating across geographies over thousands of years to keep up with its ideal habitat. Plants that don’t exhibit climate fidelity tend to adapt locally in the face of climate change. Being loyal to one’s climate, it turns out, doesn’t necessarily mean being loyal to a particular place.
To investigate the case of trees, McGuire and former Georgia Tech postdoctoral scholar Yue Wang (associate professor in the School of Ecology at Sun Yat-sen University in China) studied pollen data from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database, which contains pollen fossil data from sediment cores across North America. Each sediment core is sampled, layer by layer, producing a series of pollen data from different times throughout history. The data also contains breakdowns of the relative abundance of different types of plants represented by the pollen types – pine versus oak versus grass, for example – painting a picture of what types of plants were present in that location and when.
McGuire and Wang looked at data from 13,240 fossil pollen samples taken from 337 locations across the entirety of North America. For each of the 16 major plant taxa in North America, they divided the pollen data into six distinct chunks or “bins” of time of 4,000 years, starting from 18,000 years ago up to the present day. Wang used the data to identify all climate sites containing fossil pollen for any individual type of tree – such as oak, for example – for each period. Then, Wang looked at how each tree’s climate changed from one period to the next. Wang did this by comparing the locations of pollen types between adjacent time periods, which enabled the team to identify how and why each type of tree’s climate changed over time.
“This process allowed us to see the climate fidelity of these different plant taxa, showing that certain plants maintain very consistent climatic niches, even when climate is changing rapidly,” Wang said.
For example, their findings showed that when North American glaciers were retreating 18,000 years ago, spruce and alder trees moved northward to maintain the cool temperatures of their habitats.
Crucially, McGuire and Wang found that most plant species in North America have exhibited long-term climate fidelity over the past 18,000 years. They also found that plants that migrated farther did a better job of tracking climate during periods of change.
But some plants fared better than others. For example, the small seeds of willow trees can fly over long distances – enabling them to track their preferred climates very effectively. But the large seeds of ash trees, for example, can only be dispersed short distances from parent trees, hindering their ability to track climate. Habitat disruptions from humans could make it even more difficult for ash trees to be able to take hold in new regions. If there are no adjacent habitats for ash trees, their seeds are under pressure to move even farther – a particular challenge for ash, which slows their migration movements even more.
Protecting the Fabric of Life
On the bright side, by identifying which plants have historically been most sensitive to changing climates, McGuire and Wang’s research can help conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy prioritize land where biodiversity is most vulnerable to climate change.
As a final step, McGuire and Wang identified “climate fidelity hotspots,” regions that have historically exhibited strong climate fidelity whose plants will most urgently need to move as their climates change. They compared these hotspots to climate-resilient regions identified by The Nature Conservancy that could serve as refuge areas for those plants. While plants in these resilient regions can initially adapt to impending climate change by shifting their distributions locally, the plants will likely face major challenges when a region’s climate change capacity is exceeded due to lack of connectivity and habitat disruptions from humans. Refining these priorities helps stakeholders identify efficient strategies for allowing the fabric of life to thrive.
“I think that understanding climate fidelity, while a new and different idea, will be very important going forward, especially when thinking about how to prioritize protecting different plants in the face of climate change,” McGuire said. “It is important to be able to see that some plants and animals are more vulnerable to climate change, and this information can help build stronger strategies for protecting the biodiversity on the planet.”
Citation: Yue Wang, Silvia Pineda-Munoz, and Jenny L. McGuire, "Plants maintain climate fidelity in the face of dynamic climate change." PNAS (2023).
DOI: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201946119
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Black History Month is a time to honor the triumphs and contributions of African Americans throughout U.S. history. Atlanta history is ripe with achievements from the Black community, and history continues to be made here today.
Great work is being done both on campus and across Atlanta by Georgia Tech students, faculty, staff, and alumni. They are working across different industries to help bring about change to improve the human condition, whether it's on campus, in the city, or beyond.
Atlanta Change-Makers introduces you to a few of the people whose aspirations and actions are making a difference — for today, and for a brighter future.
Tap here to get to know Psychology undergrad Lauren Hester and Biology undergrad Kemuel Russell — plus several Georgia Tech faculty and staff, and change-making alumni including Valerie Montgomery Rice (CHEM 1983), President and CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine.
Human balance is a complicated dance, and even the most advanced robots and wearables like robotic exoskeletons have trouble replicating how our brains and bodies work together to keep us upright. A new study from researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University is taking the first step toward addressing the balance problem.
In a paper published Feb. 15 in Science Robotics, the group showed an ankle exoskeleton must react faster than our bodies to improve balance. Participants didn’t recover any more quickly when the exoskeleton delayed applying power until the same time muscles in the leg and ankle activated to restore balance.
Read about the study on the College of Engineering website.
]]>The AAM is an honorific leadership group and think tank within the American Society of Microbiology (ASM). Fellows are elected annually through a highly selective, peer-review process, based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbiology. The Academy received 148 nominations this year.
“On behalf of the School of Biological Sciences, I am thrilled to hear about Steve’s election to the American Academy of Microbiology,” said Todd Streelman, professor and chair of the School of Biological Sciences. “This is a tremendous feather in our cap and further illustrates the success of the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, its faculty and students, on our campus.”
Arturo Casadevall, Chair of the Governors of the American Academy of Microbiology, notified Diggle of his election. The Academy “recognizes excellence, originality, service and leadership in the microbial sciences,” Casadevall wrote. “As a nominee, you were strongly supported by your nominators … Your election to the Academy this year is a mark of distinction.”
“I am delighted to be elected,” Diggle said. “It is an honor to be chosen by your peers to be part of this fellowship and to recognize the work my group has done over the years. The award would not have been possible without all the hard work and talents of many undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs and collaborators since I started my own group back in 2006. Thank you to all.”
More than 2,600 Academy Fellows represent all subspecialties of the microbial sciences. They are involved in basic and applied research, teaching, public health, industry, and government service.
Diggle’s research interests focus on cooperation and communication in microbes, and how these are related to virulence, biofilms, and antimicrobial resistance. He has a longstanding interest in understanding how the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes disease, and is especially interested in how this organism evolves during chronic infections such as those found in cystic fibrosis patients and chronic wounds.
Diggle currently serves as a senior editor on the editorial board of the journal Microbiology. He has previously served on the editorial boards of FEMS Microbiology Letters, BMC Microbiology, Microbiology Open, and Royal Society Open Science. He served as an elected member of the Microbiology Society Council from 2012-2016, and was also on their conference and policy committees.
In 2020, Diggle received the Cullen-Peck Scholar Award, which recognizes research accomplishments led by Georgia Tech College of Sciences faculty at the associate professor or advanced assistant professor level. Diggle was selected as an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer in 2021.
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 46,000 students, representing 50 states and more than 150 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.
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“Georgia Tech envisions a future in which we continue to educate transformative researchers, strive for inclusive excellence and truth, and leverage our scale and resources to address the most urgent challenges of our time,” said Chaouki Abdallah, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. “Our plan is people centered, value based, and data informed. Like the Institute’s strategic plan, this belongs to all of us, and it will be up to us to make it a reality.”
To create the research strategy, Georgia Tech faculty, staff, and students assessed the current landscape for research-intensive universities. They identified the internal and external forces and factors that shape the research ecosystem. Out of this came a research landscape analysis. The Phase II work capitalized on the rich insights from the Phase I to identify 16 goals and 50 objectives for Georgia Tech to work toward over the next decade.
Now, seven initial projects have been identified to support the vision of the Research Next. They are large-scale, campus-wide projects. Four of the teams have assembled, and efforts are underway, including:
Three additional teams will be launched in FY23, including:
The Research Next plan will leverage trends and thought leadership to prepare for changes in the research landscape, focus Georgia Tech’s efforts, and resolve grand challenges. Stay tuned for regular updates on how the project teams are evolving to meet the needs of the Institute and world.
Check out the full Research Next website.
]]>Title: Contending with the Truly Alien: Agnostic Approaches to Life Detection
Presented by: Dr. Sarah Stewart Johnson, Georgetown University - Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor
Date/Time: Friday, Sept. 2nd 11:00 AM–12:30 PM
Location: virtual via Zoom or view with others in MoSE G021
(link: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/98659257400)
In the afternoon, there will be a social event with food and refreshments beginning at 4:00 PM, located at the Molecular Science and Engineering (MoSE) outdoor patio, ground floor. We will also be taking a group photo at this time, so bring your GT Astrobiology shirts! No shirt? No worries! We will be handing out updated shirts at the start of the social event for our wonderful new members! For up-to-date information about this event, see https://astrobiology.gatech.edu/category/events/.
We hope to see you there!
Organized by Astrobiology Fellows, 2022-2023:
Claire Elbon, Tatiana Gibson, Emmy Hughes, and Sharissa Thompson
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The human brain, composed of about 86 billion noisy neurons, is a reliable, durable, complex, and cryptic biological supercomputer. A community of multidisciplinary researchers at Georgia Tech is decrypting that neuronal chatter, which may hold the key to better treatments for disease and addiction, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), and even global energy efficiency.
These researchers work in the realm of computational neuroscience, a branch of neuroscience that uses mathematical models, computer simulations, and theoretical analysis of the brain to gain a deeper understanding of the nervous system.
"We want to understand the brain and the important data that we gather from this amazing, mysterious organ,” said Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “But for a long time, we really didn’t have the adequate tools.”
Basically, the ability to look at the brain and gather large amounts of data from it has advanced rapidly — faster than our ability to understand it all.
“There has been an explosion of technology over the past five or 10 years,” Pandarinath said. “So, we’re moving into a different space in the ways we approach the brain, and the ways we think about it.”
Much of that explosion — manifested at Georgia Tech and its partner institutions, like Emory, in the form of additional academic offerings as well as research interest — has been fueled by the BRAIN Initiative, launched by President Barack Obama in 2014. That global research program has identified computational neuroscience (among other things) as an area where progress is most needed.
The wish list includes improvements in machine learning, AI, and crowdsourcing approaches to translating the massive volume of data being gathered from human brains. And Georgia Tech researchers have their hands in every area.
Pandarinath’s lab, for example, is using AI tools and the insights gained from the brain’s neural networks — and support from the National Institutes of Health — to develop revolutionary assistive devices for people with disabilities or neurological disorders.
He also spearheaded the Neural Latents Benchmark Challenge on GitHub. These competitions attracted a diverse range of teams that created new models for analyzing large data sets of neural activity.
“This was our effort to accelerate progress at the intersection of neuroscience, machine learning, and artificial intelligence,” Pandarinath said.
The challenge illustrated a need for multiple perspectives and disciplines in computational neuroscience — the winning team of the first competition in January was a firm called AE Studio, a software development, data science, and product design company that doesn’t ordinarily focus on neuroscience but develops potent mathematical and machine-learning tools.
“This field is multidisciplinary and collaborative by nature and necessity,” said Tansu Celikel, chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology, who wants to understand complex behaviors controlled by the brain in order to make smarter, more intuitive robots.
“It begs for biologists, psychologists, mathematicians, physicists, data scientists — people from the machine learning and AI worlds — to come together and advance the state of computation and brain research," Celikel added. "With that in mind, Georgia Tech is in an excellent position to make a significant impact and become a global center for this kind of research.”
Celikel and Pandarinath are just two of the researchers at Georgia Tech in computational neuroscience, a wide-ranging field that relies on collaborations between data scientists, experimentalists, and clinicians, who are forming partnerships across schools, colleges, universities, and disciplines. A small sampling of the people connecting the brain’s neuronal dots and expanding this body of research at Georgia Tech include:
• Assistant Professor, School of Mathematics
• Research Group in Mathematical Neuroscience
Neuroscience wasn’t part of Choi’s plans. But while working toward her Ph.D. in applied mathematics, “I got really interested in nonlinear dynamical systems, a big topic in applied mathematics,” she said. Such systems seem to be chaotic, unpredictable, and counterintuitive — pretty much like most systems in nature. “I soon realized the brain is the most exciting nonlinear dynamical system, and that I could apply my mathematical tools and develop computational theories to better understand the brain.”
Earlier this year, Choi’s work in applying math to neuroscience earned her a prestigious 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship, which goes to the nation’s most promising young scientific researchers. Since launching her lab at Georgia Tech in January 2021, Choi has continued her collaboration with the Seattle-based Allen Institute in studying how information is processed in neural networks of many different scales, while starting partnerships with several Georgia Tech and Emory researchers, including Simon Sponberg, Anqi Wu, Nabil Imam, Chris Rodgers, Ming-fai Fong, and Dieter Jaeger, working in the sprawling computational neuroscience world.
Like some of her Georgia Tech colleagues, Choi also wants to address the problem of the environmental footprint being made by all of this computation and AI in her chosen field. “The idea is to apply what we have learned about our very energy-efficient brains to the development of better, more efficient artificial neural networks.”
• Assistant Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
• Neural Data Science (NERDS) Lab
Dyer leads a diverse team of researchers in developing machine learning approaches to analyze and interpret massive, complex neural data sets. Winner of a McKnight Technology Award and BRAIN Award in recent years, Dyer’s interest in the brain is rooted in her love of music — being keen on how we perceive sound at the neuronal level.
As a postdoctoral student she developed a cryptography-inspired strategy for decoding neural conversations. Now one of the leading young researchers in computational neuroscience, Dyer directs a lab that routinely presents research at high-profile conferences like NeurIPS. Her team is “essentially interested in how the coordinated activity of large collections of neurons are being modified or changing in the presence of something like disease,” she said.
“Ultimately, with the information we gather and analyze, we hope to discover biomarkers of Alzheimer’s and other diseases,” added Dyer, who worked with Pandarinath to develop the Benchmark Challenge. “The idea is to catch changes in neural activity that are happening before we actually see the cognitive deficits.”
• Perception, Neuroimaging, and Modeling Lab
Rahnev uses a combination of neuroimaging and computational modeling to reveal the mechanisms of perception and decision-making in humans.
A recipient of the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology and the Vision Science Society Young Investigator Award, Rahnev has already made important contributions to our understanding of how people perceive the world and make decisions. He has recently started to investigate how deep neural networks — which have established themselves as state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms — can serve as excellent models for the perceptual and decisional processes in the human brain.
“One of my strongest passions is to make science more open in every sense of the word,” said Rahnev, who organized the Confidence Database, the largest field-specific database of open data in the behavioral sciences. “It’s important for me to be involved in efforts to attract and retain people from underrepresented groups in cognitive and computational neuroscience.”
• Professor; Julian T. Hightower Chair, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Sensory Information Processing Lab
Rozell describes his lab’s focus on computational neuroengineering as a combination of data science, neurotechnology, and computational modeling, with the goal of advancing the understanding of brain function, leading to the development of intelligent machine systems and effective interventions for disease.
“One of the projects in our lab that is really compelling right now is a novel therapy for patients with treatment-resistant depression,” said Rozell, whose lab is partnering with a clinical team to improve this experimental treatment for patients who have not responded to any currently approved therapy. “So, no drugs help them. No psychotherapy. No electroconvulsive therapy. We’re using deep brain stimulation.”
The results have been positive for patients, and the researchers are, “getting an objective readout, for the first time, of what’s happening in their brains,” Rozell said, thanks to a new generation of machine-learning tools called “explainable AI.” “With these new approaches, we can gain a deeper understanding of the disease, which can lead to more personalized therapies.”
• Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences
When he isn’t helping to lead the city of Smyrna as a city councilman, Wheaton is leading a research effort that could lead to user-friendly prosthetic devices and improved motor rehabilitation training, particularly for people with upper limb amputation.
“There are a lot of beautifully developed upper limb prostheses available right now, but one of the big challenges is they’re just not heavily used by individuals — partly because they’re really, really expensive, but also because they’re such an easy thing to not use,” said Wheaton. “It’s very easy to just take it off and never wear it at all.”
Which is why much of Wheaton’s research is focused on acquiring and studying data that shows what upper limb amputees are thinking or feeling while using, or trying to use, a prosthesis. Integrating a patient’s neural activity with observations of behavior and gaze patterns, the team is “gathering data that’s never really been acquired before,” Wheaton said.
“This will help us gather more information that is helpful in developing new rehabilitation protocols for persons learning how to use prostheses. A better understanding of how rehabilitation efforts are influenced by different types of prostheses can also inform engineers and the marketplace on the type of prostheses we should be developing.”
• Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering
• BRAin INtelligence and Machine Learning Laboratory
One of Georgia Tech’s newest computational neuroscientist faculty members, Wu is building her research enterprise around building advanced machine-learning models for neural and behavioral analyses.
“I want to help experimental neuroscientists to understand their data and draw scientific conclusions,” she said, pointing out that these collaborators are collecting larger and larger populations of neurons across the whole brain, as well as more naturalistic animal behaviors. “How to integrate these big data sets and extract multilayer knowledge to understand different perspectives of the brain is a very challenging problem.”
Wu, who came to Georgia Tech in Spring 2022, aims to develop sophisticated latent variable models to address those issues. These computational models are essentially used to project high-dimensional data from large neural populations across large brain areas into useful, low-dimensional (i.e., interpretable) information that experimental neuroscientists can use.
Ballet and Neuro Ethics Come Together at Georgia Tech
Serpooshan Lab Creates 3D-Printed Tool to Study Neuroblastoma
Writer: Jerry Grillo
Photos: Joya Chapman
Fossil Fridays begin Friday, September 2. Learn more and register here.
This story by Jennifer Herseim first appeared in Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine.
Eleven-year-old Matthew and his brother Joey, age 7, are hunched over a small pile of dirt in Tech’s Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab. The brothers aren’t students at Georgia Tech—at least not yet, says their mother, Christine Conwell, PhD Chem 04, who works at Georgia Tech and is married to fellow Yellow Jacket David Gaul, PhD Chem 98.
Nevertheless, the two young fossil hunters are doing important work for the lab: helping researchers find fossilized bones, some of which could be 30,000 years old. Matthew and Joey are just two of the citizen scientists who have lent a hand during “Fossil Fridays,” an open, two-hour session when members of the community can come learn about paleontology and dig through dirt samples in search of real fossils.
“We’re interested in ‘citizen science’ and making sure our community knows what we’re working on and feels included,” says Julia Schap, a third-year PhD candidate and one of the hosts of Fossil Fridays. “We don’t like this idea that science happens behind closed doors.”
The program started in 2014 as a hands-on community activity, but also, partly, as a much-needed solution to help researchers in Jenny McGuire’s Spatial Ecology & Paleontology Lab at Georgia Tech sift through literally a ton of dirt pulled from the Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming.
As the name implies, the cave’s unique geography has made it an ideal spot for paleontologists—a large hole in a plateau above the cave acts as a natural trap. For hundreds of thousands of years, animals have fallen through the hole to an 80-foot drop below, explains Schap. The stack of bones below the hole is a treasure trove for researchers like Schap. She visited the cave with McGuire last summer. Their team bagged and shipped 2,000 pounds of sediment back to Atlanta.
Some of the fossils found in the samples come from rodents, rabbits, lizards, snakes, birds, frogs, and occasionally fish that get brought in by the birds. “A lot of Tech students like Fossil Fridays, especially those who are interested in medical school, because they become more familiar with what animal bones look like compared to humans,” Schap says. “Also, people think it’s just fascinating that you can touch fossils.”
The lab uses fossils in a variety of research areas. Schap studies fossils of small mammals to find out how these species were affected by climate at different periods of history. Her findings are useful for current conservation efforts.
Fossil Fridays are on pause for the summer but will resume in the fall. During a typical session, Schap likes to play movie soundtracks in the background to help fossil hunters unwind. “I sometimes play the Jurassic Park soundtrack to really help everyone get in the mood and to feel like they’re doing really important work—because they are.
Each week, LEO works with more than 150 kids at various elementary schools in Atlanta. The organization has more than 100 Georgia Tech student members and nearly 2,000 followers on Instagram. Membership is open to all undergraduate and graduate Georgia Tech students.
The past two years have presented many challenges for those involved in education, but that hasn’t stopped Georgia Tech’s Little Einsteins Organization from helping provide students in K-5 schools with instruction and activities focused on STEM.
They’ve accomplished that by changing how they bring science and engineering to the kids — meeting at Hands on Atlanta for science demonstrations, and sending kits to local libraries for children and their families to take home — so that children can perform experiments found in do-it-yourself kits assembled by Georgia Tech volunteers.
“I think they have done wonderful outreach activities, and have been so creative and committed to reach out, despite the very different pandemic landscape,” says Pamela Pollet, LEO academic advisor and senior academic professional in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “This project is unique because it gives Georgia Tech students the opportunity to support the education of young children in Atlanta during a time of isolation and online schooling.”
Pollet says the pandemic hasn’t kept LEO student and instructor volunteers from keeping their commitment to Atlanta’s students, especially those in underserved communities.
And before Covid, Pollet saw firsthand LEO’s impact when volunteers helped the younger students conduct experiments in their schools. “Their friend’s volcano erupted much more than theirs. Why? What was different? ‘How come my catapult is not working?’ It is okay if it does not work — let’s take a look and think how we can make it work," she shares. "LEO members created a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere in which students were so engaged and curious.”
There was also the opportunity for Atlanta children to see future versions of themselves in the Georgia Tech students. “They recognized themselves or connected with LEO members as if they were in an age group of older sisters or brothers. It demystified the image given to a scientist or engineer.”
Olivia Gravina, a fourth-year undergraduate in the School of Mathematics, serves as LEO president for the 2021-22 school year. Gravina says one of the group’s latest efforts to get creative during Covid challenges involved putting together at-home STEM kits for kids involved in Hands On Atlanta’s "Disco" program, formerly known as the Discovery program. Disco is a Saturday morning enrichment program which currently offers STEM, social emotional learning, fitness, and health-related activities to K-5 youth across nine Atlanta-area schools.
“We made 150 homemade ice pack kits, and 150 soap Silly Putty kits,” Gravina says. Teams of LEO members made instructional videos for each of the activities which included explanations of the science behind them. Then, Tech's LEO members joined Zoom calls with students from schools involved in the Disco program.
“The young students had the opportunity to ask questions, and Georgia Tech students were able to encourage the younger students and see the impact of the kits they had provided,” Gravina shares.
Another recent activity, a collaboration with Fulton County Libraries, saw LEO members assembling kits for building small catapults, which also included instructional videos. “We delivered 620 catapult-making kits, which translates to 20 kits in each of the 31 branches of the Fulton County Library System,” Gravina explains.
“It was absolutely brilliant to use the libraries, kits and videos to maintain the excitement of hands-on experimenting,” Pollet adds.
“It was needed even more, especially for younger kids. Being virtual all day leaves many of them disconnected from the material and what science is about: Experiments, observations, questions, analysis," Pollet shares. "And again, they can connect the experiments with Georgia Tech students they can easily relate to.”
Gravina says LEO is still working through plans for the season ahead, but hopes to continue coordinating activities in Atlanta libraries. She encourages other Georgia Tech students to join those activities.
Pollet says the ability to show younger students that they could eventually pursue science careers is critical, pandemic or no pandemic.
“Young, dynamic Tech students who are doing science, and taking the time to do it with them,” Pollet says. “That is really inspiring.”
More information on Little Einsteins Organization is available on their website, and on their Instagram page. Learn more about Hands On Atlanta’s Disco program here.
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“I’ve always thought that it would be nice if you can answer clinically relevant questions and more broadly evolutionary ones at the same time. Maybe I’m just very ambitious, but I don’t see why those two things always have to be so separated,” she said. Research funding is often siloed to answer either medical or basic research questions, less often both on a single project.
Alseth is in the right place to be ambitious. She started this March as the first Early Career Award Fellow at the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI) at Georgia Tech, which prides itself on building connections across disciplines. Its 12 participating labs hail from three schools in the College of Sciences: Biological Sciences, Physics, and Chemistry and Biochemistry. They share a common research focus on the role of microbes like bacteria and viruses in human and environmental health.
The fellowship will fund Alseth and her research for three years. “There’s nothing like this on campus, to my knowledge,” said Sam Brown, CMDI’s director. The most important aspect of the fellowship, he said, is independence: “It’s unusual to be able to put junior scientists truly in the driver’s seat with their research agenda, especially at the junior postdoc level. We have a panel of mentors that offer support, but not instruction.”
That promise of independence was a major pull for Alseth, who moved from Europe to Atlanta for the fellowship. She’s from Norway and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and cited the chance to do interdisciplinary microbial research at CMDI as a primary reason she decided to make the move.
“It’s nice to complement my evolutionary and ecology skills with molecular work, because that’s where I feel like I have the biggest gap in knowledge,” Alseth said. Studying molecules (such as chemical signals between bacteria) requires quite a different set of skills than ecology and evolution. “And CMDI has everything you could possibly dream of for answering fairly complicated molecular questions.”
Alseth’s research in CMDI will focus on phage therapy, combining approaches and ideas from community ecology, evolutionary biology, and molecular biology. Phages are viruses adapted to infect bacteria, and they are harmless to humans. That means they can serve as alternative or supplemental treatments to antibiotics, with fewer side effects. Many bacteria have evolved to escape and resist antibiotics, leading to a major global public health threat expected to worsen in the decades ahead. Phage therapy is one possible solution in an arsenal of tools, but it is not nearly as well-understood as therapeutic drugs.
Phage therapy is typically a last-ditch therapy after antibiotics have failed. However, fighting biology with biology is complex and may have unintended consequences. “Phage therapy is the concept that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Alseth said. “But as an evolutionary biologist, I want to know what the consequences might be. How will the bacteria respond? The worst-case scenario is that [scientists] will do what we did with antibiotics and go in blind, thinking we have a solution that will last forever.”
So, Alseth is working with the bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii to understand how it evolves to resist phages. A. baumannii is one of the so-called ‘ESKAPE’ pathogens, an acronym of the names of six bacteria that are resistant to many antibiotics and commonly spread in hospital settings. A. baumannii is interesting to Alseth because “It’s very good at scooping up DNA from its environment,” which helps it evolve to escape antibiotics by picking up genes from other microbes around them. In hospitals and in the human body, A. baumannii may be surrounded by other bacteria. Each species is evolving new strategies to escape its phage, and A. baumannii might be able to develop a formidable defense strategy by combining them all.
Alseth’s Ph.D. research, published in the journal Nature, found that growing multiple microbe species together affected the course of phage resistance evolution in the more commonly studied bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Although Pseudomonas is studied by several labs in CMDI, for her postdoctoral studies Alseth chose to switch to A. baumannii, a species that she found had strong effects on evolution of other bacteria. Alseth noticed there was very little known about its evolution and ecology. “I realized that there is a gap here that I was quite curious about,” she said.
That interdisciplinary curiosity was important to the fellowship selection committee, said Brown, the CMDI director. Another reason Alseth was a good fit was her impactful research: “science that would change the way other people were doing science,” as he put it. “This is a great way to bring the brightest talent to Georgia Tech, because we’re offering an unprecedented deal in terms of the fellow’s ability to lead their own science, and that’s really valuable.”
“Looking to donors, the hope is that we can extend our funding, and really expand this to have a cohort [of fellows],” Brown added, which would continue to boosting the research agenda and profile of CMDI, College of Sciences, and Georgia Tech. “We hope and expect this is the launching pad for really bright careers.”
Funding: The Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI) Early Career Award Fellowship is supported by CMDI faculty funding.
Story and photo by Carina Baskett.
]]>Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
The research, in collaboration with Zoo Atlanta, finds that an elephant’s skin doesn’t uniformly stretch. The top of the trunk is more flexible than the bottom, and the two sections begin to diverge when an elephant reaches more than 10%. When stretching for food or objects, the dorsal section of the trunk slides further forward.
The findings could improve robotics, which today are typically built for either great strength or flexibility. Unlike an elephant’s trunk, the machines can’t do both.
Read about the study and see video from the experiments.
]]>The study, “The core root microbiome of Spartina alterniflora is predominated by sulfur-oxidizing and sulfate-reducing bacteria in Georgia saltmarshes, USA” is published in Microbiome. The research team includes Georgia Tech Ph.D. students Jose Rolando (the study’s lead author) and Tianze Song; Max Kolton, a former postdoctoral researcher, now senior lecturer and principal investigator with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel; and corresponding author Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair for Research in the School of Biological Sciences with a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who is also a member of Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection.
The study shows that diverse and abundant microbes associated with spartina cordgrass help mineralize sediment organic matter and release bioavailable nutrients to the plant, suggesting that the microbes help support plant productivity.
The work could assist efforts to restore salt marshes that will help to strengthen the coastline to be more resilient in the face of sea level rise and climate change.
Kostka says about 40% of salt marshes have disappeared in the U.S. over the past 100 years. “So coastal ecosystem restoration has become a huge field, with an important goal to manage or restore marshes so that they continue to provide critical ecosystem services to people,” he explains.
Kostka adds that certain bacteria benefit plants not only by removing potentially toxic sulfide from the root zone, but also by giving the plant nutrients and potentially carbon. “In other words, this is an example of how we think the classic lines might be blurred by what we generally think of as autotrophs (plants that grow via photosynthesis) and heterotrophs (microbes) in ecosystems.”
Sulfur in the roots
The study was conducted at salt marshes near Sapelo and Skidaway Islands on the Georgia coast in 2018 and 2019. There, ocean water washes over the salt marsh grasses, and that water is rich in sulfate. “Sulfide is a phytotoxin or plant toxin,” Kostka says. “A lot of sulfide will kill plants or at least stress them out, but when you add just a little bit (to Spartina alterniflora), it fuels microbial factories in the plant roots.”
Kostka’s team found that Spartina alterniflora has concentrated sulfur bacteria in its roots, and those bacteria are in two categories: sulfur oxidizers, which use sulfide as an energy source — “then you have sulfate reducers which breathe or respire sulfate from seawater, producing sulfide.”
In this microbial cell factory, bacteria are using sulfide as an energy source to fix nitrogen — and possibly carbon — which then is passed to the grasses. Nitrogen fixation happens when a microbe takes nitrogen gas from air or water and makes usable ammonium out of it. In nature, soil microbes primarily perform this process — occasionally lightning in the atmosphere can also spark it.
The study’s findings suggest that fixation is happening via chemoautotrophy (using chemical reactions for energy) by bacteria living inside the plant roots.
“The next chapter of this story is to learn how the plant and bacteria exchange nitrogen and the environmental controls of that exchange,” Kostka says. “We also know these bacteria can fix carbon, and could potentially be passing carbon to the plant. The plant may have a cell factory that’s making biomass from chemical energy rather than photosynthesis.”
Finding climate clues in plants
The new study’s research in salty wetlands is similar to climate-related work Kostka leads on peat mosses in freshwater bogs at the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) research facility in northern Minnesota. The facility is managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A study Kostka and his team published in 2021 showed that warming peat bogs are releasing higher amounts of the greenhouse gas methane that is trapped inside them. Peatlands comprise just about 3% of the Earth’s landmass, but they store around one-third of the planet’s soil carbon. As they warm, bogs may also start releasing more carbon along with their methane into ecosystems, a harmful one-two punch for the environment.
The saltwater marshes that Kostka’s team studies have also been termed “blue carbon” sinks because they act to mitigate climate change by sequestering large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere on a global scale. “Salt marshes or coastal marshes are not only critical as habitat for fish and shellfish that we like to eat — along with other vegetated coastal ecosystems — they store as much or more carbon as the remainder of the seafloor,” Kostka says.
A triumph for omics, and what’s next
Kostka credits ‘omics’, technologies which allow for the study of microbes in the environment without cultivation, for advances in uncovering microbiomes — all the microorganisms in a specific environment. Metagenomics and metatranscriptomics, the sequencing of all genes or expressed genes in the environment, allows scientists to chart the potential for microbes to carry out important ecosystem functions like nitrogen fixation. This is critical since very few microbes out of the large diversity that is out there can be grown in the lab, Kostka explains.
“The work is another example of how we are uncovering plant microbiomes — the microbes that live inside or on the tissues of environmentally relevant plants that help the plants to grow better,” Kostka adds. “If we can add microbes to the roots when we plant them, and therefore increase the survival of those plants, we can improve restoration efforts.”
This work was supported in part by an institutional grant (NA18OAR4170084) to the Georgia Sea Grant College Program from the National Sea Grant Office, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US Department of Commerce, and by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DEB 1754756).
Citation: Rolando, J.L., Kolton, M., Song, T. et al. The core root microbiome of Spartina alterniflora predominated by sulfur-oxidizing and sulfate-reducing bacteria in Georgia salt marshes, USA. Microbiome 10, 37 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-021-01187-7
About Georgia Institute of Technology
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 44,000 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.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
At just a few inches underground, the rhizosphere — the thin strip of earth that includes the soil-root interface — has so far been difficult to visualize on site. If scientists can build instruments that capture in real-time clearer images of the physical associations of microbes attached to roots, along with the oxygen-carbon-nitrogen chemical exchanges they mediate, it could help mitigate the effects of climate change and lead to the development of more sustainable fuels and fertilizers.
“From a microbiological perspective, we have catalogued what microbes are in the root zone and how abundant they are,” said Joel Kostka, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “But there's been very little work to understand their dynamics under real soil conditions.”
Kostka, who also serves as associate chair for Research in Biological Sciences, joins Marcus Cicerone, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and principal investigator for the new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The research team also includes Francisco Robles, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Lily Cheung, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the College of Engineering.
Together, the researchers plan to produce a new optical instrument that will provide 3D images of dynamic metabolic processes with chemical specificity — meaning it will be able to identify carbon sources (sugars, organic acids) exuded by plant roots and nitrogen-rich compounds provided to the root by nitrogen-fixing (diazotrophic) microbes. The instrument will be built with commercially available components, and with an eye towards simplicity so that it can be easily leveraged by Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers and field sites.
Understanding more about the metabolic processes happening in the rhizosphere will help the DOE develop a wider range of sustainable products like new types of biofertilizers and biofuels. The research will also help create practices for better crop management — and will help researchers use plants and soil as more effective carbon traps that sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere into the soil.
“The problem is that we don’t know much about the free-living bacteria in the soil, because we can’t get in there and look,” Cicerone said. “The DOE wanted somebody to build an instrument that would allow them to image or gather information about the metabolic processes, the interaction — the metabolic interactions between the microbes and the plants, in real time.”
Kostka adds that the rhizosphere is “a hotspot for microbes.”
“It’s often where the plant is communicating with the outside world,” he explained. “Our goal is to develop an instrument that they (the DOE) can use to better understand those interactions between plants and microbes and how those can be tweaked, say, to optimize plant production, crop production, biofuels and biomass production. And that's the long-term goal for us.”
Cicerone says the visibility issue with soil involves how photons — or particles of light — scatter once they hit the soil. He likens it to someone putting a red light up to the back of their thumb.
“You turn your thumb around, your thumb glows red, right? So, the light comes through, but most of it scatters. The unscattered light contains the spatial information, but it is so weak that you can’t detect it by eye, and you lose the spatial information. The same thing happens with the soils. You get a lot of light scattering, and you lose spatial information,” Cicerone said.
Cicerone and Robles will build instrumentation that will focus light into the soil and that is “exquisitely sensitive to the minuscule amount of light that only scatters when it reaches its target.” Evaluating that light will help scientists learn even more about the chemical processes in the rhizosphere.
The visibility enhancements will be implemented in optical techniques with names like coherent Raman scattering and optical coherence tomography, which are commonly used for non-invasive imaging of thin biological material, like the retina of the eye — or the tiniest of plant roots.
“We learn two things from the light coming out of the sample. The amount of light coming out tells you about the refractive index of the material, and the light’s frequency change tells you about the chemical composition of the material,” Cicerone explained.
It’s through imaging and then optimizing those microbe-plant interactions that the DOE aims to design more sustainable products and practices, based on the chemistry to be learned from the team’s new optical instruments.
“This is a three-year funded project, and we hope at the end of the three years to have an experimental system, where we can do something that nobody else can do,” Cicerone added. “And that is that we can follow the biochemistry under the soil, in situ, in real time, to clearly see what's going on there and find out what the microbes really are doing in natural conditions. At that point, we can start manipulating the biology, start doing the experiments that the DOE is primarily interested in.”
Award Number: DE-SC0022121
Title: Deep Chemical Imaging of the Rhizosphere
Institution: Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta, GA
Principal Investigator: Cicerone, Marcus
About Georgia Institute of Technology
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.
]]>Editors: Jess Hunt-Ralston, Georgia Parmelee
]]>However, there’s a downside – off-target side effects, neurotoxicity being among the more prevalent and significant. Pain, fatigue, weakness, strange sensations, and difficulty with balance are the common symptoms known collectively as chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, or CIN. For many clinicians, this has been a fair trade-off – powerful, toxic cancer drugs save lives, but kill neurons. It’s the price of survival.
Georgia Tech postdoctoral researcher Stephen Housley isn’t buying it.
“The basic position has been, ‘we cured your cancer, but you have neurotoxin damage, so let’s manage those symptoms.’ Because when neurons becomes dysfunctional, it is challenging to correct it,” said Housley, a neuroscientist, physiologist, and licensed physical therapist who works with Tim Cope, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and with cancer researcher John McDonald, professor in the School of Biological Sciences.
But what if the nerve cells didn’t have to become dysfunctional? What if you could stop the damage before it even begins? Housley and his colleagues aim to find out with help from a new NIH National Cancer Institute R01 grant, “which will help us really drill down into some of the mechanisms of neurotoxicity experienced by cancer survivors globally,” said Housley, who is leading the research effort.
Cope, principal investigator on the $2.5 million grant, added, “building on our recent discoveries, we’re taking a new direction that has the promising potential to identify novel targets for treating neurotoxic damage to the neurons that are responsible for movement disorders.”
The grant will support a growing area of research for Cope’s team, which published a paper on its discoveries earlier this year. Housley was the lead author of “Neural circuit mechanisms of sensorimotor disability in cancer treatment”, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Cope and Housley work in the pre-clinical phase of cancer treatment, developing and studying animal models to mimic the human condition, so they can study the effects of chemotherapy on the individual neurons and circuits that human behaviors and perceptions emerge from. Previous studies from other labs have determined that these drugs are causing the nerve damage by themselves, but the Georgia Tech team discovered a more nuanced set of circumstances.
“Biology is more complex than that – the cancer interacts with the chemotherapy, changing the underlying causes and worsening the nerve dysfunction long-term,” Housley asserted, explaining that the majority of previous studies have focused only on the effects due to chemotherapy.
“If you are diagnosed with cancer and are treated with these drugs, in the great scenario, you go into remission and stop the drugs," he added. "The problem is, the side effects don’t stop. They actually evolve and convert into something a bit different than what was happening early on. And they persist for a long time, in many cases over a decade.”
Housley and Cope have focused on the chronic phase of cancer and discovered that there is a likely a link between what happens in the earliest stages of treatment and the long-term probability of developing neurologic disorders.
“While a patient is in the chair getting chemotherapy, they will not only have sensory problems, but an increased stimulation, often perceived as being painful or hypersensitivity to cold,” Housley said. “And you will see people with muscle spasms, and twitching, really visceral responses. The speed at which these drugs can impact the nervous system is stark. The motor system that helps us move is being affected in the course of minutes or hours.”
This muscle hyperactivity is due to an increase in the excitability of the nervous system across both the sensory and motor systems, and that spiking behavior – the currency of the nervous system– can last for days after the treatment. And then, the nervous system goes haywire.
In response to the infusion of these PBC drugs, the system overcompensates. The hyper excitability goes in an opposite direction. So now, instead of an electrical jolt, the system slows down: when reaching for and grabbing a cup of coffee, the collaboration between your motor and sensory systems gets fuzzy. Is your sensory system correctly anticipating the weight of the cup while your motor system grabs and lifts? Will the cup slip and spill hot coffee on your lap?
Housley, Cope and their multidisciplinary team, including McDonald, want to stop the initial hyper excitability from happening in the first place. Through a process called in vivo electrophysiology, they use glass electrodes to study the behavior of single cells as they respond to stimulation, such as that caused by the reaction of cancer to a platinum-based drug. With these approaches they are testing new pharmacologic and gene therapy approaches to prevent hyper excitability.
“It’s a challenging but powerful approach,” said Housley. The ultimate goal is to block the neurotoxic effects of the drugs, so that they can beat the cancer and not harm the patient’s long term health and quality of life. “Through these experiments, we want to knock out the various drivers of what we suspect is causing this serious problem, and ultimately prevent the long-term consequences of these neurological disorders.”
]]>This year’s initiatives included National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (NSF REU) programs, a new initiative to engage Georgia community college students, summer workshops in computational chemistry and quantitative biosciences, and more.
Through the workshops, students learned to navigate new methods of research that involve data analysis and computational aspects of disciplines like chemistry and biology — as well as communicate connections across concepts like group theory, topology, combinatorics, and number theory.
Meanwhile, the NSF REU programs across the College’s six Schools of Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Physics, Psychology, and Mathematics, as well as the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program, allowed early-year students to get their first taste of in-depth research with unique expertise and equipment available at Georgia Tech.
Other students took advantage of special fellowships to attend summer conferences in their chosen disciplines, where they networked with fellow young scientists and mathematicians while soaking up knowledge from peers and mentors.
Here’s a roundup of some of the 2022 summer undergraduate student research programs and events led by the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech:
The Summer Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (STACC) Workshop
Undergraduates eager to try calculations in areas such as quantum dynamics, electronic structure theory, and classical molecular dynamics — and who want to know more about new data science and machine learning tools — got their chance during this two-week early summer computational chemistry workshop.
“Theoretical and computational studies provide a necessary complement to experimental investigations because they are able to obtain the atomistic level of detail that is near impossible to probe with experiment,” said Joshua Kretchmer, assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
“It is becoming more and more routine to use these techniques, even outside of pure theory research groups, as computers have become more powerful and more easy-to-use software is being developed to perform these calculations,” Kretchmer said. “It is thus important for students to be exposed to these techniques early on in their undergraduate education so they have a basic understanding of how and when the slew of different computational techniques are best utilized.”
2022 was the first year for the STACC Workshop, and Kretchmer added that the students “seem to be engaged and excited by the material, both in terms of learning the technical skills necessary to utilize high-performance computers and the unique aspects that can be learned about chemical systems from computer simulations.”
Those thoughts were echoed by University of South Florida student Nicholas Giunto. “After simulating and calculating these various processes, I realized how theoretical chemistry can do so much more than just simulate these scenarios. This technique of chemistry can be used in many other fields of science as well,” Giunto said. “This workshop has broadened my perspective of chemistry, and taught me a whole new field of science that is innovative and prudent.”
For more information, check out the STACC website here.
Summer College Research Internship
Thanks to a grant from the Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Dean’s Chair, community college students in Georgia were paired up with a Georgia Tech College of Sciences lab — at no cost to the students — for the inaugural Summer College Research Internship (SCRI).
The idea for SCRI grew from Shania Khatri’s experiences conducting research for the first time. Khatri, a fourth-year Biological Sciences major scheduled to graduate in December 2022, began research in high school through a program at a local university that placed students, especially those historically underrepresented in STEM, in labs to complete their own summer research projects.
“I felt firsthand how important mentorship was in building confidence in STEM, promoting belonging, and ultimately influencing my decision to pursue higher education and research,” Khatri said. “Research shows that students who complete high school and undergraduate programs are more likely to pursue STEM majors and consider doctoral degrees, underscoring that mentorship early in careers can improve achievement and retention of these students.”
SCRI students helped design experiments, collected and analyzed data, and presented the results of their work. They worked closely with their Ph.D. student mentors, learning from them as well as the broader community of their host labs. They also heard weekly lectures from College of Science faculty as they learned about the broader research environment at Georgia Tech.
“The accepted students have strong scholastic potential, and we hope that we can excite them about the research happening at Georgia Tech and potentially recruit them to join our programs, either as transfer students or future graduate students,” said William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences Program. Ratcliff also co-leads the SCRI with Todd Streelman, professor and chair of the School of Biological Sciences at Tech.
Three students from two-year community college programs in Georgia were chosen for the inaugural SCRI, Ratcliff said. With diverse interests, all three researched in labs within the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI).
“While this was not part of our review criteria, two of the three students are members of groups that are underrepresented in science according to National Institutes of Health criteria, so this is a great opportunity to broaden participation in academic research,” Ratcliff added.
“When discussing diversity in STEM and retention of underrepresented minorities, community college students should be at the forefront of the discussion,” Khatri said. “It is my hope that through this program the students will gain confidence in their own abilities, and learn skills of science communication, data analysis, critical thinking, collaborative work, and problem solving that will aid them in any career path.”
More information on the Summer College Research Internship is available here.
Child Lab Day
Child Lab Day is the capstone assignment for students in the School of Psychology course PSYC 2103 Human Development. Christopher Stanzione, senior lecturer and associate chair for undergraduate studies for the School, said his students conducted cognitive, language, and conceptual assessments in June on children ranging in age from four months to nine years old.
“This is a great applied experience for the Georgia Tech students,” Stanzione said. “All semester we study these concepts, but to see development in action is special. They’ll likely see the gradual change between concepts by administering the assessments to kids of different ages.”
The first Child Lab Day was in 2019. This summer, students majoring in psychology, biomedical engineering, computer science, biology, neuroscience, and economics took part in this second one. “They loved it,” Stanzione said.
National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (NSF REUs)
For the first time, this year all six schools across the College of Sciences — plus the Neuroscience program at Tech — led Research Experiences for Undergraduates, a National Science Foundation initiative.
Each student was associated with a specific research project, and worked closely with school faculty and other researchers. Students were given stipends and, in many cases, assistance with housing and travel to help cover the experience.
“Since most of the undergraduate participants are recruited from institutions that do not have extensive research infrastructure, the immersive research experience available to them in these programs can be transformational,” said David Collard, professor and senior associate dean in the College, who previously led the REU program in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry for more than a decade.
“A measure of success of the REU programs in the College of Sciences is that many of the undergraduate participants subsequently go on to complete their Ph.D., some at Georgia Tech, and others elsewhere,” Collard added.
The following are the details for each College of Sciences school’s REU program. Learn more about future Summer Research Programs for Undergraduates here.
School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences REU:
Georgia Tech Broadening Participation in Atmospheric Science, Oceanography, and Geosciences
Working under the supervision of a School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) faculty member, participants focused on a single research project, but also gained a broad perspective on research in Earth and atmospheric sciences by participating in the dynamic research environment. This interdisciplinary REU program had projects ranging from planetary science to meteorology to oceanography. In addition to full time research, undergraduate researchers participated in a number of professional development activities, seminars with faculty and research scientists, presentation and research poster symposiums, and social activities with other summer REU students.
Schools of Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering REU:
Aquatic Chemical Ecology (ACE) at Georgia Tech
The Aquatic Chemical Ecology REU gave students the opportunity to perform research with faculty from five Georgia Tech schools.
Students participated in research with one or more faculty members, learned about careers in science and engineering, and saw how scientists blend knowledge and skills from physics, chemistry, and biology to investigate some of the most challenging problems in environmental sciences.
This was the first REU experience for Jenn Newlon, a rising senior at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In fact, “I’d actually never heard of an REU before I came here,” she said. “It’s been a really good experience. I never really saw this side of research in my institution. While I did get to do undergraduate research, it was more of, ‘do this in a lab, this is what happens.’ I had to present my findings every week to my PI (principal investigator), who gave really good feedback. And all the people in my lab were really kind and helpful.”
Schools of Psychology, Biological Sciences REU:
Neuroscience Research Experience for Undergraduates
The first week of the inaugural Neuroscience/Psychology REU was a Neuroscience Bootcamp, where students engaged in hands-on activities to learn about brain anatomy, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), encephalography, and other techniques. Then the student researchers spent time working on projects in the laboratories of mentors in either the School of Psychology, School of Biological Sciences, or with researchers at Georgia State University. They also attended professional development and social activities with other REU students.
“There is tremendous interest in neuroscience, and we have seen an incredible expansion of technology in our ability to record from the human nervous system,” said Lewis Wheaton, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Neuroscience/Psychology REU.
“At the same time, many students do not have access to these technologies at their academic institutions because of expense,” Wheaton said. “We feel that it is vital to ensure that students who do not have access to these technologies at their universities get exposure to the tools and approaches to understand the human brain. I am excited to further focus on providing opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities to engage in this research.”
A unique feature of the Neuroscience REU program is that it allows some students to come back for a two-year experience, “which can really provide a great opportunity to enhance their research, and put these students in a stronger position to advance their careers,” Wheaton added.
“It is also great that we can show them the research and educational environment at Georgia Tech and in the broader Atlanta area,” said Eric Schumacher, professor in the School of Psychology and co-director of the Neuroscience/Psychology REU. “This is an opportune time to showcase our two schools and the Institute, given that both schools are working with the College and Institute to offer a cross-disciplinary Neuroscience Ph.D. program soon.”
That was the impression that Alexa Toliver came away with. The fourth year student at Arizona State University is majoring in neurobiology, “but I always wanted to do neuroscience research,” she said during the recent REUs poster session at the Ford Environmental Science and Technology Building. “It was a little new, but it was a great opportunity and I never felt uncomfortable with any of the topics. This was the only neuroscience REU that I could find, and I applied to it and I got it, so I was excited.”
School of Physics REU:
Georgia Tech Broadening Participation in Physics
Working under the supervision of a physics faculty member, participants focused on a single research project but also gained a broad perspective on research in physics by participating in the dynamic research environment.
Available projects for the REU spanned the field of physics ranging from quantum materials, quantum simulation/sensing, astrophysics, physics of living systems, and non-linear dynamics.
In addition to full time research, undergraduate researchers participated in a number of professional development seminars, research horizon lunches, and social activities with other summer REU students.
Brendan D’Aquino, a rising senior at Northeastern University in Boston, had planned to use his computer science background to get an industry job after graduation. Then he attended the 2022 School of Physics REU.
“After doing an internship last year at a software company that does physics, I kind of realized I wanted to make the switch,” D’Aquino said. “So I applied to the program. I got to work here. And I thought it was super cool. So this was my first time doing research. I kind of had grad school in the back of my mind for a while. But 10 weeks here kind of makes me more sure that I want to get into that in the future.”
The School of Mathematics has a rich tradition of offering summer undergraduate research programs. The projects have been mentored by faculty and postdocs covering a range of topics, such as graph coloring, random matrices, contact homology, knots, bounded operators, harmonic analysis, and toric varieties.
Previous Math REU students have published many papers, won a number of awards, and have been very successful in their graduate school applications.
“The main purpose of our REU is to give students research experience which should help them decide if they want to do math research for a living, and in particular, go to a math grad school,” said Igor Belegradek, professor and director of Teaching Effectiveness in the School of Mathematics. Belegradek also coordinates the Math REU. “Also, if there is a publication or poster at a conference, their grad school application will definitely become more competitive.”
Sometimes that application is sent to Georgia Tech. “We did have a few students who were accepted to our grad school after attending an REU with us,” Belegradek said. “It definitely helps put Georgia Tech Mathematics on the map. This summer we have 22 REU students, and only two of them are from Georgia Tech.”
Mathematics topics for the 2022 REU included aspects of graph coloring, Legendrian contact homology, Eigenvectors from eigenvalues and Gaussian random matrices, and applications of Donaldson's Diagonalization theorem.
Read more about the 2021 Mathematics REUs here.
In July, the School of Mathematics also hosted its biennial Topology Students Workshop, organized by Professor Dan Margalit since 2012.
Events included a public lecture on campus, “Juggling Numbers, Algebra, and Topology”, accessible for curious people of all ages and backgrounds.
“One goal of mathematics is to describe the patterns in the world, from weather to population growth to disease transmission,” event organizers said. The workshop used mathematics to describe juggling patterns, count the different kinds of patterns, and create new patterns, “making surprising connections to group theory, topology, combinatorics, and number theory.”
The 36th Annual Symposium of the Protein Society
From microproteins, protein condensates, synthetic biology and biosensors, to the latest developments in machine learning and imaging technologies, to addressing health disparities, the Protein Society Symposium, held in San Francisco in early July, provided a state-of-the-art view of the most exciting areas of research in biology and medicine.
Four students of Raquel Lieberman’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry lab attended, thanks to Protein Society travel fellowships:
Lydia Kenney, fourth-year undergraduate and Beckman Scholar in the Lieberman lab. Kenney was also selected to give an oral presentation in a dedicated session to undergraduates
Minh Thu (Alice) Ma, fourth-year Ph.D.student
Emily Saccuzzo, fourth-year Ph.D. student
Gwendell Thomas, first-year Ph.D. student
Kenney and Ma won Best Poster awards at the symposium, and Saccuzzo won an honorable mention.
“The conference was amazing! We saw so many great speakers and presentations about protein science, and it was a great way to meet scientists from all over the world,” Kenney said. “I’m so grateful for this experience, especially as I begin to apply to graduate school and think about my future career in science. It was a great experience, and one that has truly deepened my appreciation for science and research.”
“To have each of these superstars selected for travel fellowships puts them in an elite cohort of trainees at this 500-plus person meeting,” Lieberman said. “I am so excited for them to present their thesis research and to get feedback from colleagues in our field from all over the world. I’m sure new ideas, collaborations, and other opportunities will emerge from this experience. It’s just the boost they and I need after a challenging couple of years as experimental biochemists.”
]]>Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>Christina Ragan, a lecturer of Biology in the B.S. in Neuroscience program who also serves as director of Outreach and co-director of Neuroscience Teaching Conference at Georgia Tech, has been named one of 51 educators to receive funding from a new grant program launched by online learning platform Course Hero, designed to support a wide range of faculty submitted “dream projects.”
“The creativity and aspirations of the hundreds of faculty who submitted were inspiring, and the makeup of the applicant pool truly reflected the breadth and diversity of faculty across disciplines, institutions and passions,” said Sean Michael Morris, VP of Academics at Course Hero. “We were especially impressed by the focus on experimentation with new and emergent pedagogies. At the start of the pandemic, digital learning approaches were deemed a short-term solution, but a growing number of faculty now use them as an integral piece of the puzzle.”
For Ragan’s project, Georgia Tech students will produce videos on challenging topics with embedded quiz questions for their peers — then vote on the best videos, with the winners to present at a conference.
Selected through a blind review process by a team of Course Hero staff who were, themselves, former educators, awardees were selected from a pool of 374 faculty projects submitted for the Fall 2022 term.
Grant recipients will be recognized at Course Hero’s fifth annual educator summit, which will take place virtually, July 28-29, 2022. Over 5,000 educators, researchers, and instructional designers will convene around this year’s theme, “Learning Together, Teaching Together,” to discuss the latest in learning and pedagogy. Speakers at this year’s summit include Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell, and award-winning faculty like Gaye Theresa Johnson, professor of African American Studies and Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles — and Michelle Miller, author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (Harvard University Press, 2014).
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About Course Hero: Course Hero is on a mission to help students graduate confident and prepared. The online learning platform now offers more than 100 million course-specific study resources created by and for students and educators, as well as 24/7 tutor help. More than 100,000 faculty across the U.S. and Canada use Course Hero to share their resources with the community, collaborate with other faculty, and hone new strategies for instruction. Every day, students, educators and tutors on Course Hero help more than 20 million students make every study hour count.
]]>Course Hero Media Contact:
press@coursehero.com
The 2022 class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Graduate Fellows are:
The Faculty Advisory Board for the BBISS Graduate Fellows is composed of the faculty who submitted the students' nominations. Nominations for Class III of the BBISS Graduate Fellows program will open in the Spring 2023. It is expected that 6 to 8 scholars will be selected for next year’s group.
The Faculty Advisory Board for the inaugural class are:
Updates and outcomes will be posted to the BBISS website as the project progresses. Additional information is available at https://research.gatech.edu/sustainability/grad-fellows-program.
]]>Montoya has previously served as associate chair for Undergraduate Affairs in the School of Biology (Biological Sciences), and has additional leadership experience with the ECOGIG (Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf) Consortium. He is also a founding member of the Georgia Tech Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council, as well as a member of the College of Sciences Faculty Diversity Council.
“The OSE program benefits from a close collaboration between the Schools of Biological Sciences, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Civil and Environmental Engineering,” said David Collard, senior associate dean in the College of Sciences and professor in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry. “The College of Sciences and College of Engineering continue to support the program and Professor Montoya is well-prepared to advance the program.”
“At the same time, I would also like to express immense gratitude to Professor Emanuele Di Lorenzo for his vision, hard work and leadership in creating the OSE program and serving as its founding director,” Collard added. “He leaves the program in a healthy position, and with great opportunities to expand the instructional and research missions of Georgia Tech in a critical field of study.”
Meet Joseph Montoya
Joseph Montoya is a biological oceanographer with research interests at the interface of biology and geochemistry. His lab specializes in studies of the marine nitrogen cycle, using a combination of direct rate measurements and stable isotope natural abundance methods to explore the role of biological dinitrogen (N2) fixation in structuring the flow of nitrogen and energy through planktonic ecosystems. The metabolic capability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support biological production plays a key role in supporting diverse ecosystems in many offshore and coastal waters.
The Montoya Lab has also been deeply involved in studies of the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on offshore ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico. His group’s research program is highly interdisciplinary, incorporating work in plankton biology, marine chemistry, and isotope biogeochemistry both at sea and in the lab.
Montoya received an A.B. in Biology at the University of California and a Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University. He served on the faculty of the Departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998.
Learn more about Montoya’s work:
About Georgia Tech
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 44,000 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.
]]>Of all earth's ecosystems, the biggest might be the one about which we know the least. Our oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface, and yet more than 80% of that is uncharted. Scientists estimate that 91% of ocean life has yet to be classified. But what little we do know might be the key to solving some of land-dwellers’ most vexing problems.
Julia Kubanek is vice president for Interdisciplinary Research and a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She and her team study how ocean organisms, such as crabs and mollusks, use chemicals to feel out their environment and communicate with each other. This work has not only produced insight on how humans use chemical cues but also led to discovery of chemicals that can be used to create drugs that treat human disease. “Some of these molecules that function as cues in animals and algae can be useful to us too,” says Kubanek.
“For instance, usually toxins are considered bad, but you can use them to explore human cells,” she says. “You can also use paralytic toxins for neuroscience. We’ve even discovered molecules that function as natural antibiotics in the water and co-opted those functions that are applicable in medicine.”
Kubanek and her team have examined certain types of seaweed found on coral reefs, which are usually sites of intense competition. Yet the seemingly defenseless seaweed there grows a healthy, vibrant red without any sign of attack from predators or microorganisms. Upon further study, Kubanek and company discovered dozens of molecules that protect the plant from fungal attacks—some of which also have been found to kill the parasite that causes malaria. Additional study of molecules from other sponges and seaweed has revealed molecules with antiviral properties, including one currently under review that appears to be able to kill the virus that causes Covid-19.
“These compounds can be models for new drugs,” says Kubanek. “Chemists can mimic the natural products and create derivatives that are better for human application and drug discovery.” Kubanek’s study of chemical cues is also leading to discoveries of how organisms use chemicals to protect themselves from predators and competition, as well as disease. The possible applications for humanity, beyond just conservation, are as limitless as the sea.
Wild Tech
We often think of nature as an obvious source of inspiration, especially when it comes to art. Countless paintings, photographs, symphonies, books, and films have either directly or indirectly taken cues from the wild world around us. But artists aren’t the only ones who see Mother Nature as a muse. Increasingly, scientists and engineers are looking to flora, fauna, and even our own biological building blocks to find answers to humanity’s biggest mysteries.
Georgia Tech researchers are at the forefront of this vast frontier of discovery. They’ve ventured outside of the lab and gone on safari, danced into the woods, dived beneath the ocean waves, and even turned the microscope inward on our own bodies to find clues on how to do everything from help us better communicate with robots to cure disease. Here are the stories behind some of Tech’s wildest innovations.
Learn how other Georgia Tech researchers are developing innovations inspired by nature.
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NASA's Astrobiology program has announced its newest Research Coordination Network (RCN) ‘LIFE: Early Cells to Multicellularity,’ bringing together a collaboration of researchers from around the world that will spend the next five years investigating the earliest biological processes and the evolution of life into more complex organisms.
The new RCN was officially launched today at the 2022 Astrobiology Science Conference, hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The field of astrobiology seeks to understand how life originated and evolved on Earth so we can search for life elsewhere in the universe.
NASA’s RCNs are virtual collaboration structures designed to support groups of investigators to communicate and coordinate their research across disciplinary, organizational, divisional, and geographic boundaries.
The LIFE RCN is co-led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Betül Kaçar, alongside Georgia Institute of Technology’s Frank Rosenzweig, Arizona State University’s Ariel Anbar, and University of California Riverside’s Mary Droser.
“LIFE will discern rules of co-evolution (between organisms and their environment) that will enable us to predict how life could evolve on worlds other than our own, and how we might search for it,” said Kaçar. “We know that the journey from single cells to multicellularity relied on critical environmental and biological innovations.”
One of five cross-divisional networks, RCNs are inherently crosscutting and focus on interdisciplinary science questions. LIFE joins:
“Astrobiology has been a part of NASA since its inception and is the focus of a growing number of NASA’s science missions,” said Mary Voytek, senior scientist for NASA’s Astrobiology Program. “We are excited for the important work that members of our LIFE RCN will accomplish in support of NASA’s objective to understand the distribution of life beyond Earth.”
The goal of NASA’s Astrobiology Program is the study of the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe. The Program is central to NASA’s continued exploration of our solar system and beyond and supports research into the origin and early evolution of life, the potential of life to adapt to different environments, and the implications for life elsewhere. NASA, together with the science community, has developed an Astrobiology Strategy that describes the scientific goals and objectives of NASA’s Astrobiology Program.
Learn more: astrobiology.nasa.gov
]]>Renay San Miguel
Communications Officer II/Science Writer
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
404-894-5209
Celestial mechanics
Bhanu Kumar, a Ph.D. candidate and NASA Space Technology Research Fellow (NSTRF) in the School of Mathematics, has won a fellowship for work in dynamical systems applied to celestial mechanics and applied astrodynamics for space mission design. His Ph.D. is set to be conferred in August. Kumar received his M.S. from the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech last December, and is also an NSTRF visiting technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he works with his mentor and research collaborator Rodney Anderson. Kumar’s adviser at Tech is Rafael de la Llave, professor in the School of Mathematics.
Microbial dynamics and infection
Elijah (Eli) Mehlferber is slated to receive his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley this summer, before beginning research in the lab of Sam Brown, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI) at Georgia Tech. Mehlferber received his baccalaureate degree from the University of Georgia. Mehlferber’s research seeks to understand how community dynamics in the microbiome can impact susceptibility to pathogen invasion.
“I was aware of CMDI through talking to Sam before deciding to apply for the fellowship in his lab, and it was definitely one of the factors that influenced my decision to join the program,” Mehlferber says. “I liked the idea of having a cross-disciplinary group of like-minded researchers to work and collaborate with — and a program that encourages that kind of work. I think a lot of my best research has taken place through these sorts of collaborations so I’m very excited to continue that with the folks across CMDI.”
Host-microbe symbiosis
Kayla Stoy is set to receive her Ph.D. this summer at Emory University before joining Mehlferber in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech this fall. Stoy will complete her NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship with research in the lab of William Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program at Tech. Ratcliff’s lab focuses on experimental evolution of multicellular complexity. While at Emory, Stoy researched population biology, ecology, and evolution with a focus on mutualism.
]]>Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>This summer, organizers welcomed 45 attendees for an in-person workshop for the first time since 2019.
“While virtual workshops have some benefits — for example being able to reach a larger audience — being in-person is so much more conducive to forming connections with people,” shared J.C. Gumbart, associate professor in the School of Physics and associate director of the Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech. “One of my favorite parts of workshops is just sitting and chatting with participants one-on-one about their research background and interests, something that’s very hard to do over Zoom.”
Organized by the first-year Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS) and the NIH T32 Integrative and Quantitative Biosciences Accelerated Training Environment (InQuBATE) cohorts, this year’s two-day workshop highlighted how computational modeling can be applied to better understand gene expression. As no prior modeling or even programming experience was necessary to attend, the in-person workshop was open to graduate students, scientists, and faculty members from any field of research.
The workshop opened with a lecture on the event’s theme, stochastic gene expression, delivered by Adriana Lucia-Sanz, postdoctoral researcher in the Weitz Group at Georgia Tech, which is led by Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair of Biological Sciences and founding director of the Quantitative Biosciences program. The attendees then broke into smaller groups led by organizers to work through hands-on modeling tutorials in various programming languages.
“The thing that I enjoyed the most was the group cultures that formed among the workshop groups,” shared Chris Zhang, a first-year Ph.D. student in Quantitative Biosciences and one of the workshop’s organizers. “I was incredibly happy at the quantity and quality of new relationships and connections that were made during this workshop.”
For first-year student Siya Xie, “the best memory was definitely the experience of our first-year cohort working together.”
The event closed with a plenary lecture on how randomness affects the biology and behavior of living cells by Ido Golding, professor of biological physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The annual gathering “has been quite revealing,” shared Hameed Sanusi, an attendee and Georgia State University bioinformatics graduate student. “I was glad to be part of this workshop — and more glad to have worked with budding scientists and professionals from the Atlanta area.”
“Hopefully,” added Zhang, “the participants learned a lot about how to think about biology from a quantitative perspective.”
]]>Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
The answer from Jung Choi, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the Master’s program in Bioinformatics: “At Georgia Tech, we use our own,” with an invitation to check out the open source textbooks.
Choi and senior academic professionals Shana Kerr and Chrissy Spencer, who also serves as associate chair for Undergraduate Affairs in Biological Sciences, don’t just teach those introductory courses. They wrote the two textbooks for the classes “Biological Principles” and “Organismal Biology” specifically for their students, who also get to save money that would have been spent on commercial textbooks for those courses.
The textbooks are examples of open education resources (OER), which involves the use of digital learning and teaching materials that are either in the public domain, or are under copyrights that allow them to be used, changed, and shared at no cost.
“We have been using these in lieu of a commercial textbook for over five years now, with a high degree of both instructor and student satisfaction,” Choi says. “Students and teachers all over the country and from all over the world access our online textbook,” thanks to a license from Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that protects copyrights while enabling sharing of knowledge and creativity.
That license allows for “anyone to use the textbooks as is, or to copy and modify for their own purpose, for non-commercial use with attribution and making any modifications also available under the same license,” Choi says.
Both Spencer and Kerr credit Choi for moving the School of Biological Sciences toward OER. “To me, the story is about a student educator and faculty mentor (Jung Choi) whose ideas and passion for undergraduate student learning generated this online textbook as the end product,” says Spencer.
OER: Up-to-date, more accessible textbooks
Both OER textbooks are, as Spencer calls them, “living documents” that are regularly updated, not just with updated editions, but also to incorporate new scientific ideas.
“We built in readings on gene editing using CRISPR/Cas9 (the genetic-editing technique that won its scientists a 2020 Nobel Prize) that are not yet in most commercial textbooks,” Spencer says. “During the pandemic we incorporated content on viruses and specifically on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.”
Along with Choi, Spencer, and Kerr, about a dozen faculty members have rotated through teaching the “Introductory Biology” sequence, Choi says. “All the faculty have readily accepted using the site,” for textbooks, he explains. “Some suggested improvements or pointed out corrections that we quickly incorporated on our pages. We also looked at student performance on midterm and final exam questions, and found no difference in student performance before and after the transition to our web pages.”
Kerr says she was excited to work with Choi and Spencer on a project that she believed “would benefit students — both academically and financially.”
Before OER, the introductory biology textbook and homework packet cost up to $250 per student. “We adopted a low-cost homework and in-class quizzing system that cost $12,” Choi says. “Estimating that about 500 students take the course each year, that's more than $100,000 per year (in savings) for this single course.”
When the transition to OER began, one class had access to both the faculty-written textbook and a commercial textbook. “We surveyed students to see which resources they used, and they overwhelmingly used our web pages over the alternatives,” Choi says.
From teachers to textbook authors
The idea to use OER resources was initially prompted by Choi’s recognition that students struggled to learn about membranes, molecules, and metabolism from an evolutionary perspective, Spencer says. “The textbooks we used did not integrate evolutionary thinking into that content, and in fact were very human-centered in their approach.”
Choi had already developed OER readings as blog posts for about a quarter of the “Biological Principles” course in 2012 when the decision was made to develop the School’s own textbook, with Choi, Kerr, and Spencer dividing the writing duties. “Personally, I felt like it was down to the wire to get everything in place, but our mutual commitment to serving our students was a strong motivator to keep at it,” Kerr says.
Chaohua Ou, assistant director of Special Projects and Educational Initiatives at Georgia Tech’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), adds that OER is used in many ways across the Institute, explaining that it includes “many things, not just books. They could be materials for teaching, learning, and research in any format or medium that are publicly accessible.”
Ou says that Choi, Kerr, and Spencer were the second group of Georgia Tech faculty to receive an Affordable Learning Georgia grant in 2015 to fund the textbook initiative, with the first group led by Industrial Design faculty. Affordable Learning Georgia is an organization dedicated to reducing education costs by endorsing the use of OER in Georgia schools.
Crafting a Georgia Tech-specific textbook
Choi, Kerr, Spencer, and other faculty who instruct in the introductory biology courses at Georgia Tech spent a semester crafting very specific learning objectives for every class session of the “Biological Principles” course. “These objectives are designed to let students know precisely what we expect them to know and be able to do by the end of the class session,” Kerr says. “Without the learning objectives, I don’t think we could have written the textbook in such a targeted and streamlined way.”
“Writing this book was focused, fast, and furious,” Spencer says. “I was so excited to be implementing a free textbook resource that was truly focused on only the content and applications that we wanted the students to know for the course. When writing to deadline, I felt more attuned to the course content, and more considerate of what students typically already knew and what they so often struggled with in the course.”
A textbook for the second introductory biology course, “Organismal Biology,” came about because the faculty decided it was not reasonable to require students to buy a full commercial textbook for just one semester of the two-semester course sequence.
“Our successful development and release of the ‘Biological Principles’ OER spurred me to take on a similar project for ‘Organismal Biology,’” Kerr says.
Choi says since OER has trended in higher education, commercial publishers have launched lower-cost options such as rentals or online subscriptions. Yet he says students lose access to those when their subscriptions or rentals expire. “Our web pages are accessible to students for as long as we continue to host the site.”
Faculty across Biological Sciences have been supportive of OER, Spencer adds, “after seeing the data that we’ve done ‘no harm’ to student learning — while saving them on textbook and online homework system costs.”
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Georgia Tech’s MURIs are both primarily within the School of Physics. First, Simon Sponberg, a Dunn Family Associate Professor of Physics and Biological Sciences, leads a team discovering how animals strategically use sensing and cognition to make decisions in complex environments. The project, Fast, Lexicographic Agile Perception Integrates Decision and Control in a Spike-Resolved, Sensorimotor Program (FLAP), specifically addresses the core DoD topic area of understanding neural systems integration for competent autonomy in decision and control.
“We have all these great, sophisticated algorithms for processing big data, but an animal doesn't have time to process a million samples of its environment and then figure out what’s a predator,” said Sponberg.
Studying moths for their agile, sophisticated flying and complex sensing abilities, the team will record electrical activity in the brain to determine how the moths make decisions and use natural language processing techniques to see how a moth derives meaning from sensory cues and movements. The goal is to develop an information processing framework that enables quick, flexible decision-making that could facilitate the next generation of autonomous bio-inspired systems and better integrate living systems with engineered technologies
The interdisciplinary nature of the team makes complex research possible. Half the team is made of experimentalists: Sponberg specializes in sensors connected to motor systems with precisely timed signals; Jeff Riffell, a professor at the University of Washington, studies how the nervous system processes sensory signals to control behavior; and as a vision neuroscientist at Florida International University, Jamie Theobald, determines how animals parse complex environments. The other half of the team will build the framework: Duke Professor Vahid Tarokh models complex datasets, Georgia Tech School of Mathematics Assistant Professor Hannah Choi focuses on neural networks, and Cornell Professor Silvia Ferrari ties it all together as a control theorist embedding control in neural structures.
“MURIs were originally training grants for the DoD to develop the next generation of scientists who would make progress,” said Sponberg. “This funding will allow us to have postdocs and graduate students across all six labs and disciplines working together tightly and creating a community.”
For the second MURI, Programming Multistable Origami and Kirigami Structures via Topological Design, Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Zeb Rocklin is part of a team exploring a new class of origami- and kirigami-inspired flexible, lightweight structures capable of transitioning between many stable shapes to perform different tasks or adapt to changing environmental conditions. These structures could be used in a range of applications, from multifunctional robots and collapsible antennae to rapidly assembled bridges and temporary structures, and force protection elements like origami-inspired bulletproof shields.
The team combines experts in mathematics, physics, material science, mechanics, robotics, numerical modeling, and computation, including Harvard University Professors Katie Betoldi, Jennifer Lewis, L. Mahadevan, and Robert Wood, as well as University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor Eleni Katifori
The researchers will develop mathematical models to characterize and design the complex mechanical behavior of multi-stable origami and kirigami structures; new scale-spanning manufacturing processes that efficiently integrate actuation and sensing; and experimental test beds to serve as a platform for evaluation and optimization of design concepts.
"This project benefits from Georgia Tech's ability to develop tight, powerful connections between engineering advanced technologies and developing universal, mathematically rigorous physical theories,” Rocklin said. “We'll be starting from concepts that anyone can get a sense of by looking at or feeling a piece of origami and using robotics and multifunctional 3D printing to create complex, flexible and robust dynamical structures that can do things nobody has ever seen before."
]]>College of Sciences graduate students and researchers have also been recognized with Georgia Tech Teaching Assistant Awards and special certificates during the Institute’s Teaching Assistant (TA) and Future Faculty Award ceremonies, held on April 20 at the Bill Moore Student Success Center.
Please join us in congratulating these special recipients across our community:
Love Family Foundation Award
Yashvardhan Tomar, a double major in the School of Physics and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, is the recipient of one of the highest academic honors given to a Georgia Tech graduating senior, the Love Family Foundation Award.
The accolade is made possible by a generous grant from the Gay and Erskine Love Foundation, and recognizes the undergraduate student with the most outstanding scholastic record of all members of the class.
Each of Georgia Tech’s six colleges nominates its top graduating student, and the winner is ultimately selected by the academic associate deans in coordination with the Office of Undergraduate Education (OUE).
“I find myself at a loss for words to truly convey how grateful I feel to the institute for selecting me for this really high honor,” Tomar says.
“I still remember my first day as a freshman at Tech—a young boy beyond-eager to learn so many new things and get involved in so much exciting research—an excitement that has stayed with me since," he shares.
"The news of this award comes as a strong boost of encouragement and appreciation to propel with me strengthened promise towards the fulfillment of my aspirations. I express my most heartfelt thanks to everyone who invested their belief in my candidature for this highly prestigious award.”
Roger M. Wartell and Stephen E. Brossette Award for Multidisciplinary Studies in Biology, Physics, and Mathematics
This award is presented to an undergraduate student with demonstrated accomplishments at the interface of biology with either physics or mathematics. The award was established by a generous donation from alumnus Stephen E. Brossette in recognition of the many contributions of Roger M. Wartell to the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The 2022 winner, Lila Nassar, is a physics major with a concentration in the physics of living systems. Nassar has a broad set of research experiences with faculty Martin Mourigal and Jennifer Curtis in the School of Physics. Nassar has also served as the secretary and president of the Georgia Tech Society of Women in Physics.
“Lila has broad interests and lots of ambition,” says Curtis. “She brings both an intensity that is useful for driving forward progress and dealing with setbacks. She brings that same fire and energy to her role as president of the Society of Women in Physics.”
In summer 2021, Nassar also participated in a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Vanderbilt University.
A. Joyce Nickelson and John C. Sutherland Undergraduate Research Award
This award was created by the endowment gift of Joyce E. Nickelson and John C. Sutherland to honor Joyce’s late mother, alumna A. Joyce Nickelson, and Sutherland. The scholarship, which recognizes excellence at the interface of mathematics and physics, is awarded to an undergraduate student who has jointly studied mathematics and physics, and who has engaged in scientific research.
Nickelson-Sutherland award winner Sarah Eisenstadt is completing majors in physics and mathematics, and also studies applied languages and intercultural studies.
Eisenstadt has completed research with Michael Loss in the School of Mathematics on mathematical physics and the development of an energy functional to describe superconductivity, and with Stephanie Boulard on the artist Marc Chagall. She has also served as a teaching assistant for linear algebra and multivariable calculus.
Cynthia L. Bossart and James Efron Scholarship
This honor was created by alumna Cindy Bossart to recognize high academic achievement by a student in the College of Sciences who is a non-Georgia resident.
The 2022-3 recipient of this award, Sena Ghobadi, is a resident of Florida who graduated from American Heritage School in Broward County. Ghobadi has made a strong start as a first-year as a physics major at Georgia Tech: she has already begun work as a teaching assistant for Physics 2211.
Metha Phingbodhipakkiya Memorial Scholarship
This honor was established by Maranee Phingbodhipakkiya to honor her father, his love for physics, and the sacrifices he made to assure that she would have the finest education. This award is made to a junior or senior in the College of Sciences based on academic merit.
The recipient of this award, Nabojeet Das, is a graduate of Tucker High School and is a candidate for the Bachelor of Science in Biology with the Research Option designation and Biologically Inspired Design certificate.
Das has served as a teaching assistant for the introductory Organismal Biology course, and as a resident assistant for Georgia Tech Housing. His research with Aniruddh Sarkar, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, focuses on the creation of small and portable biosensors for Covid-19 and other diseases.
He has presented his research at a meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society. Das is a member of DramaTech, the Minority Association of Premed Students, and Buzz Mobile Health.
Virginia C. and Herschel V. Clanton Jr. Scholarship
This scholarship was established by alumnus Herschel V. Clanton Jr. to honor his wife, Virginia. The scholarship is awarded annually to a student in the College of Sciences who has demonstrated outstanding academic achievement.
The 2022 recipient of the Clanton Scholarship, Griffin Wagner, is a graduate of Vero Beach High School in Florida and is currently a biology major.
Wagner’s research with Jennette Yen in the School of Biological Sciences, with collaborators at the Carter Center, the University of Georgia, Texas A&M, and the African country of Chad, focuses on inhibiting the transmission of African guinea worm disease.
He has completed an internship at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, and a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at Georgia Tech. Wagner presented his research at the 2022 Ocean Sciences meeting.
Robert A. Pierotti Memorial Scholarship
The College of Sciences presents this scholarship in honor of Robert “Bob” Pierotti, past dean of the College and founder of the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC). The award is made to top graduating seniors in the College who have excelled both academically and in research.
The two recipients of the 2022 Pierotti Award are Holly McCann and Soham Kulkarni.
McCann is a biology major who is completing the Biomolecular Technology certificate. She is a researcher with Loren Williams in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, working on the prediction and visualization of the structure of RNA. McCann’s work led to the publication of a paper in the journal Nucleic Acids Research. She has also participated in the BeeSnap Vertically Integrated Project with Jennifer Leavey. McCann has also completed internships with Syngenta and Fidelity Investments.
“Holly is remarkable,” says Williams. “She is highly intelligent, creative, motivated, functional and productive. She is destined to be an extremely successful scientist.”
Kulkarni, a graduate of Chattahoochee High School, is a biochemistry major who will also complete the Health and Medical Sciences and Computational Data Analysis minors.
He has conducted research with Cassie S. Mitchell in the Chronic Myeloid Leukemia laboratory. He is a coauthor of a paper in the journal Pharmaceutics and has presented his research at the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference. He also serves as an Undergraduate Research Ambassador.
Larry O’Hara Graduate Scholarship
This honor is provided by an endowment bequeathed by alumnus Larry O’Hara. It is presented to outstanding graduate students in the College of Sciences.
All of the 2022 winners have established a strong record of research with multiple publications in peer-reviewed journals, as well as multiple conference presentations:
Youngho Yoo, Ph.D. candidate, Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization in Mathematics
Pedro Márquez-Zacarias, Ph.D. candidate, Quantitative Biology program, Biological Sciences
Jason Tsukahara, Ph.D. candidate, Psychology
Yoo is currently studying graph theory with Xingxing Xu and holds a prestigious NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship to support her doctoral studies.
Márquez-Zacarias’ doctoral research with William Ratcliff focuses on developing theories to understand how multicellular organisms became more complex, and how microbial populations are structured in space.
Tsukahara, who is studying cognition and brain science with Randall Engle, focuses on investigating the nature of attention control with the use of pupillometry and mind-wandering reports.
Herbert P. Haley Fellowship
This graduate fellowship recognizes significant accomplishments and outstanding academic achievements for students at Georgia Tech.
The 2022 winners are:
Keun (Kara) Lee, Bioinformatics
Marisa Cepeda, Chemistry
Estefania Garcia, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Christopher DuPre, Mathematics
Francisco Martinez, Physics
Teaching Assistant Awards
The College of Science had four winners among the 2022 Georgia Tech Teaching Assistant Awardees, with three hailing from the School of Mathematics. The awards are presented annually by the Center for Teaching and Learning to celebrate the contributions to teaching excellence at Georgia Tech made by graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants:
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant of the Year:
Bryan Clark, Mathematics
Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year:
Tao Yu, Mathematics
Graduate Student Instructor of the Year:
Elizabeth (Liz) Jones, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Online Head Teaching Assistant of the Year:
Jaewoo Jung, Mathematics
Tech to Teaching Certificates
Tech to Teaching Certificates are designed to prepare Georgia Tech graduate and postdoctoral associates for college teaching positions.
Through this certificate program, participants will develop a thorough understanding of the scholarship of teaching and learning, and will demonstrate their ability to apply these skills in the classroom.
The following College of Sciences students were awarded Tech to Teaching Certificates:
Thomas Day, Physics
Alex Draper, Biological Sciences
Caria Evans, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Annika Jersild, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Maugan Lloyd, Psychology
Pedro Márquez-Zacarias, Biological Sciences
Daniyar Omarov, Mathematics
Alperen Ozdemir, Mathematics
Tyler Roche, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Tyler Vollmer, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) Certificates
As a member institution in the CIRTL national network, Georgia Tech joins with 37 other universities on a mission to improve undergraduate education through the preparation of future faculty.
Participants in these certificate programs learn about how students learn, how differences among students affect their learning, evidence-based teaching and assessment practices, and teaching with technology.
Participants who complete these foundation-level learning outcomes through a combination of coursework, workshops, or online learning, receive the CIRTL Associate certificate.
The following College of Sciences students were awarded CIRTL Certificates:
Mary Bernhardt, Psychology
Thomas Day, Physics
Annika Jersild, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Sierra Knavel, Mathematics
Maugan Lloyd, Psychology
Pedro Márquez Zacarias, Biological Sciences
Alexandra Newton, Mathematics
Jennifer Rattray, Biological Sciences
Tyler Roche, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Micah Schaible, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Danielle Skinner, Physics
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Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences
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Hay is among 120 members and 30 international members elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Established by an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. Scientists are elected by their peers to membership for outstanding contributions to research.
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and others to honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and convene leaders in advancing the public good. Hay, an experimental marine ecologist known for his work on community and chemical ecology, is being recognized by the organization for decades of world-renowned research in the field. He is among 261 artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors who will be inducted in 2023.
“I am honored to be associated with a group that has shaped not only science and art — but the human experience and culture in general for more than two centuries,” says Hay.
“Mark is an international leader in the field of marine chemical ecology,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair. “His work has helped build our modern understanding of marine ecosystems and has guided marine conservation efforts across the globe. Whether as a researcher, educator, mentor, advisor, or colleague — those who are fortunate enough to know Mark also know just how fitting these honors are for him.”
Hay founded and co-directed the Center for Aquatic Chemical Ecology, now merged with the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection at Georgia Tech. His research has provided key insights into the conservation and restoration of coral reefs, and has challenged scientists' views of ecological and evolutionary processes affecting the establishment and impact of invasive species.
“Most organisms have neither eyes nor ears and so must use chemical cues to decide whether to attack, mate with, or escape from the organism next to them,” Hay says. “Learning and interpreting these chemical cues provides an instruction manual for the critical processes structuring Earth's populations, communities, and ecosystems. This deeper understanding then produces novel approaches for improving conservation, management, and restoration of threatened and collapsed natural systems.”
Hay is the 2011 recipient of Georgia Tech’s highest faculty award, the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, and is also a past recipient of the Cody Award in Ocean Sciences for “outstanding scientific achievement in oceanography, marine biology, and earth science.”
“My research would not have been possible without an amazing group of students and postdocs who collaborated, innovated, and often led as much as followed in our explorations of nature,” says Hay. “They are the future of science — probably my greatest contributions to science — and they will make wonderful discoveries I can't predict or even imagine.”
Hay is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) and the Ecological Society of America, as well as a recipient of the International Society of Chemical Ecology’s Silver Medal, the organization’s highest honor. In 2015, Hay received the Lowell Thomas Award from The Explorers Club as a “Visionary of Conservation,” and in 2018 the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
Following 17 years as a faculty member at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hay joined Georgia Tech in 1999 as recipient of the Teasley Chair.
Hay joins four current Georgia Tech faculty who are members of the NAS: Marilyn Brown, 2020; Randall Engle, 2020; Arkadi Nemirovski, 2020; and Mostafa El-Sayed, 1980. Those elected to the NAS today bring the total number of active members to 2,512 and total international members to 517.
He is among 11 scientists recognized by the American Academy as new members in Evolution and Ecology, and joins eight other current Georgia Tech faculty who are members: Kaye Husbands Fealing, 2021; Charles Isbell, 2021; Susan Lozier, 2020; Randall Engle, 2018; Arkadi Nemirovski, 2018; Richard Lipton, 2014; Zvi Galil, 2005; and Mostafa El-Sayed, 1986. Robert Nerem (1937-2020) was elected in 1998, along with James Meindl (1933-2020) in 1992.
About the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences connects fields of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together, as expressed in the organization’s charter, “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” The Academy’s studies have helped set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy, education, and the arts and humanities.
About the National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a private, nonprofit organization of the country’s leading researchers. The NAS recognizes and promotes outstanding science through election to membership; publication in its journal, PNAS; and its awards, programs, and special activities. Through the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the NAS provides objective, science-based advice on critical issues affecting the nation.
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If it wasn’t for her dad’s encouragement, Jenna Nash may never have applied to Georgia Tech. After her admission to Tech, Nash says the resources available for pre-health students at Tech felt like “the missing puzzle piece that fell in place” when deciding what college to attend.
Four years and countless memories later, the Canton, Georgia native graduated in May 2021 with a degree in neuroscience and a minor in health and medical sciences. From her involvement in the Physician Assistant Club as a member and vice president of marketing, to support from peers, professors, and the Neuroscience Club, Nash shares that coming to campus was “the best decision I have ever made.”
Her time at Georgia Tech helped Nash achieve her goal of physician assistant (PA) school. This semester, she begins classes at Mercer University for the Master of Medical Science (MMSc) degree.
Here are Nash’s tips on “How to Pre-Health” at Georgia Tech:
Q: Why did you decide to pursue pre-health at Georgia Tech?
A: I knew going into college that I wanted to pursue a pre-health career, but Tech actually helped secure my decision to become a physician assistant. I was weighing heavily between nurse practitioner, which requires a complete Bachelor of Nursing, then going back to school to become a nurse practitioner for around two years; versus physician assistant, where you can choose your own undergraduate degree and then complete around 27 months of school; versus doctor, which requires a complete undergraduate degree then four or more years of school depending on specialty.
While choosing what school to attend, I knew I wanted to stay in state because of financial reasons, but most schools in Georgia that offered nursing programs did not seem challenging enough to me.
My dad actually encouraged me to apply to Tech, even though I thought there was no way I would get in, and I didn't think it had a huge pre-health program. However, checked all the boxes – challenging, football team, great location – so when I got in, I knew that it was meant to be. From there, I decided to become a physician assistant instead of a doctor because of a mentor in high school that told me about the flexibility and freedom that comes with becoming a PA instead of doctor – then, I knew it was for me. Additionally, I found out there was a club for pre-physician assistant students at Tech which sealed the deal. It was kind of my missing puzzle piece that fell in place. It was the best decision I have ever made.
Q: What resources did you use at Georgia Tech to support your career aspirations, such as clubs, advisors, or supportive professors?
A: One of the best resources for me during my time at Tech was the Physician Assistant Club (PAC). It is tricky navigating how to get into graduate school and it was getting super overwhelming trying to figure it out on my own. My pre-health advisor, Maria Krakovski, and one of my sisters in my sorority, Claudia Varnedoe, encouraged me to join PAC. I am so happy that I did! It helped me figure out what I needed to do while in college, allowed me to form connections with other people that aspired to become PAs, gave me job and volunteering options, and walked me through the application process which was so helpful when it came time to apply for schools my senior year.
One of the best things that came from PAC was the opportunity to work with Good Shepherd’s Clinic, which provided healthcare to uninsured people of Atlanta. At this clinic, I learned how much I loved working with underserved populations and learned a lot about the inequality in the healthcare system of Georgia and the United States.
Another thing I am so thankful for was one-on-one tutoring through the Tutoring & Academic Support Office at the Clough Undergraduate Commons (CULC). I was studying there nearly three times a week for help on subjects that I could not figure out for the life of me. It increased my confidence in my ability to solve problems and allowed me to reflect on what I really understood. Tutoring is a very underused resource at Tech, and I cannot encourage people to take advantage of the tutoring resources enough!
Q: How did Georgia Tech help you during the application cycle for graduate school? Any tips that process?
A: I am so thankful that I had Georgia Tech resources available during my application cycle. I used lots of the available resources, especially when it came to writing my personal statement. I took advantage of the Communication Center to edit my essay a lot. They really helped to critique and organize my thoughts. Writing has always been a weakness of mine, because I write just like I talk, and my message can get confusing; they went through it with me sentence by sentence to make sure every word in my essay was meaningful.
I put to use every bit of knowledge I gained from PAC during the application process. I utilized other students in the Club that I made connections with to review my application and make sure that I did not miss any small details. I encourage students to take advantage of peers with similar goals to share the stress of the application cycle with, because they are an invaluable resource.
Q: What graduate degree are you pursuing and where? Why did you choose that program?
A: I am studying to become a physician assistant (PA) at Mercer University. I knew from high school I wanted to become a physician assistant because of my desire to form connections with patients while still having time to enjoy life outside of my career. I chose the PA program at Mercer because of its proximity to Atlanta. During my time at Tech, I became connected to the city and realized how much it has to provide. But, living in Atlanta and through my involvement at Tech, I also noticed the large population of people in need of healthcare, shelter, food, and more. Since Mercer focuses on service opportunities, I thought this would be a great way for me to give back to the city I learned so much from in college.
Q: What advice do you have for current Georgia Tech pre-health students?
A: Get as many healthcare experiences as possible that you can while you are at Tech. In Atlanta you have access to many different fields – take advantage of that! Try different things, because each thing you do will give you more information and shape your future as a healthcare provider. During those experiences, keep a journal of conversations, patients, or advice that make an impact on you. This will help you in future interviews, when writing your personal statements, or talking about your career. And it is fun to look back at it all when you are questioning whether you have chosen the correct path for yourself.
One of the most important pieces of advice that was given to me is: this is the only time in your healthcare journey where you will get the opportunity to see how different providers handle situations differently. Take advantage of shadowing experiences to determine how you will act as a healthcare provider in the future.
Lastly, develop a network of people that have a career path that is similar to you. For me I had three main people: someone who already was working in the field, someone currently in my chosen graduate program, and then someone that was at the same stage as myself. Having these people to go to with “stupid” questions was so useful and really eased my stress about the whole application process. In my experience, people are flattered when you ask them for help because it makes them feel important, so don’t be afraid to reach out!
Q: What makes Georgia Tech special?
A: I had the best four years of my life at Georgia Tech, and I am forever thankful for everything I learned from my professors, friends, and peers. It was challenging, but at the end of the day, you come out of Tech ready to accomplish anything that is ahead of you. Cherish the moments getting to learn in such a stimulating academic environment. You were chosen to be at this school for a reason.
Feel free to reach out to me if you ever need advice or encouragement! I’m always available. Email Jenna Nash.
]]>Editor: Audra Davidson
Science Communications
College of Sciences
Pre-Health at Tech:
prehealth.gatech.edu
Jeffrey Kramer’s first semester at Georgia Tech was a running start. With the post-grad goal of attending medical school to be a physician, the biology major from Marietta, Georgia has set ambitious plans to prepare for graduate school, focusing on his studies, three unique organizations, and learning “what it means to be a Yellow Jacket.”
Here are Kramer’s recommendations for “How to Pre-Health” at Georgia Tech:
Q: What attracted you to pursue a pre-health career at Georgia Tech?
A: I decided to pursue pre-health here at Georgia Tech for a variety of reasons. First, as an in-state student eligible for the Zell Miller Scholarship, it is difficult to beat the price and quality of a Georgia Tech education. Compared to out of state or private institutions, Georgia Tech is significantly more affordable while still offering a high level of prestige.
Second, Georgia Tech is in close proximity to a huge number of hospitals and clinics including Grady, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Atlanta Medical Center, and Emory. This makes it significantly easier to obtain clinical volunteering and experience.
Third, Georgia Tech has an incredibly active pre-health community. There are a number of pre-health campus organizations, including Student Hospital Connections and the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), dedicated to helping students navigate the pre-health process. These organizations provide access to a wealth of opportunities and connections, and were a huge factor in my decision to attend Georgia Tech.
Q: What have you been involved with on campus?
A: In the past semester, I have become an active member of three organizations: Student Hospital Connections, AMSA, and the Student Center Programs Council.
Q: How did you find your first semester of classes?
A: I found my first semester of classes to be very difficult, but very manageable as well. It's a lot of content, but I'm very satisfied with my professors and their teaching. I've found it necessary to radically change my study habits, but Georgia Tech provides a wide variety of resources, such as office hours and Peer-Led Undergraduate Study (PLUS) sessions, to make this transition easier. Looking forward to future semesters, I'm thrilled to continue my science education here.
Q: How do you plan to make the most of your time at GT to prepare for a pre-health career?
A: Outside of my coursework, I plan on participating in a number of extracurriculars during my time here at GT to prepare me for a pre-health career. First, I plan on volunteering as often as possible throughout my time here. Fortunately, there are a huge number of campus organizations dedicated to facilitating community service opportunities.
Second, I plan on getting involved in scientific research. Luckily, Georgia Tech makes it easier than perhaps any other university to begin research as an undergrad.
Third, I plan on gaining clinical experience by both volunteering at local hospitals and clinics and shadowing physicians.
Q: Do you have any future career plans, or ideas for what you would like to do upon graduation?
A: After graduation, I currently plan on attending medical school with the goal of becoming a physician. I am not yet decided whether I wish to pursue a dual M.D./Ph.D. degree.
Q: What advice would you share with others interested in coming to Georgia Tech on a pre-health path?
A: I would advise them to look into the huge variety of pre-health resources here at Georgia Tech. Taking classes is only one component of the pre-health journey. The campus organizations, academic support resources, and research opportunities provided at Georgia Tech are unrivaled. They were a huge factor in my decision to attend GT.
]]>Editor: Audra Davidson
Science Communications
College of Sciences
Pre-Health at Tech:
prehealth.gatech.edu
Meet Alonzo Whyte
As a faculty member, advisor for the Health and Medical Sciences (HMED) Minor, and director of academic advising for the Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience at Georgia Tech, Alonzo Whyte supports pre-health students throughout their time at Tech. He also teaches neuroscience and serves as a development leader in the School of Biological Sciences, working to incorporate feedback on the program and support future growth through curriculum development, course instruction, and academic advising. Whyte is also a member of the College of Sciences Task Force on Racial Equity and in spring 2021 received the Institute’s Class of 1934 Course Instructor Opinion Survey Award.
In his tenure at Tech, Whyte says he has seen a diversity of routes that students take on the path to a pre-health career. Today he shares some advice on success stories, mistakes to avoid, and resources to explore.
Here’s his take on “How to Pre-Health” at Georgia Tech:
Q: What is your role advising students on the Pre-Health Track?
A: As a neuroscience advisor and an advisor for the Health and Medical Sciences Minor, I see a lot of students on the Track for anything from medical school, to physician assistant school, to dental school, to physical therapy school, and everything in between. We try our best as advisors to have some knowledge in terms of what steps the students need to take in order to meet the pre-requisite requirements for different programs, because it’s not simple.
There is no pre-medical major at Georgia Tech. Students need to do research to find out what specific programs they’re interested in and what classes they need to meet their goals. In that capacity, as an advisor for the major and the minor, I have developed some knowledge in terms of what classes students should be taking for the different paths.
But really, my job is to ensure that their completed courses help students towards progress for their major or minor, and wrapped into that are the pre-health requirements. And even though I have some experience and knowledge about what things students are doing to prepare for their post-graduate experience, I strongly, strongly recommend that every student talk to the Pre-Health Advising Office. They have a set of advisors there that are dedicated to helping the writing medical school letters, interviewing, and anything else needed.
For example, last week I was part of a mock medical school interview process. The Pre-Health Office creates those types of events. As major and minor advisors, we ensure the students' academic course work will earn their desired degree and that students’ courses are getting applied appropriately, while edging them along the pre-health path.
Q: What other key resources are there for students on the pre-health path?
A: Again, the Pre-Health Office is fantastic. They’re very busy, so to get a meeting with their advisors such as Mr. Castelan or Ms. Liggins, it’s important to book in advance.
Additionally, advisors are still not the only experts in what the students need. I find that the best solution is to utilize peer advisors as well as a student groups. The Pre-Health Office has many resources; they have their own set of peer advisors; they have a very active Piazza page, that allows you to connect with the pre-health community to get quick answers to your pre-health questions; and they have a list of pre-health student organizations.
I’m also a faculty advisor for a new club, the American Physician Scientist Association. They are students who are looking to be physicians, scientists, or something similar. They’ll have speakers come who are focused on that subject.
Additionally, I am faculty advisor for Minority Association of Pre-Medical Students. It’s not just limited to minority identity students, it’s a very diverse group of students and open to all. This semester they hosted a medical school showcase where they had representatives from different medical schools come and talk the attendees through the application process.
There’s also an American Medical Student Association, a Pre-Dental Society, and many more places where you can connect with senior students who are going through the application cycle, as well as participate in their events where they bring in guest or representatives of medical schools to provide great insight. The pre-health path is really a collaborative process.
There’s not one single resource. You have to pick and choose what resources you need. If you have questions about classes, I’ll be a person to talk to. If you have questions about the application cycle, you can talk to me, but I’ll refer you to the Pre-Health Office as they have all these peer advisors, all these student associations. The community is great, and there are plenty of supportive resources.
Q: In your experience, what kind of activities do students on the Pre-Health Track do to ensure they take the right steps to pursue the rigorous process of applying to these difficult schools?
A: I think one of the biggest things is thinking beyond GPA and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) score. While those are important factors for the application, currently the holistic view of the student is huge. There are some shifts and trends in the application experience.
I would say many students are waiting a year or two after their undergraduate graduation as a way to build up their credentials. Maybe they need more clinical hours, or they’re taking positions as a medical assistant, Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), things like that, to get hands-on experience to show that they can thrive in a medical environment. Maybe they don’t have the strongest GPA, so they’ll do a one- or two-year master’s in something like genetics to show that they can achieve academically and handle the rigor of medical school.
Three important things that students do are leadership positions, getting involved in clubs, and research.
Showing commitment to clubs is important by staying active not just for one semester but two or three years if possible. Additionally, research is becoming popular. Working in biomedical, neuroscience, chemistry, or other research lab shows that students can commit to a project that’s high-level science. We have these opportunities at Georgia Tech where students can successfully write a thesis, get some publications or poster presentations.
That’s a lot of what I see for strong candidates – along with maintaining a good attitude throughout that all, because when recommendation letters are written, it won’t matter how much you’ve done if you’ve had a sour attitude the whole time! As advisors, we want to ensure that we’re putting students in the position to become a good clinician. When we’re thinking about who we’re sending to medical school, we think, who do we want to be treated by when we’re older? Do I want some student who is grumpy, even if they’re the smartest? That’s one of the reasons for graduate school interviews – personality does matter for who you choose as your doctor.
Q: For students who are on the Pre-Health Track, but have a major that is not explicitly science related, how does their path differentiate from students studying a healthcare related subject?
A: The College of Sciences majors, in particular neuroscience and biology, have a lot of pre-health courses already built into the major requirements … Whereas if you’re studying computer science or engineering, you don’t have the lab science requirements built into the degree the same way. You have other courses you must take, so you have to find a place in your schedule to fit the pre-health courses in.
For students studying biomedical engineering, for example, because of the heavy credit requirements to complete that major, students are often really stretched to find every free elective that completes a pre-health requirement … So, there’s a bit more pressure.
There are plenty of non-science students who attend medical school after graduation successfully. In fact, some schools are looking for students with diverse skill sets. For example, some schools want engineering students who want to be doctors, because that’s how they design medical devices well.
Q: What would you tell prospective students interested in pursuing a pre-health career through Georgia Tech?
A: The rigor of Georgia Tech has a national, if not international, reputation. You leave Georgia Tech prepared for the rigor of medical school. That’s what we hear from our students who have gone off to places like Emory for a medical degree – they say that Georgia Tech prepared them to excel and succeed in their medical school courses. You can go to many different institutions and earn high marks, but you’re going to get your world turned over when you go off to medical school. The struggle is helpful, because you build skills to succeed while struggling, and then when you step up to the challenge of medical school, you’re ready for it.
Q: What other advice do you have for students on the Pre-Health Track to ensure they have a successful time here?
A: Again, I think it’s important that students don’t focus solely on GPA. A “C” is not the end of your pre-health path. A “D” is not even the end of your pre-health path. Think about the whole picture. There are plenty of students who struggle their first year and that’s expected. So, you have to adjust, and have some grace there, understanding that there’s more to the process than GPA.
I also encourage students, regardless of if they’re straight “A” students or straight “B” students, to have an open mindset to other careers. You may have come to Georgia Tech thinking that you want to be pre-health, but I would suggest still exploring other paths. Consider, “What if I were to start my career with a bachelor’s degree and not go to medical school, what would I do? What would I enjoy?” And then tailor their minor towards that. For example, if they like programming, pursue a Computer Science Minor. If they like writing science communication, a Language, Media, and Communications Minor. There are many things they can do in addition to their major, along with the pre-health requirements. So, if they get to graduation and decide they don’t want to go to medical school, they have something that they’re also equally excited about.
Some of the best medical school applicants I've seen have had activities like projects where they worked in conjunction with local hospitals to design new algorithms for them to read how patients are treated upon arrival. That’s taking their interests and putting in into this pre-health context. And that you would be great for public health, if they decide they don’t want to pursue a medical doctorate. A multimodal, diverse skill set is really important to think outside the box of what it means to be a typical pre-med student, to move to being something more creative and unique.
Q: My last question is a little more personal to you. What do you like about advising for the Health and Medical Sciences minor?
A: I love the energy that students bring. The HMED minor requirements are flexible, diverse and very interdisciplinary – similar to the Neuroscience major. We have students taking classes in science, bioethics, and any of the College of Sciences programs. I love seeing the diversity of classes that they pull together and the interesting things that they’re doing. And I think that the freedom to explore these interdisciplinary courses is important. They really choose their own adventure to complete the minor.
Just to show how varied the minor is, you could complete the HMED minor and not take a single class that is a pre-requisite for medical school. If you’re a neuroscience student also interested in physics and psychology, you could take those courses through the minor, none of which will serve as pre-health requirements. So, people can cater the minor to what their future path may be.
]]>Editor: Audra Davidson
Science Communications
College of Sciences
Pre-Health at Tech:
prehealth.gatech.edu
From the moment Charles Winter stepped onto campus freshman year, he was ready to use his time at Georgia Tech to prepare for a pre-health career. Over the next four years, engaging classes, global study, extracurricular activities, and research with a number of supportive professors paved the way for his current career as an anesthesiologist assistant.
At Georgia Tech, Winter shares that while success was a struggle, through studying in the Library and leaning on the support of professors and peers, he successfully entered graduate school and kick-started his career. He shares with the College of Sciences how he did it all – and what he’s up to today.
Here are Winter’s recommendations for “How to Pre-Health” at Georgia Tech:
Q: What degree did you receive from Georgia Tech and when did you graduate? Where did you go to graduate school after graduation?
A: I received my Bachelor of Science in Biology from Georgia Tech in 2012. I attended South University in Savannah, Georgia and graduated with my Master of Medical Science in Anesthesia in 2016.
Q: What were your extracurricular activities at Georgia Tech?
A: I did Crew my first year, and I spent a good amount of time at the Campus Recreation Center. I really enjoyed it, but I eventually decided to do intramural sports instead. I studied abroad in London for a full year after that (doing undergraduate research and taking classes) at the University College of London. I received the STAR award, a scholarship found via the Office of Internal Education, in 2010 for a project called "Keeping a Tab on Hope," where I would locally source tabs from cans to upcycle while raising awareness on lowering one's carbon footprint. My third and fourth year I did undergraduate research for various labs: professor Francesca Storici in 2011, professor Philip Santangelo in 2011, and professor J. Todd Streelman in 2012.
Q: Why did you decide to pursue a pre-health career at Georgia Tech?
A: I was pre-health from the moment I stepped onto campus. I planned out all the prerequisites I'd need to take over the next four years as well as relevant extracurriculars and service projects. I had a plan, but I didn't have a mission. “What's the primary reason why you're doing all this work? Will this career path make you happy? Are you doing this because all your peers are as well?” These were hard questions I had to answer during my time at Georgia Tech.
My early medical shadowing motivated me to continue the pre-health career. It showed me that I could make a positive impact in someone's life in real time. I would urge anyone in the pre-health career track to do medical shadowing as soon as possible.
Q: What resources did you use at Georgia Tech to support your career aspirations, such as clubs, advisors, or professors?
A: I want to thank Paul Fincannon, assistant dean Jennifer Leavey, and associate professor Matthew Torres. Without these individuals, I wouldn't be where I am today. Paul Fincannon was my undergraduate advisor for biomedical engineering. He had a candid conversation with me, telling me if I wanted to pursue my pre-health goals, I needed to adjust my trajectory to hit that target. I took his advice, and I changed my major to biology. My undergraduate advisor for biology was assistant dean Jennifer Leavey. She was a wealth of knowledge throughout my remaining years at Georgia Tech. She opened the doors to medical shadowing at Piedmont Hospital, where I learned about the various programs for anesthesiologist assistants. Finally, associate Professor Torres offered me advice and a position in his lab during the time between graduation from Georgia Tech and entrance into the South University anesthesia program.
Q: What role do you hold today, and what does your typical routine look like?
A: I am an anesthesiologist assistant, and I work at a hospital in the metro Atlanta area. I work as part of a “4-1 care team model,” where an anesthesiologist supervises four anesthetists in the clinical care setting. My shift can vary, depending on the department I'm assigned to that day. I'll do anesthesia for neurovascular, orthopedic, abdominal, and other various cases. In the morning we prepare for our first case with our anesthesiologist, discussing the various aspects of our anesthesia care plan, which is tailored to each patient. We're in the operating room or procedural area during the whole time anesthesia is administered, and we finally hand off to the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) or relevant post-procedure care area when the case is complete. You get to see your positive impact on patients every day, and it's such a good feeling.
Q: How did Georgia Tech prepare you for your career?
A: Georgia Tech is tough. I had classmates that could breeze through undergrad with straight A's. That definitely wasn't me. I had to work hard for my grades. I spent a majority of my evenings and weekends in the Library or Student Commons studying. Georgia Tech increased my mental fortitude by making me comfortable under stressful situations. I realized early on that if I wanted to have a career in medicine, and finally, anesthesia. then I had to work as hard as I possibly could now to do that.
You realize when you get into college the terrifying truth that you're responsible for your future. You have to schedule your activities and parties around your studies, and you have to plan both short-term and long-term. Georgia Tech helped me become a self-motivated individual. Talk to the teachers. Talk to the teaching assistants. Ask for help from your classmates. I want to thank senior academic professional Edwin Greco for getting me through physics. He and his teaching assistants were amazing, and they took the time to explain everything to me during office hours. All of the College's resources are there, but you have to want to use them.
Q: What advice do you have for current Georgia Tech pre-health students?
A: If you're doing pre-health, then you don't have to choose the “hardest” major. I made it into anesthesia as a biology student. You just have to perform really well in your prerequisites. Most (not all) parties and events can wait. Allocate your time wisely. You may think you have all the time in the world in undergrad, but it has a way of disappearing rather quickly. Finally, take advantage of every single opportunity you can at Georgia Tech, whether it's an undergraduate advisor or research position.
Q: What are some of your favorite Tech memories?
A: I did write President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough when I was in undergrad, asking him for advice and what he liked the most about his time there. He had recently left Georgia Tech to start his position as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. I was more than surprised to find he not only read my letter, but he also wrote back! He said that it's the people there that have made it the amazing institution it is today, and he encouraged me to work hard. That letter motivated me along with the individuals previously mentioned.
I also was an extra for “The Internship” when they were filming on campus, and I got into the final cut of the film! I'm in one of the Quidditch scenes, cheering on some of the players. That was pretty fun.
Overall, Georgia Tech played a major role in who I am today, and I am grateful for that.
Winter spoke about his experience as a frontline healthcare worker to the Alumni Magazine in their On The Front Lines of A Pandemic feature.
]]>Editor: Audra Davidson
Science Communications
College of Sciences
Pre-Health at Tech:
prehealth.gatech.edu
You can read more about the project here.
]]>"The Institute's strategic plan asks us to envision an institution that leverages its unmatched scale and resources to address the most crucial challenges of our time,” Cimilluca said. “I see the Institute's sustainability plan as one of the many pathways for collaboration, innovation, and action that will lead us toward transformations in research, applied technologies, culture, and ultimately a more sustainable future."
Georgia Tech first celebrated Earth Day in 1997. For many years the celebration was a one-day, afternoon event. In 2020, it was expanded but held virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Held in person last year, the event featured The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design’s Living Building Certification by the International Living Futures Organization, and President Cabrera cut the ribbon for the grand opening of the EcoCommons. These two areas on campus represent Georgia Tech’s commitment to sustainability and serve as living, learning laboratories for students, faculty, and staff.
Event co-chairs Anne Rogers, associate director of the Office of Campus Sustainability, and Emma Brodzik, campus sustainability project manager, have planned a strong lineup of events for this 25th anniversary. From a bike ride with President Cabrera, to a waste audit of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, to a bird walk and tree planting, this year’s “Down to Earth” event offers many opportunities to celebrate nature and learn about new and innovative ways to protect and preserve our planet.
As is the tradition, this year’s theme and logo were chosen from a student design contest. The winner, Abhinav Thukral, is a graduate student in human and computer interaction. “I think it’s incredibly important to be aware of how our activities affect the planet and to learn sustainable ways to progress as a community,” Thukral said. “Earth Day is essential to reflect on some of the environmental issues we face today and how we might work together to address them.”
Students have often requested to work with campus operations to manifest positive environmental change by engaging with the staff of Infrastructure and Sustainability. This unit is responsible for providing sustainable, safe, and well-maintained campus facilities. For example, recent Carbon Reduction Challenge winners aided in implementing the replacement of existing fluorescent lighting with LED in a wing of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience building. By working with the Building Engineering and Energy Strategies department, this improvement will yield more than 250,000 pounds of carbon dioxide reduction per year. Another area where students are proactive is recycling. When the need for acrylic shields lessened as the intensity of the pandemic waned, student volunteers from the Office of Minority Education assisted campus staff in collecting 800 pounds of acrylic and PVC for recycling.
These types of student-led collaborative efforts are encouraged. If your organization or class would like to collaborate with Infrastructure and Sustainability, use this form to get started.
]]>Institute Communications
]]>Protein function heavily depends on their three-dimensional structure, and researchers around the world have long endeavored to answer a seemingly simple inquiry to bridge function and form: if you know the building blocks of these molecular machines, can you predict how they are assembled into their functional shape?
This question is not so easy to answer. With complex structures dependent on intricate physical interactions, researchers have turned to artificial neural network models – mathematical frameworks that convert complex patterns into numerical representations – to predict and “see” the shape of proteins in 3D.
In a new paper published in Nature Communications, researchers at Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Laboratory build upon one such model, AlphaFold 2, to not only predict the biologically active conformation of individual proteins, but also of functional protein pairings known as complexes.
The work could help researchers bypass lengthy experiments to study the structure and interactions of protein complexes on a large scale, said Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor and Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and one of the corresponding authors of the study, adding that computational models such as these could mean big things for the field.
If these new computational models are successful, Skolnick said, “it could fundamentally change the way biological molecular systems are studied.”
Primed for Protein Prediction
Created by London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, AlphaFold 2 is a deep learning neural network model designed to predict the three-dimensional structure of a single protein given its amino acid sequence. Skolnick and fellow corresponding author, Mu Gao, senior research scientist in the School of Biological Sciences, shared that the Alphafold 2 program was highly successful in blind tests occurring at the 14th iteration of the Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction, or CASP14, a bi-annual competition where researchers around the globe gather to put their computational models to the test.
“To us, what is striking about AlphaFold 2 is that it not only makes excellent predictions on individual protein domains (the basic structural or functional modules of a protein sequence), but it also performs very well on protein sequences composed of multiple domains,” Skolnick shared. And so with the ability to predict the structure of these complicated, multi-domain proteins, the research team set out to determine if the program could go a little further.
“The physical interactions between different [protein] domains of the same sequence are essentially the same as the interactions gluing different proteins together,” Gao explained. “It quickly became clear that relatively simple modifications to AlphaFold 2 could allow it predict the structural models of a protein complex.” To explore different strategies, Davi Nakajima An, a fourth-year undergraduate in the School of Computer Science, was recruited to join the team’s effort.
Instead of plugging in the features of just one protein sequence into AlphaFold 2 per its original design, the researchers joined the input features of multiple protein sequences together. Combined with new metrics to evaluate the strength of interactions among probed proteins, their new program AF2Complex was created.
Charting New Territory
To put AF2Complex to the test, the researchers partnered with the high-performance computing center, Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE), at Georgia Tech, and charged the model with predicting the structures of protein complexes it had never seen before. The modified program was able to correctly predict the structure of over twice as many protein complexes as a more traditional method called docking. While AF2Complex only needs protein sequences as input, docking relies on knowing individual protein structures beforehand to predict their combined structure based on complementary shapes.
“Encouraged by these promising results, we extended this idea to an even bigger problem, which is to predict interactions among multiple arbitrarily chosen proteins, e.g., in a simple case, two arbitrary proteins,” shared Skolnick.
In addition to predicting the structure of protein complexes, AF2Complex was charged with identifying which of over 500 pairs of proteins were able to form a complex at all. Using newly designed metrics, AF2Complex outperformed conventional docking methods and AlphaFold 2 in identifying which of the arbitrary pairs were known to experimentally interact.
To test AF2Complex on the proteome scale, which encompasses an organism’s entire library of the proteins that can be expressed, the researchers turned to the Summit Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, the world’s second largest supercomputing center. “Thanks to this resource, we were able to apply AF2Complex to about 7,000 pairs of proteins from the bacteria E. coli,” Gao shared.
In that test, the team’s new model not only identified many pairs of proteins known to form complexes, but it was able to provide insights into interactions “suspected but never observed experimentally,” Gao said.
Digging deeper into these interactions revealed a potential molecular mechanism for protein complexes that are particularly important for energy transport. These protein complexes are known to carry hemes, essential metabolites giving blood dark red color. Using AF2Complex’s predicted structural models, Jerry M. Parks, a senior research and development staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a collaborator in the study, was able to place hemes at their suspected reaction sites within the structure. “These computational models now provide insights into the molecular mechanisms for how this biomolecular system works,” Gao said.
“Deep learning is changing the way one studies a biological system,” Skolnick added. “We envision methods like AF2Complex will become powerful tools for any biologist who would like to understand molecular mechanisms of a biosystem involving protein interactions.”
AF2Complex is an open-source tool available to the public and can be downloaded here.
This work was supported in part by the DOE Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (DOE DE-SC0021303) and the Division of General Medical Sciences of the National Institute Health (NIH R35GM118039). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29394-2
]]>Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
“Our annual celebration is a welcomed tradition in the College,” shared Susan Lozier, dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair. “As we greet new members of faculty, recognize excellence and service in research and teaching, and affirm our special community of staff and faculty, we thank the generous alumni and friends who help make these awards possible.”
In addition to annual awards honoring faculty development and mentoring, this year’s ceremony featured new accolades for staff members, made possible by funding from the Betsy Middleton and John Sutherland Dean’s Chair endowment — as well as a trio of awards recognizing exceptional contributions from postdoctoral fellows and research scientists, established through the advocacy of the College’s Research Faculty Advisory Council.
The Cullen-Peck Fellowship Awards, established by Frank Cullen (‘73 Math, MS ‘76 ISyE, PhD ‘84 ISyE) and Elizabeth (Libby) Peck (‘75 Math, MS ‘76 ISyE), to recognize mid-career faculty pursuing highly innovative research:
Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev, associate professor, Psychology
Molei Tao, associate professor, Mathematics
Pamela Peralta-Yahya, associate professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Gretzinger Moving Forward Award, endowed by Ralph Gretzinger (‘70 Math) and named to honor his late wife Jewel, recognizing the leadership of school chairs and senior faculty members who have played a pivotal role in diversifying faculty composition, creating a family friendly work environment, and providing a supportive culture for junior faculty:
Greg Huey, chair and school professor, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
The Eric R. Immel Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, endowed by Charles Crawford (‘71 Math) to recognize exemplary teaching in lower-division foundational courses by faculty in the early stages of their career — and to honor a late faculty member in the School of Mathematics, professor Eric R. Immel, who greatly influenced Crawford’s undergraduate experience at Tech:
Alonzo Whyte, academic professional in Biological Sciences, academic advisor for the Health and Medical Sciences (HMED) Minor, and director of academic advising for the Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience
Peter Yunker, assistant professor, Physics
The Leddy Family Dean’s Faculty Excellence Award, established by Jeff Leddy (’78 Physics) and Pam Leddy to support a faculty member at the associate professor level with proven accomplishments in research and teaching:
William (Will) Ratcliff, associate professor in Biological Sciences and director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program
The Faculty Mentor Award, established jointly by the College of Sciences and the Georgia Tech ADVANCE Program and presented to exemplary senior faculty who help new faculty advance in their careers as they learn to balance their roles as researchers, teachers, and advisors to their own graduate students and postdoctoral researchers:
Sung Ha Kang, professor, Mathematics
Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, professor and associate chair, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Loren Williams, professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Outstanding Junior Research Faculty Award and Outstanding Senior Research Faculty Award recognize postdoctoral and non-tenure track research faculty who have made exceptional research contributions with significant impact on their field of study:
Outstanding Junior Research Faculty Award
Gina R. Lewin, postdoctoral fellow in Marvin Whiteley’s research group, Biological Sciences
Outstanding Senior Research Faculty Award
Anton S. Petrov, research scientist II and co-investigator of the Center for the Origins of Life in Loren Williams’ research group, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Research Faculty Community Trailblazer Award recognizes postdoctoral and non-tenure track research faculty who have demonstrated exceptional and sustained leadership that strengthens and improves the research faculty community:
Micah J. Schaible, research scientist II in Thomas (Thom) Orlando’s research group, Electron and Photon Induced Chemistry on Surfaces (EPICS) Lab, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The newly established Exceptional Staff Member Award and Staff Excellence Awards recognize staff who exemplify outstanding performance above and beyond the call of duty — positively impacting the strategic goals of their department and the College, consistently providing excellent service within their school or the overall College, and demonstrating exemplary teamwork:
Exceptional Staff Member Award
Jasmine Martin, assistant to the chair, Biological Sciences
Staff Excellence Awards
Katrine Pate, grants administrator, Physics
Lea Marzo, assistant to the chair, Mathematics
Stacey Bass, grants administrator lead, Psychology and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Steven Daniele, IT support engineer senior, Academic & Research Computing Services (ARCS)
The inaugural Leadership in Action Staff Award and Excellence in Leadership Staff Awards recognize staff who have made exceptional contributions to the College through innovative and strategic leadership, change management, business process improvement, special project leadership, and similar accomplishments:
Leadership in Action Staff Award
Kimberly Stanley, assistant director of business operations, Mathematics
Excellence in Leadership Staff Awards
Kathy Sims-McDaniels, development assistant in the Dean’s Office and chair of College of Sciences Staff Advisory Council
John Wallom, associate director of IT Operations, ARCS
The College also recognized and welcomed a trio of new faculty members who arrived on campus this school year:
Onur Birol, academic professional, Biological Sciences
Tansu Celikel, professor and school chair, Psychology
Shelby Ellis, lecturer, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
The 2022 Spring Sciences Celebration program can be found here, and high-resolution photos can be downloaded here.
]]>When Georgia Tech VentureLab program directors Melissa Heffner and Sara Martin Henderson noticed that a disproportionately low number of women were showing up to their entrepreneurial programs, they decided to address the issue with an experiment. The duo knew that students learned best when they felt represented by their instructors, leading them to create an entrepreneurial program geared specifically for women and led by female entrepreneurs and coaches.
The Female Founders program, a five-week cohort experience, debuted at Georgia Tech in the fall of 2020.
“We had a hunch that women in our programming wanted to be surrounded by other like-minded women and coached by female mentors with whom they could relate,” said Heffner. “After the first cohort, we heard that sentiment validated by many of our participants.”
Female Founders is open to startup teams that are founded or co-founded by women, with 25 chosen for each cohort. The program is open to Georgia Tech students, community teams, and researchers from other institutions in the United States.
The programming assesses the relative strengths of each of the participants and seeks to highlight their advantages as individuals and as part of a team. Cohort members work to cultivate those skills in an array of entrepreneurial environments. Teams also receive feedback on their work from mentors and peers within the program, while attending lectures on topics such as customer discovery and innovation.
Participants may attend the Female Founders Speaker Series each month, where Heffner and Henderson bring in successful women entrepreneurs and leaders, as well as program alumni, to speak about their areas of expertise.
Applications for the next cohort are due by April 7, with each team getting a boost from a successful female entrepreneur with Georgia Tech ties.
This past fall, Heffner and Henderson were contacted by Audrey McLoghlin, a graduate of Georgia Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and founder of luxury clothing company Frank & Eileen. After receiving B CORP certification in December 2020, McLoghlin’s company pledged to donate $10 million over 10 years to support the female leaders of tomorrow.
After meeting with Heffner and Henderson, McLoghlin gave a $125,000 gift to the Female Founders program, with the funds directly intended to help female entrepreneurs.
"When COVID put us into quarantine I suddenly found myself with a very rare resource: time. With that extra time, we pursued B CORP certification," McLoghlin said. "Much to my surprise, we received the 2nd highest impact score among globally recognized fashion brands in the US, second only to Patagonia. This inspired me to make a Giving Pledge to support the female leaders of tomorrow."
McLoghlin's gift will allow each of the 25 teams in the next cohort to receive $5,000 to explore their customers’ needs, research the market for their product or service, or travel to meet with potential consumers.
“The donation from Frank & Eileen will change the way that we can engage with our upcoming cohort,” said Henderson. “We are still supporting them through education and community building within the program, but now we have a new opportunity to expand that support.”
In addition to the gift, VentureLab will host McLoghlin for its next Female Founders Speaker Series event on March 30.
"I became an entrepreneur when I was 25 and I had no idea what I was doing!" she said. "Without a mentor or a support network, I definitely learned things the hard way.We were over-the-moon to discover the incredible work that Melissa and Sara were doing by creating and launching the Female Founders Program. I am thrilled to have been able to partner with Georgia Tech and with the Female Founders Program to help support women in their entrepreneurial journey.”
Since launching in 2020, Female Founders has become a larger success than either Heffner or Henderson anticipated. After completing the first cohort, 10 of the original teams joined Heffner and Henderson the next semester for a follow-on program to expand upon what they already learned. Throughout 2021, Heffner and Henderson hosted another two cohorts.
“We want to create a dedicated space in each cohort for women to discuss their experiences in the workplace and as female entrepreneurs, and that is what makes the Female Founders program so unique,” said Henderson. “Our goal is to talk about how each individual, regardless of gender, can navigate these male-dominated spaces with their natural strengths and skills, which is not something the participants would necessarily find in a co-ed program.”
Allyson McKinney, a Ph.D. student in the College of Engineering’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and member of the inaugural cohort, appreciates how the program deepened her understanding of customer discovery and the ways in which her specific technology fits into different markets.
“Female Founders introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking about tech,” said McKinney. “The mentors understand how to combine deep tech ideas with market need, and can then communicate that effectively to a customer. It’s an art, a science, and a business strategy.”
Mourin Jarin, a Ph.D. student in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering who joined McKinney in the first cohort, also highlighted customer discovery as one of the most important things she learned during her time with the program.
“The Female Founders program introduced me to mentors who have helped guide and introduce me to other programs and competitions, both inside Georgia Tech and external,” said Jarin. “I was chosen to participate in the NSF I-Corps program last fall on Melissa’s recommendation, and the women entrepreneurs and mentors I’ve met through the program serve as an invaluable network, providing feedback and support for the start-up efforts in my lab.”
Yana Bebieva, a postdoctoral fellow in the College of Science’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and a member of the fall 2021 group, says the program helped her to improve her active listening and technical communication skills.
“Through the program, I gained confidence with presenting my research, especially to customers and laypeople, and learned how to more effectively communicate a big-picture view of a problem,” said Bebieva.
LaVonda Brown, founder and CEO of EyeGage, earned her MBA from the Scheller College of Business in 2020 after receiving her master’s and Ph.D. from ECE. She participated in the first cohort, then stayed for the follow-up program in the spring. She said Female Founders helped her add various skill sets to her entrepreneurial toolbox, such as customer discovery and effective communication.
“The program gave us a safe space to discuss the biases that female founders face in male-dominated tech environments,” said Brown. “We were given time to talk about issues we were facing in our field, as well as learning healthy ways to respond when facing adversity.”
For Heffner and Henderson, the most rewarding part of building up the Female Founders program was the space they created for women to explore different options for their future.
“In our program, we have so many engineers, inventors, scientists, and leaders seeking the right pathway for their leadership skills,” said Henderson. “The program has given them the autonomy to take their intelligence and capabilities and just run with it to create and innovate.”
41 College of Sciences faculty have won Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: CIOS Awards based on student evaluations during the annual Course Instructor Opinion Survey (CIOS). Eight faculty are the recipients of CTL Faculty Teaching Awards.
The CIOS honors, given for the full calendar year, are based on student-provided CIOS responses about their instructor's “respect and concern for students, level of enthusiasm about teaching the course, and ability to stimulate interest in the subject matter.”
“It's impressive to see the many ways that faculty in the College of Sciences are contributing to student learning at Georgia Tech,” says Joyce Weinsheimer, CTL director. “The College’s award-winning teachers are excelling in the classroom, laboratory instruction, co-curricular education, online teaching, academic outreach, and the scholarship of teaching. They are providing exciting learning environments and experiences to students on our campus and beyond.”
College of Sciences recipients of the “2022 Faculty Teaching Awards” include:
CTL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award
Neha Garg, assistant professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Faculty Award for Academic Outreach
James R. Sowell, principal academic professional, School of Physics, and director of the Georgia Tech Observatory
Geoffrey G. Eichholz Faculty Teaching Award
Michael Evans, First-year Chemistry Laboratory coordinator, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Christie N. Stewart, senior academic professional, School of Biological Sciences
Innovation and Excellence in Laboratory Instruction Award
Christy O’Mahony, laboratory coordinator for Analytical and Physical Chemistry, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Innovation in Co-Curricular Education
Jake D. Soper, associate professor and associate chair for Operations, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award
Emily G. Weigel, senior academic professional, School of Biological Sciences
Teaching Excellence Award for Online Teaching
Michael Evans, First-year Chemistry Laboratory coordinator, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
College of Sciences faculty honored with “Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: CIOS Awards” include:
Small Classes:
Gary (Michael) Lavigne, visiting assistant professor, School of Mathematics; and assistant director of Communication, Education and Outreach for the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology
Dan Margalit, professor, School of Mathematics
Melinda (Mindy) Millard-Stafford, professor, School of Biological Sciences
Large Classes:
Meghan Babcock, academic professional and lecturer, School of Psychology
Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev, associate professor, School of Psychology
College of Sciences “Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Honor Roll” Awardees:
Small Classes:
School of Biological Sciences — Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair of Research; Lin Jiang, professor; Melinda (Mindy) Millard-Stafford, professor; Emily Weigel, senior academic professional
School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences — Sven Simon, associate professor; Samantha Wilson, academic professional; James Wray, associate professor
School of Mathematics — Neha Gupta, academic professional and director of Scheduling; Gary (Michael) Lavigne, visiting assistant professor, School of Mathematics; and assistant director of Communication, Education and Outreach for the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology; Dan Margalit, professor; John Olinde, Ph.D. student
Neuroscience — Timothy Cope, professor
School of Psychology — Lizanne DeStefano, professor and Center for Education Integrating Science, Math, and Computing (CEISMC) executive director; Ruth Kanfer, professor; Dianne Leader, lecturer
Large Classes:
School of Biological Sciences — Adam Decker, senior academic professional and director of Anatomical Sciences; Colin Harrison, senior academic professional; Emily Weigel, senior academic professional
School of Chemistry and Biochemistry — Amit Reddi, associate professor; J. Cameron Tyson, principal academic professional and College of Sciences assistant dean for Academic Programs
School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences — Heather Chilton, remote laboratory support; Zachary Handlos, academic professional
School of Mathematics — Neha Gupta, academic professional and director of Scheduling; Sung Ha Kang, professor; Siddhi Krishna, former NSF Research Training Groups (RTG) postdoctoral associate; Miriam Kuzbary, NSF postdoctoral fellow; Gary (Michael) Lavigne, visiting assistant professor, School of Mathematics; and assistant director of Communication, Education and Outreach for the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology; Michael Loss, professor; Gregory Mayer, academic professional and director of Online Learning
Neuroscience — Christina Ragan, lecturer and director of Outreach for the B.S. in Neuroscience program; Alonzo Whyte, academic professional, advisor for the Health and Medical Sciences (HMED) Minor, and director of Academic Advising for the B.S. in Neuroscience program
School of Psychology — Meghan Babcock, academic professional; Dianne Leader, lecturer; Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev, associate professor; Christopher Stanzione, senior lecturer, associate chair for Undergraduate Studies in Psychology; Christopher Weise, assistant professor
Learn more about the Center for Teaching and Learning at Georgia Tech.
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Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>A group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology is tackling this complex, multi-layered problem, and they describe their latest work in a recent edition of the journal Cancer Research. Their results blur the line between nature and nurture, providing a potential link between the genetic and environmental contributions to cancer health disparities.
“When you think about race and ethnicity, those are socially ascribed categories, based on cultural expectations and norms” said King Jordan, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and principal investigator of the study. The lead author was Kara Keun Lee, a graduate student advised by both Jordan and cancer researcher John McDonald, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a co-author of the study.
So while they approached the work with the understanding that race and ethnicity are not genetic or biological categories, Jordan said the researchers also are aware that health outcomes are a combination of the genetic and biological, with the social and environmental. “And we’re very interested in that interplay,” Jordan said. “But this particular study is focused on the idea of using genetic ancestry as a means to drill down to the underlying molecular biology – the mechanisms that contribute to these survival disparities.”
Genetic ancestry, a characteristic of the genome, refers to genomic similarities based on shared ancestors, which can be defined objectively and with precision, “independent of the social dimensions of race and ethnicity,” Jordan added.
And it turns out, the mechanisms behind cancer survival disparities have plenty to do with the environmental impacts on gene expression, and not on ancestry-related differences.
The research was a collaboration of the Jordan and McDonald labs at Georgia Tech, blending the two labs’ experience in multi-omics biological analysis with Lee’s biostatistics skills, together with Dr. Leonardo Mariño-Ramírez, head of Genomic and Epidemiology Sciences at the NIH’s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, which helped fund the study.
The key to analyzing all of the multi-omics and cancer survival data was Lee. Though she’s pursuing her Ph.D. in the Georgia Tech Bioinformatics Graduate Program, Lee’s background as both a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an Emory University student, is in biostatistics.
While bioinformatics is generally concerned more with collecting and analyzing complex biological and genomics data, biostatistics is focused on broad, bigger-picture biological data to address public health issues. So, for example, when you read that cancer mortality rates have decreased 27%, that’s the work of a biostatistician.
“We would not have been able to do this study without Kara’s expertise in biostatistics,” Jordan said. “She brings experience as a statistical epidemiologist in health outcomes to our team. One of the really exciting things as a Ph.D. advisor is when you can get a student like Kara that can potentially change the direction of your lab.”
Lee previously led a study that utilized the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genome Atlas to analyze 33 cancers and 9,818 patients. The team identified four cancer types with significant survival disparity.
“The survival disparities were more stark and more obvious when we looked at genetic ancestry as opposed to self-identified race and ethnicity,” said Lee, whose computational tools built a compelling body of evidence showing that nature might actually be nurture.
The researchers’ findings point to epigenetic mechanisms – not genetics – as the primary culprit in cancer survival disparities. Epigenetic changes, which can alter the structure of DNA and affect how genes are expressed, can be heavily influenced by the environment around us or the food that we eat.
“The thing about epigenetic changes is that they can be inherited, passed down to future generations,” said McDonald. “That includes the propensity for cancer. But that’s the other thing about these epigenetic changes. They don’t unalterably change DNA structure. They’re reversible. It isn’t permanent.”
One of the most interesting discoveries of the study, the researchers agreed, was what they didn’t find – there were no ancestry-related differences in the DNA they analyzed that contributed to survival disparities. Rather, it was epigenetically induced changes in gene expression that were associated with differences in cancer survival between populations.
“That means the environment may actually change how genes are expressed,” said Jordan. “Following that epigenetic trail, or at least the logic of it, looking at how genes and the environment interact to shape health disparities will be a big focus of my lab going forward.”
CITATION: Kara K. Lee, Lavanya Rishishwar, Dongio Ban, Shashwat Nagar, Leonardo Marino-Ramírez, John F. McDonald, and I. King Jordan. “Association of Genetic Ancestry and Molecular Signatures with Cancer Survival Disparities: a Pan-Cancer Analysis.” (Cancer Research)
https://doi.org/10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-21-2105
FUNDING: Lee, Rishishwar, and Nagar were supported by the IHRC-Georgia Tech Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory (Atlanta, GA; grant no. RF383). Marino-Ramírez was supported by the NIH Distinguished Scholars Program and the Division of Intramural Research (DIR) of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (Grant Nos. 1ZIAMD000016 and 1ZIAMD000018). Ban was supported by the Ovarian Cancer Institute. McDonald was supported by the Ovarian Cancer Institute, Deborah Nash Endowment, and Northside Hospital Research Foundation.
About Georgia Institute of Technology
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 44,000 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.
]]>The Applied Physiology Ph.D. program, part of the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences, focuses primarily on the physical and neural function of the human motor system. “Because of that,” explains T. Richard Nichols, Biological Sciences professor and head of Applied Physiology, “rehabilitation has always been a very strong theme in our program.”
That deeper focus on rehabilitation sciences is now formalized by the creation of the Jack and Dana McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program. The new initiative is the result of a $1 million gift from Dana and Jack McCallum (BIO ’66) that will be used over the next four years to support graduate student and faculty research, as well as train new scientists in neurorehabilitation.
Emory University School of Medicine, where Jack McCallum received his M.D., will be a close partner in developing the program. A course designed to train graduate students in clinical neurorehabilitation will be taught at the school in addition to collaborating closely in research funded by the investment.
“This gift is really going to strengthen the tie between specifically Biological Sciences and the Emory University School of Medicine, which was the intention of the gift,” explains Biological Sciences professor and associate chair of faculty development Young-Hui Chang. “I think it’s going to provide one more, but very strong, avenue for collaboration between the two institutions.”
Refocusing on rehabilitation
With a clinical focus, research funded through the program will target aspects of rehabilitation for people who have neurological diseases like Parkinson disease — or trauma, such as a spinal cord or brain injury.
The investment will also drive new major research focused on understanding the neurophysiological basis for injury and recovery related to central and peripheral nervous system trauma, and on the preclinical development of potential therapies.
“As people survive and live longer with acquired conditions such as stroke and Parkinson disease, and with traumatic injuries such as brain and spinal cord injury, there is a tremendous demand for rehabilitation researchers to meet needs of the large and growing population of persons with neurologic conditions,” explains Edelle Field-Fote, a professor with joint appointments in the Emory University School of Medicine and Applied Physiology at Georgia Tech, who also serves as director of spinal cord injury research at the Shepherd Center. “The goal of the McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program is to help address this need. The program will develop rehabilitation scientists with the training to advance knowledge underlying clinical care and the skills to develop interventions that can reduce disability, thereby improving functioning and quality of life for persons with neurologic conditions.”
Research and practice in motion
The Applied Physiology graduate program is no stranger to clinical research and development, having served as home of a clinical master’s degree in prosthetics and orthotics, which migrated to Kennesaw State University in 2020, and also hosting a training grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH), funding students whose research focused on rehabilitation for persons with limb loss. In 2018, Applied Physiology launched a dual Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Physical Therapy degree program in collaboration with the Division of Physical Therapy at Emory University, with Field-Fote as its director.
"Emory University’s Division of Physical Therapy greatly values our collaborations with Georgia Tech and its Applied Physiology program,” shares Tami Phillips, associate professor and interim program director of the Division of Physical Therapy. “The opportunity for Ph.D. students to work in research labs across institutions and D.P.T/Ph.D. students to bridge the gap between clinical neurorehabilitation practice and research will lead to innovations that will benefit individuals with neurologic conditions.”
As Nichols points out, these ties between research and the clinic build a solid foundation for the new training program. “Our faculty in Applied Physiology are used to dealing with clinical collaborators and clinical problems, but we're working more at a fundamental level in terms of the science. It really provides a nice environment for this training program and will help move us into a new area of neurorehabilitation.”
New funding for current graduate students in Applied Physiology, as well as those enrolling in the dual Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Physical Therapy program, is set to begin this year. Targeted toward advanced students, the efforts are expected to allow the Applied Physiology program to admit more new students and to award competitive McCallum Research Fellowships to help fund thesis research after they reach Ph.D. candidacy.
“I am so grateful to Dana and Jack McCallum for their foresight and generosity,” shares Field-Fote. “I am most excited by the great potential that this program has for advancing the clinical care and foundational sciences related to neurorehabilitation.”
For more information on the Applied Physiology program or the Jack and Dana McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program, contact Young-Hui Chang at yh.chang@ap.gatech.edu.
For more information on how to support the School of Biological Sciences or the Applied Physiology Program, contact Leslie Roberts at leslie.roberts@cos.gatech.edu and visit: cos.gatech.edu/giving
]]>Georgia Institute of Technology students, faculty, and staff are proudly taking part in the 2022 ACCelerate Festival, a celebration of creative exploration and innovative research happening at the intersection of science, engineering, arts, and design. Featuring teams from universities and colleges across the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and the Smithsonian Institution, the Festival promotes cutting-edge creative work from a new generation of thinkers. This year’s event, to be held April 8 – 10, 2022, will be the third time the ACC institutions have gathered in DC, and Georgia Tech is honored to have been represented at each Festival to date.
“The ACCelerate Festival is an opportunity to showcase the incredible possibilities that await us at the intersection of art and technology,” said Georgia Tech Provost Steve McLaughlin. “We are proud to once again send teams from Georgia Tech and participate alongside our ACC peers. The arts have an undeniable power to teach, heal, and transform us, and this festival gives great visibility and a new way to experience the innovative and impactful education and research that is taking place on our campuses each day.”
The two Georgia Tech teams participating in the 2022 ACCelerate Festival come from the School of Architecture at the College of Design, and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Georgia Tech’s participation in ACCelerate is managed by Georgia Tech Arts, a department in the Division of Student Engagement and Well-Being.
Walking in the Footsteps of History
On March 7, 1965, at the south side of Edmund Pettus Bridge, armed State Troopers attacked peaceful civil rights activists attempting to march to the state capital of Montgomery in an incident that became known as Bloody Sunday. Despite access to vivid archival material, little interpretation addresses the physical context and experiential timeline. To digitally record this significant civil rights site and to make the specific context of the event more experientially engaging to the public, this project’s multidisciplinary team of designers, architectural historians, civil rights historians, cultural resource managers, and construction technology specialists are pairing collected 3D digital data of Selma’s extant structures with digital reconstructions to recreate the site.
By melding the physical and virtual, Walking in the Footsteps of History presents a broader understanding of the events of 1965 in and around Selma through enhanced historic interpretation by animating famous photographs through immersive visualization, creating interactive digital platforms for exploring fragile archival content such as the Good Samaritan Hospital logbook, and affording virtual tours where visitors can safely explore the Bloody Sunday conflict site that is bordered by a busy highway.
The team is led by Danielle Willkens, assistant professor, School of Architecture, who commented “This project has encompassed more than 6 years’ work with civil rights foot soldiers and their descendants with the intention of enabling visitors to translate the visceral experience to an understanding of the tenets of what was being advocated for - voting rights and civil rights – in the 1960’s through present time.”
Participating staff include Aaron Shackleford, director of Georgia Tech Arts. Georgia Tech student researchers include Simran Bajaj, Thomas Bray, Sydnee Henry, Carly Langsdorf, Sean Li, Sakshi Nanda, So Min Park, Patricia J. Rangel, Aishwarya Somasundaram, Christian Waweru, and Eden Wright. This project is the result of an ongoing collaboration with Junshan Liu, associate professor at Auburn University's McWhorter School of Building Science and Georgia Tech Visiting Scholar and the Auburn University team including faculty (R. Burt, K. Hébert, and E. Gaddis) and students (C. Brown, A. Davis, M. Gibbs, and S. Page). The team is currently completing a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, sponsored by a National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant.
Visit the ACCelerate website for more information about the team’s work and exhibition.
Heart Sense
“How can the very creation, rendering, and experiencing of biological data contribute to a more nuanced understanding of our bodies?” This is the question at the heart of this project. Heart Sense is a series of installations that visualize biometric data such as heart rate and breath as participants engage in a variety of listening and viewing activities. Our bodies are often conceived as separate autonomous entities, disjoint from the physical and social environments that they inhabit while in fact we are deeply connected with the material and social world around us.
The first installation tracks a participant’s heart rate, galvanic skin response, and breathing as they watch a short, emotionally engaging video. This data input produces flower-like visualizations that illustrate the physiological responses. The second installation engages the social dimension of embodiment through the mediation of the physical environment. Participants are invited to sit around a table and are given headphones to listen to music.
A floral visualization representing the collective heart rates of the participants will be projected onto the table, the size and the colors of each petal shifting with changes in each participant’s body. The visualization showcases how our bodies come into relation with each other and are in and of the environment, as they respond to our surrounding conditions even when we are not aware of it.
The team is led by Nassim Parvin, associate professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, who states “This project has catalyzed interdisciplinary collaboration across natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and it has been a privilege to work with talented students in imaginative world-building.”
Participating faculty include Lewis Wheaton, associate professor, Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech, and Anne Pollock, previously associate professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and now professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London. The interdisciplinary team includes post-doctoral researcher Aditya Anupam alongside Georgia Tech student researchers Pooja Casula, Shubhangi Gupta, Sylvia Janicki, Michelle Ramirez, and Mohsin Yousufi.
Visit the ACCelerate website for more information about the team’s work and exhibition.
Visit the LMC website for detailed Heart Sense documentation and Heart Sense demonstration.
Working at the Intersection of Art, Learning, and Research
“The faculty and students at Georgia Tech have embraced the role of art and creativity as a way to engage with people and share their research with a wide audience,” said Georgia Tech Arts Director Aaron Shackelford. He explains that Georgia Tech Arts selected each project because of the way they bring together art, learning and research. “Both projects show what happens when you bring art and creativity into every step of the process,” he notes, “and the results are these innovative approaches to conducting important work that can be experienced by anyone visiting the Smithsonian.” Each project also supports the well-being of the community. “Heart Sense invites us to have a better understanding of our own bodies, while Walking in the Footsteps of History pushes us to have a better understanding of our nation’s history. Both are important for cultivating the well-being of our community, which is a central goal for Georgia Tech as a whole and one of the most important benefits of the arts.”
ACCelerate is programmed by Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Hosted at the National Museum of American History, the multi-day festival is free and open to the public. The 2022 Festival features 24 projects from 12 ACC schools; the most recent Festival drew public attendance of more than 30,000.
For more information about the 2022 ACCelerate Festival, visit their website.
]]>Sigma Xi’s mission is “to enhance the health of the research enterprise, foster integrity in science and engineering, and promote the public’s understanding of science for the purpose of improving the human condition.”
Two College of Sciences researchers won the Best Faculty Paper Award:
Roman Grigoriev, professor in the School of Physics
Nga Lee (Sally) Ng, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences with a joint appointment in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Grigoriev won for the paper, “Robust learning from noisy, incomplete, high-dimensional experimental data via physically constrained symbolic regression.” The study appeared in Nature Communications.
Ng won for four papers:
“Evaluation of particle filtration efficiency of commercially available materials for homemade face mask usage,” Aerosol Science and Technology.
“In-flight particulate matter concentrations in commercial flights are likely lower than other indoor environments,” Indoor Air.
“Formation of Oxidized Gases and Secondary Organic Aerosol from a Commercial Oxidant-Generating Electronic Air Cleaner,” Environmental Science and Technology Letters.
“Room-level ventilation in schools and universities,” ChemRxiv.
Four College of Sciences graduate students are also recognized.
Best Ph.D. Thesis Awards:
Yuchen He, School of Mathematics
Advisor: Sung Ha Kang
Title: "Mathematical and data-driven pattern representation with applications in image processing, computer graphics, and infinite dimensional dynamical data mining"
Pan Liu, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Advisor: Yuanzhi Tang
Title: "Speciation and recovery of rare earth elements (REES) from coal fly ash"
Suttipong “Jay” Suttapitugsakul, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Advisor: Ronghu Wu
Title: "MS-based chemical proteomics studies of extracellular glycoproteins: identification, quantification, and dynamics"
Best M.S. Thesis Award:
Charles Ross Lindsey, School of Biological Sciences
Advisor: Frank Rosenzweig
Title: "Phylotranscriptomics points to multiple independent origins of multicellularity and cellular differentiation in the Volvocine algae"
The Sigma Xi Georgia Tech Chapter awards ceremony is scheduled for April, preceding the Georgia Tech faculty awards ceremony. Learn more.
]]>Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>“This honor is only bestowed to our most distinguished and established members,” says ASBMB president Toni Antalis. ASBMB Fellowships were established in 2020 “to recognize our members for their meritorious efforts to advance the molecular life sciences through sustained outstanding accomplishments in scientific research, education, mentorship, commitment to diversity, and service to the society and the scientific community.”
“It is an honor to be selected as a fellow of the ASBMB, an organization that was established over a hundred years ago and promotes research and training in biochemistry through newsletters, conferences and publication of several of the most highly regarded journals in the field, such as The Journal of Biological Chemistry and The Journal of Lipid Research,” Merrill says.
“We are thrilled to see Al Merrill named a ASBMB Fellow,” says Todd Streelman, professor and chair of the School of Biological Sciences. “This award acknowledges Al’s lifetime of achievement in the lab and as a mentor to his colleagues. On behalf of the School of Biological Sciences, I congratulate Al on this honor."
Merrill was nominated by George Carman, Board of Governors Professor of Food Science, and Founding Director of the Rutgers Center for Lipid Research in the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition, & Health at Rutgers University. “Al has made impressive contributions to science through both the discoveries by his laboratory and his assistance to others through service activities,” says Carman, who was named an ASBMB Fellow in 2021.
Merrill has been an IBB member since he came to Georgia Tech in fall 2001. He was an adjunct professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 2003-2016. Merrill’s Georgia Tech research affiliations include the Center for Bio-Imaging Mass Spectrometry, the Integrated Cancer Research Center, the Center for ImmunoEngineering, and the Center for Drug Design Development and Delivery.
Merrill is also a member of the Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Research Program at Emory Winship Cancer Institute.
Improving our understanding of important organic compounds
Lipids are hormones, fats, oils and waxes that store energy and act as messengers within the body. A class of lipids, sphingolipids — named after the mysterious sphinx of mythology because of their enigmatic nature to early researchers — are important in tissue development, cell structure, cell-cell communication and signal transduction (how a cell responds to substances outside the cell).
Merrill began researching sphingolipids while an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine in 1981. “I wanted to branch out from my areas of previous training, which had been on the mechanisms of action of coenzymes and glycerolipids,” he says. “The sphingoid base biosynthesis pathway looked promising because few other scientists were studying it and my background in these two areas somewhat uniquely prepared me to tackle that challenging field. It was also helpful that I like to develop new methods for analyzing biochemical processes, and one of the first things that I did was develop easier ways to study sphingoid bases and their metabolism.”
The ASBMB notes that Merrill developed quantitative methods to measure sphingolipids and was a major contributor to mass spectrometry–based lipidomics research guidance. Merrill helped determine how the lipid backbones of sphingolipids are made and how they function in cell signaling and disease.
Three research studies that Merrill conducted in 1986 detailing sphingolipids and cell signaling were designated “Classics” in 2016 by the Journal of Biological Chemistry because of their scientific influence.
Merrill is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an associate editor of the Journal of Lipid Research. He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry for 20 years.
Merrill is one of five Georgia-based scientists who received 2022 ASBMB Fellowships. The others are:
Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>Kimbrough is returning to his alma mater for the first time since living on the International Space Station (ISS) for six months in 2021. In three trips to space, he has spent 388 days away from Earth, the fourth highest total among U.S. astronauts.
The event will be moderated by Naia Butler-Craig, a Ph.D. student in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. Butler-Craig is a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellow and a NASA Pathways intern in the Science and Space Technology Systems branch at Glenn Research Center. The Q&A will be streamed live on the Georgia Tech YouTube channel, where viewers can submit questions. K-12 schools around Atlanta will also participate remotely.
The Q&A session is one of several Georgia Tech events for Kimbrough on Friday. He will spend the morning touring labs dedicated to spacecraft design and space-related research. That evening, he will throw out the first pitch at Georgia Tech’s baseball game against the University of Georgia. The action starts at 6pm at Russ Chandler Stadium.
Kimbrough grew up in Atlanta, attending Georgia Tech sporting events as a kid. He was an NCAA pitcher while earning his undergraduate degree at the United States Military Academy. After nearly a decade serving in the U.S. Army, Kimbrough graduated with a master’s degree in operations research from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE).
Kimbrough was selected to be an astronaut in 2004. His first mission was aboard space shuttle Endeavour in 2008. He returned to orbit in 2016 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, serving as commander of the ISS for six months.
Last April, Kimbrough was commander of NASA/SpaceX Crew-2, launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida. By flying on Crew Dragon, Kimbrough became the fourth person to travel on three different spacecrafts.
During his three missions, Kimbrough has taken Georgia Tech jerseys and a flag from the Ramblin’ Wreck into orbit. He also threw out the first pitch in a taped ceremony from the ISS before a 2021 Georgia Tech baseball game and recorded a message that was played during last fall’s space-themed football game.
]]>The SDGs were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They address the world’s most monumental challenges, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Some of the objectives are improved industry, innovation, and infrastructure; affordable and clean energy; and sustainable cities and communities. The SDGs appear by name in the Institute’s strategic plan as long-term goals that should guide teaching, research, and operations.
SDG Action and Awareness Week 2022 will begin with an interactive campus discussion, titled Engaging With the SDGs Across Campus, focusing on how the goals are being realized across the Institute and ways to better work together across disciplines and departments to amplify our impact. President Ángel Cabrera will moderate the discussion with participants from the College of Sciences, Serve-Learn-Sustain, Interdisciplinary Research, and Engineers Without Borders.
Other events during the week include a Tech Dining Sustainability Showcase, a panel on Infrastructure and Sustainability, Changing Relationships: You and Your Aging Parents, Toilet Talk With Shan and Shannon, A Healthy Georgia: Exploring the Impact of the Energy Transition on Public Health, the Association for Sustainable Investment Podcast Club Kickoff, and Engaging With the SDGs to Advance Sustainability in Atlanta. View a full listing of the week’s events.
In Fall 2020, a panel discussion and keynote address by Cabrera introduced the Tech community to the 17 goals. The event covered their relevance to the Institute and emphasized how Georgia Tech can lead the region in implementing and advancing these goals.
“If we are committed to improving the human condition, then we should embrace the SDGs to guide our actions as a university,” Cabrera said when introducing the SDGs.
SDG Action and Awareness Week is part of a larger global effort through the University Global Coalition, whose partners are hosting a variety of online events that are open to all.
]]>
Dr. Torres is receiving this award in recognition of his innovative research that combines genetics, mass spectrometry, and cutting-edge bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications impact protein function and cell physiology, and also in recognition of his strong commitment to teaching, mentoring and service. Dr. Torres is currently an Associate Professor in the School. He received his PhD in biochemistry and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The primary focus of Dr. Torres’s lab is to combine yeast genetics, mass spectrometry (MS) and bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications (PTMs) impact protein structure, function and cell behavior. His group studies how PTMs regulate G protein signaling pathways, with a current emphasis on the G protein gamma subunit. His lab also developed SAPH-ire (“Systematic Analysis of PTM Hotspots”), a bioinformatics tool that employs machine learning to prioritize PTMs important for protein function and provide recommendations for experimental analysis. Dr. Torres has been a member of ASPET since 2017.
The award will be presented by the Division for Molecular Pharmacology at the ASPET Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on Monday, April 4, 2022 where Dr. Torres will deliver a lecture on his research titled "From m/z to Gαβγ: Accessing the Collective Wisdom in Proteomics to Reveal Posttranslational Governors of G protein Signaling".
The talk will focus on the development of protein bioinformatic and computational tools that revealed how Gγ subunits - through phosphorylation of their intrinsically disordered N-termini - can serve as governors of Gβγ signaling.
Story adapted from:
]]>In early 2020, Georgia Tech researchers designed a saliva-based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test and encouraged community members to test weekly to track the health of the campus. Their strategy confirmed 62% of the campus’ positive cases in the Fall 2020 semester. The method of surveillance testing — focusing on case clusters and then having patients isolate — reduced positivity rates from 4.1% in the beginning of the semester to below 0.5% mid-semester. Their findings were published in the journal Epidemiology.
“One of the ways you can mitigate spread is not to think about testing as just an indicator for how bad things are, but actually use enough testing that you can begin to pull infected people out of circulation to reduce the spread,” said Joshua Weitz, Georgia Tech professor in the School of Biological Sciences who developed the infectious disease models used to monitor campus.
Surveillance testing not only kept the community safe, but also enabled an open campus during a period of the pandemic when vaccines were not available. The strategy showed that combining multiple mitigation efforts — from testing to social distancing — can keep a university operational.
Designing the Test
The program relied on saliva PCR tests compared to the more common nasal swab PCR tests.
“I saw data very early on that the saliva tests were actually probably a little bit more sensitive than the nasal ones,” said Greg Gibson, professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “I just knew that students would be more likely to do something that takes 30 seconds to give us spit. It’s easy and safe, so it was just a no-brainer.”
Saliva-based tests were a practical solution for a campus. The test could be self-administered, requiring fewer medical personnel and creating ease of access for students. The tests were also safer than nasal swabs because the collection tube contained a viral deactivation buffer that killed active virus but preserved the RNA at room temperature for analysis.
The Georgia Tech campus biomedical research labs were also ideal for this type of test. Andrés García, executive director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience, realized robotics labs could build and run tests and make the program scalable.
“Testing requires precisely distributing different amounts of fluid to volumes, and this is a task really well suited for a robot,” García said. “With the large number of tests that we were expecting to need to administer, there was really no choice because having the robot really cut down on the human error.”
Another novel strategy was double pooling. Each saliva sample was pooled twice into a group of five samples and processed. This had multiple advantages, according to Gibson. One was it prevented false results because each sample had to test positive twice to be considered positive. And, by pooling, the testing system could clear dozens of individuals at once, while also focusing on a positive individual and then referring them for further diagnostic testing.
“A purely surveillance test where you don't give anybody results can be done without much regulation, but it’s minimally useful,” said Gibson, who is a Regents’ Professor, Tom and Marie Patton Chair in Biological Sciences, and serves as director of the Center for Integrative Genomics at Georgia Tech. “The double pooling strategy was a way for us to be able to identify exactly who was responsible for positive tests, and then go back to their original test and do a diagnostic one in a CLIA-certified lab.” CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) certification indicates a lab has met federal quality standards for diagnostic testing on human samples.
The Testing Strategy
Creating an effective testing infrastructure was also key to the success of the program. A university is a high-density environment where a community lives, learns, and works. When the program was first implemented in the Fall 2020 semester, Georgia Tech had 7,370 people in residence and 5,000 students, faculty, and staff who visited daily.
With the ability to run 1,500 tests at the beginning of the semester and up to 2,850 by the end, the program enabled most people on campus to test weekly. Testing weekly helped catch cases early with Covid-19’s seven-day incubation period, and positive individuals isolated for 10 days.
Part of why this approach was so successful was because of what Gibson calls “synergistic effectiveness.” By combining testing with mitigation strategies like masking and social distancing, Georgia Tech was able to reduce positivity rates.
“We've shown that testing doesn't have to be comprehensive with everybody testing every other day to be effective,” Gibson said.
This strategy enabled the researchers to focus on campus hotspots and control spread. In the beginning of the Fall 2020 semester, campus positivity was at 0.5% until a cluster was identified in Greek housing in August. This enabled a targeted campaign where 90% of on-campus residents were tested. The asymptomatic positivity rate peaked at 4.1%, but steadily declined back to 0.5% by mid-September thanks to rapid identification and isolation of positive individuals.
“We are a technical university — that doesn't have a medical school or a school of public health — that developed its own effective testing program and was able to deploy it to test a large segment of the population and keep the campus in operation,” said García, who additionally holds the Petit Director’s Chair in Bioengineering and Bioscience and is a Regents’ Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
Due to the success of surveillance testing, cases were kept at a manageable number. Most importantly, campus was able to stay open throughout the pandemic. The Georgia state legislature also adopted Georgia Tech’s surveillance testing system in January 2021 and is using the program to track and manage cases during this year’s legislative session. The strategy continues to keep Georgia Tech an active campus with in-person learning as the pandemic evolves. Ideally, the program established at Georgia Tech will remain in place, prepared to deal quickly with future infectious disease epidemics should the need arise, according to Gibson.
“We developed a program that in practice – and psychologically – provided a benefit to community members,” said Weitz, who also serves as the Tom and Marie Patton Chair in Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences. “Many people could go get tested and know that they weren't infectious so that they had a less likely chance of infecting others. Or, if they did end up testing positive, they were able to isolate themselves so they didn't infect others. That is of significant benefit.”
CITATION: G. Gibson, J.S. Weitz, M.P. Shannon et. al, “Surveillance-to-Diagnostic Testing Program for Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections on a Large, Urban Campus in Fall 2020.” (Epidemiology, Dec. 2021)
DOI: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000001448
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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 44,000 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: Tess Malone
Media Contacts:
Georgia Parmelee | Georgia.Parmelee@gatech.edu
Steven Norris | Stephen.Norris@gatech.edu
That question is driving a new $1 million, three-year grant awarded to a Georgia Institute of Technology interdisciplinary research team of geochemistry, biology and applied mechanics experts.
The award is part of the Department of Energy’s $7.7 million funding of 11 studies to improve the understanding of Earth system predictability and the Department’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model, a state-of the-science climate model. The researchers intend to develop a new scalable model that can analyze and ultimately predict where and when sediment disruptions are most likely to occur.
Wetlands – Where Water and Land Meet
Found at the boundary between land and water, wetlands function as natural sponges that trap, cleanse, and slowly release surface water – they also serve as a natural climate change buffer, since they act as carbon “sinks,” storing vast amounts of carbon and methane in the ground. Swamps, marshes, and bogs are all examples of wetlands. What isn’t known is if wetlands that become damaged or degraded from excess water will still absorb carbon at the same level.
By better understanding how wetlands work, Georgia Tech hopes to shed light on how wetlands will function with more frequent and more intense rainstorms.
“A lot of work has been done in polar regions where there has been melting because of global warming, which has been shown to release a lot of methane. That’s the main motivation behind the work we’re going to do,” said the project’s principal investigator, Martial Taillefert, a geochemist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
As water levels rise, below ground oxygen is consumed very quickly, he explained. Then microbial processes take over, leading to methane forming as well as carbon dioxide, that can escape to the atmosphere.
In this project Taillefert will characterize the physical and chemical processes taking place in a wetland, mainly using electrochemical sensors deployed at different locations in the wetland. Taillefert will be able to follow the chemical response to microbial processes and study how perturbations of the water cycle affect the release of greenhouse gases. This data will then be used to fine tune the models that will predict greenhouse gas emissions.
Micro to Macro Scale
Initial studies will involve samples on the scale of a few grains of soil, but the researchers hope to eventually run simulations on the scale of a riverbed or watershed (where surface water drains into a common stream channel or other body of water).
“The goal is twofold – first, to satisfy our scientific curiosity and understand how those microbial processes can actually change the level of oxygen and trigger greenhouse gas emissions, and second, to develop a model that can predict what processes will be in the next cycle to better prepare and perhaps reduce carbon emissions in some cases,” said project collaborator Chloé Arson, associate professor of Geosystems Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
While Taillefert focuses on the chemistry component and Arson on the mathematical modeling, collaborator Thomas DiChristina serves as the microbe expert.
“My lab looks at what kind of hidden microbial processes are going on that we can't detect with the sensors because the methane is getting recycled so fast in the ground,” said DiChristina, professor in the School of Biological Sciences.
DiChristina will be looking at multiple gene expressions without having to grow the bacteria in a laboratory.
“Genomics allows you to deduce expression of metabolic potential. For example, which gene is producing methane, and which gene is inhibiting methane production,” he said.
Since methane won’t release into the atmosphere unless a certain condition occurs, the model will enable researchers to predict under what conditions methane would pour out of the sediments versus being retained and recycled, DiChristina explained.
The calculations that predict how much methane and carbon dioxide go into the atmosphere depend on an accurate description of what's happening in the subsurface -- in the sediment and in groundwater, Taillefert added.
“We cannot yet quantify that really well. We think using our approach will enable us to get more data and a better understanding of how the process works and translate that knowledge into the models,” he said.
Taillefert and DiChristina have been working on improving Georgia Tech’s models for predicting these processes for over three decades. With this latest award, they hope to better understand and model the processes of oxidation and reduction that change the microstructure of sediments during cycles of flood.
New Research Thrust – AI and Machine Learning
Arson is most interested in predicting the changes in the size, shape, and arrangement of the grains of soil to understand how the porous space between the grains is affected by bio-chemical reactions.
“Understanding the evolution of the porous space will help predict transport properties within the sediments, and the expected emissions of greenhouse gases,” said Arson.
An expert in applied mechanics, she will use AI to build a model that can single out dominant reactions within the soil microstructure and disregard those that have minimal impact. Such insight will help simplify the model and allow it to more quickly correlate certain criteria that leads to spikes in greenhouse gases.
“If you have a predictive model that actually attempts to explain the processes, as well as predicting them, then you have a more versatile approach that can be transferred to many other sites or environments,” she said. “I also could envision using this model and the machine learning algorithm to map locations where you expect higher emissions, and identify sites as risky, moderately risky or safe.”
Georgia Tech is partnering with two Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories: Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) in Aiken, SC, and Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, IL.
“Georgia Tech has a unique capability here that we don't have, and that capability is this combination of using state-of-the-art genomics capabilities, along with state-of-the-art electrochemistry, two attributes that Georgia Tech is internationally known for,” said Daniel Kaplan, senior research fellow with SRNL, which will serve as the study site.
Kaplan noted that Georgia Tech’s research fits perfectly with the DOE’s goal to better understand how wetlands function, enabling scientists to better understand their role in controlling water quality.
“Wetlands do a great job of cleaning out all the impurities and getting rid of a lot of the contaminants to clean the water up as it moves through a watershed,” said Kaplan.
Atomic-scale Analysis
Argonne National Laboratory plans to take Georgia Tech’s sediment samples and examine them at the atomic scale of individual atoms and electrons using the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a football-field-sized synchrotron that produces x-rays 10 billion times clearer than what is produced at a doctor’s office.
“The fundamental reactions that are controlling the quality of the water happen at the microorganism or nano scale,” said Kenneth Kemner, senior physicist and group leader of the Molecular Environmental Science Group at the Argonne National Lab. “By bringing all the different ways of looking at wetlands together, we'll actually have a much deeper understanding of how they function.”
From one of several x-ray ports operated 24x7, the APS can capture images of single microorganisms about 100 times smaller than the diameter of the human hair. In fact, when the APS first came online, it successfully analyzed hair strands of Ludwig van Beethoven, with the analysis deducing that the great German composer suffered from lead poisoning.
Kemner acknowledged that Georgia Tech brings unique capabilities to the wetlands research effort. He explained that answering the hard questions such as those posed by climate change will require this transdisciplinary and integrated problem-solving approach.
Additional unfunded collaborators for this study include Christa Pennacchio, PMO Lead with the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (JGI), and Stephen Callister, scientist with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a U.S. DOE national scientific user facility managed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
]]>“Scientific research involves increasingly complex software, technologies, and platforms,” said Alessandro Orso, the software engineer and professor of computer science who is heading up the project. “Also, platforms constantly evolve, and the complexity and amount of data involved is ever-growing.”
The result is that these software systems are often developed as prototypes that are difficult to understand, maintain, and use, which limits their efficacy and ultimately hinders scientific progress.
Software engineers are trained to address these kinds of issues and know how to build high-quality software, but their time is too expensive for a typical research project’s budget. In typical grants, software is often treated as a byproduct of research, meaning that limited funding is allocated for it.
That’s where Schmidt Futures comes in. Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. They are investing $40 million in VISS over five years at four universities: Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Cambridge.
“Schmidt Futures’ Virtual Institute for Scientific Software is a core part of our efforts to mobilize exceptional talent to solve specific hard problems in science and society,” said Executive Vice President Elizabeth Young-McNally.
At Georgia Tech, the funds will hire a software engineering lead, as well as three senior and two junior software engineers. A faculty director and an advisory board will help guide the group’s work, which will include collaborations with Georgia Tech scientists.
"We are very proud to host one of the four inaugural Schmidt Futures Virtual Institute of Scientific Software centers,” said Charles Isbell, Dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair of Computing.
“Georgia Tech’s center will advance and support scientific research by applying modern software engineering practices, cutting-edge technologies, and modern tools to the development of scientific software. The center will also engage with students and researchers to train the next generation of software engineering leaders.”
]]>“I am thrilled to have James join the Georgia Tech Career Center,” says Laura Garcia, director of Career Education Programs. “I hope everyone gives him a warm welcome to the Georgia Tech community.”
Stringfellow, who began his duties on January 4, leads the following initiatives:
Stringfellow will be available for remote meetings from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays. He will work out of Room 2-90 in the Boggs Building from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, and at the Georgia Tech Career Center (located on the first floor of the Bill Moore Student Success Center) from 8 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays.
Stringfellow previously worked for the Veterans Empowerment Organization (VEO) as their employment specialist responsible for assisting veterans with re-entry into the civilian workforce. Prior to the VEO, he served as an award-winning career services manager at SAE Institute where he oversaw employer outreach and graduate employment for audio, film, and entertainment business programs. Stringfellow also worked for DeVry University in both career services and admissions in support of its College of Health Sciences.
Stringfellow earned a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Tuskegee University, and received his MBA in International Business from Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry. A member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Stringfellow shares that he stays connected to the entertainment industry by coaching creatives on how to protect their musical brand, speaking at related conferences, and serving as a disc jockey at various events throughout Atlanta.
“I am thrilled to have James join the College of Sciences,” shares Cameron Tyson, assistant dean for Academic Programs in the College of Sciences.
Tyson and Garcia also extend a special thanks to the new role’s search committee for their “hard work and finding a great addition to our team.” Committee members included:
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Fortunately, our bodies evolved to produce antioxidant enzymes such as Cu/Zn (copper/zinc) superoxide dismutase, or SOD1, which detoxifies certain harmful oxidants. In a weird twist, SOD1 is the only antioxidant enzyme that can take on one specific oxidant, superoxide, only to produce another ROS: hydrogen peroxide.
A team of Georgia Tech researchers have published a study that found an even stranger twist to this oxidant-antioxidant tale: SOD1 (good for cells) produces hydrogen peroxide (bad for cells) which stimulates the production of another important cellular antioxidant known as NADPH (also good for cells; more on this in a moment.)
“Yes, you heard that right,” says Amit Reddi, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “SOD1, an antioxidant enzyme, produces an oxidant, hydrogen peroxide, which in turn stimulates the production of another (good) antioxidant.”
Reddi is a co-author of this research along with Matthew Torres, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Claudia Montllor-Albalate, former Reddi Lab member who received her Ph.D. in 2020 from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Hyojung Kim, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Ph.D. candidate; Annalise Thompson, a third-year graduate student in Reddi’s lab; and Alex Jonke, research scientist with the School of Biological Sciences.
Their study, “SOD1 Integrates Oxygen Availability to Redox Regulate NADPH Production and the Thiol Redoxome” is published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The NADPH/GAPDH connection
NADPH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate) is an important metabolite that is produced in cells. It provides a source of electrons that can act as an antioxidant and for the biosynthesis of numerous biomolecules, including fatty acids, amino acids, nucleotides, and cholesterol.
“NADPH is not only used as an antioxidant, but also to build new biomolecules to sustain cell proliferation,” Reddi says. “How do cells know to make enough NADPH to support aerobic life? We discovered that SOD1 senses oxygen availability via superoxide, and then converts this to hydrogen peroxide, which in turn inactivates an enzyme responsible for the breakdown of glucose, glyceraldehyde phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH).” That inactivation causes the build-up of metabolites that are re-routed to a pathway that synthesizes NADPH.
The story behind the SOD1 revelation
The PNAS research study began with a casual conversation in 2014 between Reddi and Torres at the former café in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (IBB).
“Given the very collaborative and collegial nature of faculty across the College of Sciences, and the Institute as a whole, it was easy to grab a coffee and discuss these ideas,” Reddi says. Work in the Reddi lab includes potential signaling roles for SOD1 and the hydrogen peroxide it produces; but understanding the extent to which these factors regulate signaling required a systems-level understanding of how widespread targets of SOD1 are in a cell.
Torres focuses on mass spectrometry-based proteomics (the study of all proteins produced and modified by an organism or system) to probe cell-wide signaling networks, so it seemed to Reddi like a perfect fit.
Then, Reddi says, Montllor-Albalate made the discovery that SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide can regulate NADPH production and adaptation to aerobic life. Meanwhile, Kim, a joint student of the Reddi and Torres labs, drove the work to identify proteome-wide targets of SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide.
The conversation in IBB led to a 2016 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the topic further. The resulting paper “we feel will make a strong impact in the field of redox biology and signaling,” Reddi adds.
SOD1’s potential in future cancer therapy
SOD1 is often thought of as an appealing anti-cancer therapeutic because of its ability to scavenge superoxides. The theory is that if SOD1 is inactivated, cancer cells will be at a disadvantage.
Reddi says his team’s results “suggest this very simple approach may need to be reconsidered, because the hydrogen peroxide that is produced by SOD1 plays broader roles in metabolism — and regulates many other enzymes and pathways. For instance, many cancer cells are addicted to glucose (sugars) and have an increased reliance on it for energy and metabolism, with GAPDH being a key enzyme in the process. Our findings that SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide inactivates GAPDH would suggest that inhibiting SOD1 in certain cancers could actually result in elevated GAPDH activity, and increased metabolism of glucose, which may be detrimental in fighting cancer.”
Torres and Reddi are continuing their collaboration to investigate other aspects of SOD1 and hydrogen peroxide signaling in cancer metabolism and its implications for disease progression.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023328119
This work was supported by GM118744 to Reddi and Torres, and Blanchard Fellowship to Reddi.
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A new study by Georgia Tech researchers in the lab of Timothy C. Cope has found a novel pathway for understanding why these debilitating conditions happen for cancer patients and why scientists should focus on all of the possible neural processes that deliver sensory or motor problems to a patient’s brain — including the central nervous system — and not just the “peripheral degeneration of sensory neurons” that occurs away from the center of the body.
The new findings “Neural circuit mechanisms of sensorimotor disability in cancer treatment” are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and could impact development of effective treatments that are not yet available for restoring a patient’s normal abilities to receive and process sensory input as part of post cancer treatment, in particular.
Stephen N. (Nick) Housley, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Biological Sciences, the Integrated Cancer Research Center, and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, is the study’s lead author. Co-authors include Paul Nardelli, research scientist and Travis Rotterman, postdoctoral fellow (both of the School of Biological Sciences), along with Timothy Cope, who serves as a professor with joint appointments in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech and in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech.
“Chemotherapy undoubtedly negatively influences the peripheral nervous system, which is often viewed as the main culprit of neurologic disorders during cancer treatment,” shares Housley. However, he says, for the nervous system to operate normally, both the peripheral and central nervous system must cooperate.
“This occurs through synaptic communication between neurons. Through an elegant series of studies, we show that those hubs of communication in the central nervous system are also vulnerable to cancer treatment’s adverse effects,” Housley shares, adding that the findings force “recognition of the numerous places throughout the nervous system that we have to treat if we ever want to fix the neurological consequences of cancer treatment — because correcting any one may not be enough to improve human function and quality of life.”
“These disabilities remain clinically unmitigated and empirically unexplained as research concentrates on peripheral degeneration of sensory neurons,” the research team explains in the study, “while understating the possible involvement of neural processes within the central nervous system. The present findings demonstrate functional defects in the fundamental properties of information processing localized within the central nervous system,” concluding that “long-lasting sensorimotor and possibly other disabilities induced by cancer treatment result from independent neural defects compounded across both peripheral and central nervous systems.”
The research team notes that cancer survivors “rank sensorimotor disability among the most distressing, long-term consequences of chemotherapy. Disorders in gait, balance, and skilled movements are commonly assigned to chemotoxic damage of peripheral sensory neurons without consideration of the deterministic role played by the neural circuits that translate sensory information into movement,” adding that this oversight “precludes sufficient, mechanistic understanding and contributes to the absence of effective treatment for reversing chemotherapy-induced disability.”
Cope says the team resolved this omission “through the use of a combination of electrophysiology, behavior, and modeling to study the operation of a spinal sensorimotor circuit in vivo” in a rodent model of “chronic, oxaliplatin (chemotherapy)–induced neuropathy: cOIN.”
Key sequential events were studied in the encoding of “propriosensory” information (think kinesthesia: the body's ability to sense its location, movements, and actions) and its circuit translation into the synaptic potentials produced in motoneurons.
In the “cOIN” rats, the team noted multiple classes of propriosensory neurons expressed defective firing that reduced accurate sensory representation of muscle mechanical responses to stretch, adding that accuracy “degraded further in the translation of propriosensory signals into synaptic potentials as a result of defective mechanisms residing inside the spinal cord.”
“These sequential, peripheral, and central defects compounded to drive the sensorimotor circuit into a functional collapse that was consequential in predicting the significant errors in propriosensory-guided movement behaviors demonstrated here in our rat model and reported for people with cOIN,” Cope and Housley report. “We conclude that sensorimotor disability induced by cancer treatment emerges from the joint expression of independent defects occurring in both peripheral and central elements of sensorimotor circuits.”
“These findings have broad impact on the scientific field and on clinical management of neurologic consequences of cancer treatment,” Housley says. “As both a clinician and scientist, I can envision the urgent need to jointly develop quantitative clinical tests that have the capacity to identify which parts of a patient nervous system are impacted by their cancer treatment.”
Housley also says that having the capacity to monitor neural function across various sites during the course of treatment “will provide a biomarker on which we can optimize treatment — e.g. maximize anti-neoplastic effects while minimizing the adverse effects,” adding that, as we move into the next generation cancer treatments, “clinical tests that can objectively monitor specific aspects of the nervous system will be exceptionally important to test for the presence off-target effect.”
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FUNDING: This work is supported by NIH Grants R01CA221363 and R01HD090642 and the Northside Hospital Foundation, Inc.
DOI: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2100428118
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The researchers thank Marc Binder (Department of Physiology & Biophysics at University of Washington) and Todd Streelman (School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech) for providing useful discussions and comments on a preliminary version of the manuscript. Lead author Housley also serves as chief scientific officer for Motus Nova, a healthcare robotics and technology company.
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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 44,000 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.
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Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences
McGuire, an assistant professor with joint appointments in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, and her Spatial Ecology & Paleontology Lab are teaming up with an international cohort of researchers for the effort, which includes scientists from Texas A&M University, University of Cambridge, and the National Museums of Kenya. The work is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (US NSF) and the National Environment Research Council (NERC), part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), a new body which works in partnership with universities, research organizations, businesses, charities and government “to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish.”
McGuire says the team hopes to learn more about which functional traits vertebrates (animals with backbones) have that closely relate to shifting factors at a given location like temperature, rain and other precipitation, and their natural environment — and how those changes have occurred as environments and humans evolved.
“Community-level trait calculations correlate with specific environmental conditions,” McGuire says. “For example, in places or times when there is less precipitation, mammal communities overall will have more robust, rugged, resistant teeth. And the ankle gear ratios of mammals living in open versus more enclosed habitats reflect this condition, since animals living in more open habitats typically need to run faster.”
McGuire says Africa offers a crucial natural laboratory for these types of conservation paleobiological studies, noting a rich, well-sampled fossil record. The continent is also home to a diverse range of vertebrate ecosystems, including the most complete natural community of remaining terrestrial megafauna: large animals that include the “big five” of Africa — elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines like wildebeests, antelopes, and water buffaloes.
“Critically, these megafauna are facing increasing pressures from global economic demands leading to habitat loss, as well as from changing climates,” McGuire shares.
Michelle Lawing, an associate professor in Texas A&M’s Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, is the lead institution principal investigator for the project, and McGuire is the collaborating institution’s principal investigator. Fredrick Kyalo Manthi, co-principal investigator, is director of Antiquities, Sites, and Monuments and a senior research scientist in the Department of Earth Sciences at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi. Jason Head, NERC principal investigator, is a professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.
Responding to changing climates and environments
Related research into how communities have evolved over time, and how they’ve been impacted by terrain, animal migration, and climate change, has taken McGuire to Wyoming’s Natural Trap Cave for five of the past seven summers. There, the so-called “pit” or sinkhole cave trapped animals for millennia, leaving only their bones and other fossils remaining to tell their stories to McGuire and fellow researchers about life there more than 35,000 years ago.
“What we’re really looking at is how communities shift across the landscape,” McGuire shared in an earlier interview about the work. “So, if we have glaciers that are coming really far south in North America, how does that drive the distributions of species on the landscape and where they’re living, and whether or not there’s new communities or total remixing of communities, or if communities just shift in a uniform way?
“We’re really trying to understand how animals respond to changing climate and changing environments, so that we can get a better sense of how they’ll respond to increased warming and climate change that’s occurring today.”
Positive trait to environment relationships — and a negative one
When it comes to an example of a good trait-environment relationship involving animals, McGuire cites the role that elephants play in Africa — something mastodons also did in North America before their extinction.
“Elephants help maintain savanna habitats,” McGuire says, referring to the giants’ relationships with Africa’s grassland regions. “They control trees along the perimeters of forests, preventing them from expanding into, and taking over, savanna habitats.”
Similarly, in ancient North American ecosystems, the loss of the mammoth, along with climate change, is thought to have resulted in the loss of the mammoth steppe ecosystem, “a no-analog, widespread Arctic shrubland that went extinct as a biome (a community of plants and animals) around the time of North American megafauna extinction,” McGuire says.
The new project’s outreach efforts
The US NSF and UK NERC funding for the project also includes student outreach and mentoring for early career academics. The project’s broader impact goals include measures to support inclusivity and diversity in science, high-impact training experiences for students and postdoctoral researchers, application of the researcher’s modeling framework for applied conservation, and meaningful engagement with the public.
“This international collaborative project will also help train both Kenyan and American (and) European students, thus establishing another generation of researchers,” National Museums of Kenya’s Fredrick Kyalo Manthi says.
“We plan to pair travel and research objectives with workshops so that workshop students get to directly participate in research, and serve as co-authors on projects as appropriate,” McGuire adds.
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Funding: NSFDEB-NERC Award #2124770; NSF CAREER Award #1945013; International Union of Biological Sciences: Conservation Paleobiology in Africa Program.
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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 44,000 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.
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