Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is a leader in the field of chemical and biomolecular engineering. Its mission is to create a better future by transforming people, ideas, processes and products through research and innovations that will transform the lives of its students and generate breakthroughs in technology and knowledge.

This installment of the Faces of Research Q&A series is with Mark Prausnitz, Regents' Professor, J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Director of the Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery.

What is your field of expertise and why did you choose it?
In my lab, we work in the field of pharmaceuticals. We design drug delivery systems to make drugs work better and to make them more accessible to people by simplifying their administration at home, in developing countries, and in emergency situations. The main technology we study is microneedles. We make microneedle patches, which are painlessly applied to the skin to administer drugs and vaccines without the need for hypodermic injections. We also make particles with microneedles sticking out called STAR particles that can be rubbed onto the skin to increase absorption of dermatological drugs and cosmetics. We also work on microneedles for targeted injection into the eye to treat diseases like macular degeneration. I became interested in this work because I can use my training in engineering to solve problems that improve the health of people in the United States and around the world. I also enjoy working in the area of pharmaceuticals because of its interdisciplinary nature, drawing not only from science and engineering, but also from medicine, public health, public policy, and other fields. 

What makes Georgia Tech research institutes unique?
I was initially attracted to Georgia Tech, and remain excited about being here, because of the emphasis on interdisciplinary research and collaboration, especially at the interface of engineering and medicine. These days, many research institutions talk about interdisciplinary research, but Georgia Tech has been a leader in this area for decades and had a world-class environment to collaborate across disciplines to do innovative and impactful research. For me, collaboration with Emory University and the CDC are additional critical features of the Georgia Tech research environment. 

What impact is your research having on the world?
We had our first product approved by Food and Drug Administration in 2021. It is a microneedle that administers a drug into a part of the eye called the suprachoroidal space to treat inflammation of the eye with reduced side effects as compared to conventional treatments. We also have studied microneedle patches in a number of clinical trials, including administration of influenza vaccine and measles and rubella vaccines. I have co-founded eight companies to commercialize the drug delivery systems we have developed at Georgia Tech. Publishing high-quality research and training students are very important to me; moving our technology out of the Institute and into clinical use that helps people is also important. 

What is something you wished you knew as a budding researcher that everyone considering research as a career should know?
My graduate mentor advised me that a good researcher knows how to design a study, carry out research, interpret results, and get the answer to a scientific question. But a great researcher knows which scientific question to ask. I think picking the right research questions is the key to doing impactful research. 

What is the most challenging aspect of your research?
The most challenging and most important component of my research is the research team. We encounter many technical challenges, but if we have the right people working in the right environment, we can overcome those challenges. I think it is important to recruit smart, enthusiastic, and hard-working graduate students and postdocs, and then create a physical, intellectual, and cultural environment that allow them and their research to thrive.  

Favorite show/program to binge watch?
My introduction to binge watching was Breaking Bad, which is ultimately a show about drug delivery (although not the kind that we do, of course!). I like history, so I watch The Crown. I also like mysteries, and am eagerly awaiting the next season of Only Murders in the Building. Currently, I am watching Ted Lasso to wind down after a busy day.

In the decade since Professor Gleb Yushin’s battery materials startup participated in Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center, investments in the company have rolled in — along with the first customers.

Now the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is getting on board with Yushin’s Georgia Tech startup as part of federal efforts to reinvigorate tech manufacturing in the United States.

DOE awarded Sila Nanotechnologies $100 million this fall to support the company’s new factory in Moses Lake, Washington, and help Sila hire and train up to 300 workers for the facility. It was one of 21 projects funded in domestic battery materials processing and manufacturing.

“It’s our mission to help move America away from being energy dependent and become a leader in the energy transformation,” said Yushin, the company’s chief technology officer and a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. “With this funding, Sila will deliver proven, clean energy technology and world-scale manufacturing to revitalize the industry and gain independence.”

Birthed from Yushin’s research on lithium-ion batteries, Sila manufactures next-generation materials and a silicon anode technology that boosts battery energy density by 20%. The silicon anodes are a drop-in replacement for graphite anodes in lithium-ion batteries. The new facility is projected to produce enough capacity to power 200,000 electric vehicles by 2026. Sila has inked a deal with Mercedes-Benz to use the company’s technology, starting with G-Class vehicles.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Madhavan Swaminathan is among 169 renowned and distinguished academic inventors named to the 2022 class of Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Swaminathan is the John Pippin Chair in Microsystems Packaging & Electromagnetics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) with a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), and Director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center (PRC) at Georgia Tech.

Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional accolade bestowed to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society.

Swaminathan is an internationally recognized researcher in microelectronic packaging, an area that is expected to fuel the semiconductor industry over the next decade.

He is the author of more than 550 refereed technical publications and the primary author and co-editor of three books. Swaminathan also holds 31 patents, is the founder and co-founder of two start-up companies (E-System Design and Jacket Micro Devices), and is an IEEE Fellow. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 1994, he was an engineer at IBM working on packaging for supercomputers. Swaminathan will be leaving Georgia Tech at the end of 2022 to lead the Penn State Department of Electrical Engineering.

In addition to Swaminathan, Georgia Tech researchers Adegboyega Oyelere (associate professor in the School of Chemistry & Biology) and Zhong Lin Wang (Regents' Professor and Hightower Chair Emeritus in the School of Materials Sciences and Engineering) have been named NAI Fellows this year.

The 2022 Fellow class hails from 110 research universities, governmental and non-profit research institutions worldwide. They collectively hold over 5,000 issued U.S. patents. Among the new class of Fellows are members of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; Fellows of AAAS; and other prestigious organizations; Nobel Laureates; other honors and distinctions as well as senior leadership from universities and research institutions. 

The class will be inducted at the Fellows Induction Ceremony held on July 27, 2023, during the NAI Twelfth Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. To learn more about the 2022 class of NAI Fellows, visit the NAI website.

The global demand for nanotechnologists is growing, and universities around the world are creating and expanding programs to educate the workforce of the future. This summer, Paul Joseph, a principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), spent two weeks at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) to help develop their nanotechnology offerings.

“Indian Industries realize the importance of nanotechnology and its day-to-day applications in various products, so the goal is for them to train their own student community,” Joseph explained. “It's about developing knowledgeable students in this emerging technology so that they can prepare them for the future workforce and meet the demands of the country.”

Joseph, who also serves as director of external user programs for the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor, has more than 25 years of experience in research and teaching. He received a prestigious Fulbright Specialist Award to share his expertise with the students and faculty at IIIT.

The Fulbright Specialist Program “pairs highly qualified U.S. academics and professionals with host institutions abroad to share their expertise, strengthen institutional linkages, hone their skills, gain international experience, and learn about other cultures while building capacity at their overseas host institutions.” During his visit, Joseph focused on student, faculty, and curriculum development in addition to high school outreach. He also taught a one-day course.

For the student development portion of the program, Joseph gave a series of 10 “Introduction to Nanotechnology” lectures to approximately 90 B.Tech students. Following the lectures, he hosted office hours where he held small group mentoring sessions. Joseph met with approximately 40 students during his short visit, which furthered their interest in nanotechnology.

“The students would ask questions related to my lecture, and many of them wanted to learn more about pursuing higher education in the United States,” Joseph said. “As a result, six students are very interested in applying for graduate school at Georgia Tech.”

In the afternoons, Joseph led sessions with 25 members of the IIIT faculty to share his knowledge in outcome-based education, mentoring students, student assessment and methodologies, and technology commercialization. He also worked with the IIIT team to develop the curriculum for a three-credit course titled “Introduction to Nanoscience and Nanotechnology” and participated in a brainstorming session for the establishment of the Institute Center of Excellence in Nanotechnology (CENT) at IIIT.

He also ran “Introduction to Micro- and Nanotechnology and Microfabrication Techniques,” a one-day workshop for faculty and students at IIIT in addition to other universities in the area. The successful workshop was attended by roughly 135 individuals interested in learning more about nanotechnology.

“I was very impressed by the enthusiasm of both students and faculty to learn new technologies,” Joseph said.

And finally, Joseph assisted with high school outreach in the area and visited two local high schools during his visit. He gave expert lectures on the applications of nanotechnology to approximately 140 11^th and 12^th graders during these visits.

“For many of these students, this was the first time that they heard the word nanotechnology, and they were very excited,” Joseph recalled with a smile. “I was so impressed with how quickly they grasped what I was saying and the depth of knowledge they had on the topic. They were able to answer any questions that I asked them.”

Since each of his modules reached a different audience, Joseph believes he reached approximately 400 individuals during his two-week stay at the university, and the relationship between IIIT and IEN is growing. As a result of his visit, IIIT is working to send some of its faculty members to IEN to learn more about nanotechnology and use its core facilities.

At the culmination of this visit, IIIT hosted a valedictory ceremony for Joseph to thank him for his contributions. “I would like to thank Doctor Joseph for conducting this successful program,” said one of the students who attended Joseph’s lectures. “We have moved a bit further by not only exposing our peers to the world of nanotech, but also gained a lot of insights along the way … I am impressed by how such a vast course has been delivered in such a short time.”

Joseph would like to thank Institute Director Selvakumar Subramanian, Fulbright Program Coordinator Nitish Katal, Dean of Academics Nishtha Hooda, and all other IIIT faculty and students for their support to serve as a successful and productive Fulbright Specialist at his host institution. He would also like to thank the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board for the award.

It was a simple idea — maybe even too simple to work.

Research scientist James Ponder and a team of Georgia Tech chemists and engineers thought they could design a transparent polymer film that would conduct electricity as effectively as other commonly used materials, while also being flexible and easy to use at an industrial scale.

They’d do it by simply removing the nonconductive material from their conductive element. Sounds logical, right?

The resulting process could yield new kinds of flexible, transparent electronic devices — things like wearable biosensors, organic photovoltaic cells, and virtual or augmented reality displays and glasses.

“We had this initial idea that we have a conductive element that we're covering with a nonconductive material, so what if we just get rid of that,” said Ponder, who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Georgia Tech and returned as a research scientist in mechanical engineering. “It's a simple idea, and there were so many points where it could have failed for different reasons. But it does work, and it works better than we expected.”

Read more about the team's flexible, highly conductive polymer on the College of Engineering website.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has awarded a $2.46 million grant to Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology researchers to develop a multi-sensor biopatch for farmworkers that can predict symptoms of heat-related illness, dehydration, and acute kidney injury.

The four-year grant will allow the team to develop a wearable wireless unit for farmworkers with sensors that can integrate key physiological signals, predict adverse heat-related medical events, and generate warnings about them in real time.

“When you think about people who work outside all day, and that includes construction workers and landscapers as well as farm workers and others, they are exposing themselves to potentially dangerous heat-related conditions,” says W. Hong Yeo, a Woodruff Faculty Fellow and associate professor in mechanical and biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech, and one of the principal investigators on the project, who is leading development of the biopatch.

The findings of the project will lead to an intervention study in which data are sent from the biopatch to an Android device. The team will develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools for predicting study outcomes. In future research, the team envisions that data sent to the Android from the biopatch will be processed with these tools. After processing, warnings may be sent to workers from the Android device as necessary, which will help determine if the technology can reduce morbidity associated with occupational heat exposure.

Escalating trends of increasing environmental temperatures place marginalized populations, such as agricultural workers who have routine occupational exposure to hot, humid environments, at increased risk for the acute health effects of heat exposure, according to Vicki Hertzberg, lead principal investigator on the project and a professor at the Emory University Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.

“Heat-related illness and dehydration are particularly insidious, as they can quickly progress from moderate discomfort to confusion and impaired judgment, thereby diminishing the affected worker’s ability to seek necessary medical attention,” she says. “A hand-held device with clear information about heat illness will help farmworkers know when to seek help.”

Joining Hertzberg and Yeo as a principal investigator is Li Xiong, a Samuel Candler Dobbs professor in the Emory Department of Computer Science. Xiong will lead the development of prediction models associated with the research, and Yeo will lead the development of the biopatch.

“We know that once we can get continuous physiological data in real time, then we can prevent this problem,” says Yeo, a Woodruff Faculty Fellow and associate professor in mechanical and biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech, who also is director of the Georgia Tech IEN Center for Human-Centric Interfaces and Engineering. “Currently, it’s very hard to measure real-time events because of the limitations of existing sensor or device technology.”

Conventional wearable devices tend to be rigid, heavy, and bulky – not useful for workers who spend a lot of time moving around.

Xiong adds, “Once we have these continuous data, then the challenge is how to fuse these multimodal data in real time and make reliable predictions for interventions. I’m looking forward to working with the team to develop the AI tools and test them in the field.”

Emory School of Nursing assistant professor Roxana Chicas will lead the field team assessing the use of the biopatch on outdoor workers, and Jeff Sands, professor in the Emory Department of Medicine and director of the Emory University Division of Renal Medicine, will provide renal expertise. Completing the team is Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, executive director of the Farmworker Association of Florida. The association and the School of Nursing have had a strong partnership in community-based research among Florida farmworkers.

Vibrating tiny robots could revolutionize research.

Individual robots can work collectively as swarms to create major advances in everything from construction to surveillance, but microrobots’ small scale is ideal for drug delivery, disease diagnosis, and even surgeries.

Despite their potential, microrobots’ size often means they have limited sensing, communication, motility, and computation abilities, but new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology enhances their ability to collaborate efficiently. The work offers a new system to control swarms of 300 3-millimeter microbristle robots’ (microbots) ability to aggregate and disperse controllably without onboard sensing.

The breakthrough is unique to Georgia Tech’s expertise in electric and computer engineering and robotics and its push for interdisciplinary collaborations.

“By collaborating with roboticists we were able to ‘close the gap’ between single robot design and swarm control,” said Azadeh Ansari, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “So I guess the different elements were there, and we just made the connection.”

The researchers presented the work, “Controlling Collision-Induced Aggregations in a Swarm of Micro Bristle Robots,” in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

How microbots swarm

The Challenges of Microbots

While larger robots can control movement through sensing the environment and wirelessly sending this data to each other, microbots do not have the capacity to carry the same sensors, communications, or power units. In this study, the researchers instead utilized inter-robot physical interactions to encourage robots to swarm.

“Microbots are too small to interpret and make decisions, but by using the collision between them and how they respond to frequency and the amplitude of global vibration actuation, we could influence how individual robots move and the collective behaviors of hundreds and thousands of these tiny robots,” said Zhijian Hao, an ECE Ph.D. student.

These behaviors, or motility characteristics, determine how microbots move linearly and the randomness in their rotation. By using vibration, the researchers could control these motility characteristics and perform motility-induced phase separation (MIPS). The researchers borrowed the concept from thermodynamics, when an agitated material can change phases from solid to gas to liquid. The researchers manipulated the level of vibration to influence the microbots to form clusters or disperse to create good spatial coverage.

To better understand these phase separations, they developed computational models and a live tracking system for the 300-robot swarm using computer vision. These enabled the researchers to analyze microrobots’ behavior and motion data that give rise to the swarm’s characteristics.

“This project is the first complete pipeline using this MIPS that can be generalized to different microbot swarms,” Hao said. “We hope people will find that using physical interactions is another new way to control the microbots, which initially was very difficult to do.”

Collaborating for Innovation

A Georgia Tech seed grant from the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM)  and the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology enabled this high-risk research. 

The success of the project can be attributed to the interdisciplinary nature of the research. While the ECE researchers had expertise in building microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to fabricate technology such as computer chips or microbots, the robotics researchers brought modeling experience. Ansari first created microbristle bots in 2019 from 3D-printed polymers, which seeded the collaboration with IRIM Director and Professor Seth Hutchinson and Professor Magnus Egerstedt, now at University of California, Irvine, and their Ph.D. students Sid Mayya and Gennaro Notomista.

“We knew more about how to build micro devices and actuate them, and they knew more about the algorithms, modelings, and the closed-loop and open-loop control,” Ansari said. “So, it was very good interdisciplinary work because each group benefited from the new perspectives that the others brought to this.”

CITATION: Z. Hao, S. Mayya, G. Notomista, S. Hutchinson, M. Egerstedt and A. Ansari, "Controlling Collision-Induced Aggregations in a Swarm of Micro Bristle Robots," in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2022, doi: 10.1109/TRO.2022.3189846.