The University System of Georgia's Board of Regents has honored 19 Georgia Tech faculty members with 2024 Regents' Distinctions. These accolades recognize the recipients’ outstanding contributions and excellence in education, research, and innovation. 

“These amazing colleagues exemplify the spirit of excellence and dedication that defines Georgia Tech's faculty,” said Steve McLaughlin, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “Their contributions not only advance knowledge within their respective fields but also positively impact our community at large. Working alongside these faculty members is an honor and inspires me every day.” 

Georgia Tech faculty named as Regents’ Professors include: 

• Amy Bruckman (renewal), Senior Associate Chair, School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing 

• John Cressler (renewal), Schlumberger Chair in Electronics, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering 

• Greg Gibson (renewal), Tom and Marie Patton Chair in Biological Sciences and Director of the Center for Integrative Genomics, School of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences 

• Thomas Kurfess, Professor and HUSCO/Ramirez Distinguished Chair in Fluid Power and Motion Control, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering 

• Wenke Lee, Professor and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair in Software, School of Computer Science and School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, College of Computing 

• Brian Magerko, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Digital Media, Head of the Expressive Machinery Lab, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts 

• Patricia Mokhtarian, Clifford and William Greene Jr. Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering 

• Charles David Sherrill (renewal), Professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, College of Sciences and Associate Director for Research and Education, Institute for Data Engineering and Science 

Georgia Tech faculty named as Regents’ Researchers include: 

• David Gottfried (renewal), Senior Assistant Director and Principal Research Scientist, Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, College of Engineering 

• Gregory Showman (renewal), Fellow and Principal Research Engineer, Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory, GTRI 

• Jeffrey Sitterle, Principal Research Scientist and Chief Innovation Officer, Information and Cyber Sciences Directorate, GTRI  

• Leanne West, Chief Engineer of Pediatric Technology and Principal Research Scientist, Georgia Tech Pediatric Innovation Network  

• Jie Xu, Head of Chemical and Biological Systems Branch and Principal Research Scientist, GTRI 

• David Zurn, Test Engineering Division Chief and Principal Research Scientist, GTRI  

Georgia Tech faculty named as Regents’ Entrepreneurs include: 

• Mustaque Ahamad, Professor, School of Computer Science and School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, College of Computing 

• Omer Inan, Professor and Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering 

• Rampi Ramprasad, Professor and Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Chair, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Energy Sustainability, School of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering 

Georgia Tech faculty named as Regents’ Innovators include: 

• Alexander Alexeev, Professor and Joseph Anderer Faculty Fellow, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering 

Georgia Tech faculty named to the Georgia Mining Association Early Career Professorship: 

• Sheng Dai, Associate Professor and Group Coordinator in Geosystems Engineering, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering 

For the past 10 years, the National Institutes of Health have led an unprecedented effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain. The aptly named BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Neurotechnologies) Initiative has led to remarkable technological advancements, insights into the structure and function of the brain, and budding therapies. 

Recently, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor Chris Rozell traveled to Washington, D.C. to share the impact of his BRAIN Initiative research with U.S. Congressional offices — and offer insights on how critical this program is to society. The briefing took on a particular urgency because BRAIN Initiative funding was cut over 40% this year, and future funding appears to be in jeopardy in the current federal budget climate. 

“The millions of patients suffering with intractable neurologic disorders and mental illness deserve a moonshot to develop new solutions for their conditions,” said Rozell, who also holds the Julian T. Hightower Chair in ECE and serves on the executive committee for Georgia Tech’s Neuro Next Initiative. “You can't get to the moon with a paper plane, and you can’t get there without a map. The BRAIN Initiative is a vital program because it's one of the few places that brings together interdisciplinary teams that include the scientists who have been building maps of brain circuits and the engineers who have been building rockets to understand and intervene with those circuits. 

“I'm proud to have had the chance to represent not only our own research, but the incredible community here at Georgia Tech and around the country working to understand many different aspects of the brain, developing new neurotechnologies, and advancing therapies for neurologic disorders.” 

Interdisciplinary impacts 

“The main message we presented to Congress is that the interdisciplinary combination of rigorous science and technical innovation can have enormous societal impact over the next few decades,” said Rozell. 

A stark example of that impact was published in Nature this past fall. In this research, Rozell and his collaborators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Emory University School of Medicine identified the first known biomarker of disease recovery with deep brain stimulation in treatment-resistant depression. 

“The fact that an engineer can advance clinical therapies is a testament to the new era we're in,” says Rozell, “where disciplinary boundaries are fading, and technological innovation accelerates our scientific and translational breakthroughs.” 

This research served as a focal point of the congressional briefing, where Rozell presented with BRAIN Initiative Director John J. Ngai, clinical collaborators, and a family whose lives have been transformed by this work.  

“Events like last week are dream come true,” shared Jon Nelson, who was treated with deep brain stimulation as part of the study and presented with Rozell in D.C. After living through 10 years of debilitating, treatment-resistant depression, Nelson says “remission of depression still doesn't feel real. It's been a year and a half, and I still am in awe every single day. 

“The fact that I have come out of this study and found that the disease is purely an electrical deficiency in my brain has fueled me to completely pulverize the stigma of mental illness,” Nelson explained. “When you have an opportunity to go speak to Congress — that’s about as great of a platform as you can get for that. Being able to put a face to what the BRAIN Initiative funding can do for people was just amazing.” 

When meeting with local representatives, Rozell also relayed his work as co-executive leader of the Neuro Next Initiative, a budding Interdisciplinary Research Institute at Georgia Tech. 

“I was thrilled to highlight that Georgia Tech is leading the charge with the Neuro Next Initiative, which will evolve into a full Interdisciplinary Research Institute in 2025,” said Rozell. “Georgia Tech has the ingredients to become a leading center for modern technology-driven interdisciplinary brain research and workforce development. 

“This visit was a reminder to me that research funding is not guaranteed and it’s important to keep communicating the critical value that research plays in advancing our understanding, training our workforce, fueling our economy, and ultimately making a better tomorrow for society.” 

Breast cancer is the second-most common cancer diagnosis for U.S. women, and the second-leading cause of female cancer deaths. In recent years, breast cancer treatments have improved significantly, thanks to targeted gene therapy and immunotherapy. However, for the small group of patients diagnosed with the most aggressive basal-like type of breast cancer, such approaches are less successful.

Recently, scientists in the Georgia Tech Integrated Cancer Research Center (ICRC) have found that this particular breast cancer displays a unique interactive gene network structure. Using a type of mathematics called “graph theory,” which models relationships between a pair of objects, the researchers computationally detected changes in gene-gene interactions as this breast cancer occurs and develops.

“The discovery of novel gene networks associated with basal-like breast cancers has helped us identify potential new gene targets to treat this very aggressive type of breast cancer,” said John McDonald, ICRC founding director, professor emeritus in the School of Biological Sciences, and the study’s corresponding author. “We would not have discovered these possible treatments through analyses of gene expression alone.”

While causing just 10-20% of breast cancer diagnoses, basal-like breast cancer is much more aggressive than other subtypes — and if not identified early, when it can be treated by surgery and/or radiation therapy, effective anti-cancer drug treatment can be challenging. The basal-like subtype does not respond to traditional hormonal therapies.

One theory as to why, advocated by many cancer researchers, is that individual genes do not function autonomously; as such, changes in how genes interact with one another in cancer may be as important as the cancer-driving genes themselves.

“The components of any complex system, like the human genome, are certainly important,” said McDonald. “The way in which these independent components interact with one another is also critical.”

For this study, the researchers analyzed three major subtypes of breast cancer, with particular emphasis on the most aggressive basal-like subtype. The researchers found that gene-gene interactive networks are quite different in the aggressive basal-like subtype, compared to the more prevalent luminal A and luminal B subtypes.

Many of the genes comprising these unique networks were found to be involved in functions not previously associated with breast cancer. Stephen Housley, a neurobiology researcher in the School of Biological Sciences and a co-author on the paper, noted that “an unexpected and intriguing result from our study is that neural processes appear to play a prominent role in distinguishing the highly aggressive basal-like tumors from the less aggressive luminal A and luminal B subtypes.”

In total, the researchers examined more than 300 million pairs of genes, comparing healthy women to those with breast cancer. Study co-author Zainab Ashard, a computational biologist who recently worked in McDonald’s lab, explained, “Differences in the gene network structure between healthy individuals and breast cancer patients allowed us to identify changes in patterns of gene-gene interactions within breast cancer development.”[s1] 

The team’s results are detailed in a new paper, “Changes in Gene Network Interactions in Breast Cancer Onset and Development,” which appeared in the April 2024 issue of GEN Biotechnology. Based on the results of this study and their previously published analyses of eight other types of cancer, the researchers believe they have established the usefulness of network analysis in identifying potential new candidates for the diagnosis of and targeted gene therapy treatment for breast and other types of cancers.

In addition to McDonald, Housley, and Ashard, Kara Keun Lee, a former bioinformatics Ph.D. student who worked in McDonald’s lab, is also a co-author on the paper.

The results shown here are in whole or in part based on data generated by the TCGA Research Network. The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Project was supported by the Common Fund of the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and by NCI, NHGRI, NHLBI, NIDA, NIMH, and NINDS.

This research was supported by the Mark Light Integrated Cancer Research Center Student Fellowship, the Deborah Nash Endowment Fund, Northside Hospital (Atlanta), and the Ovarian Cancer Institute (Atlanta).

Citation: “Changes in Gene Network Interactions in Breast Cancer Onset and Development,” Zainab Arshad, Stephen N. Housley, Kara Keun Lee, and John F. McDonald, GEN Biotechnology, April 2024,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1089/genbio.2024.0002

This article was first published in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign newsroom. Read the full story here.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a first-of-its-kind technique called electron videography to capture moving images at the molecular scale. In the first demonstration of the technique, the team took a microscopic moving picture of the delicate dance between proteins and lipids found in cell membranes. The study, “Electron videography of a lipid–protein tango” was published last week in the journal Science Advances.

"This is the first time we are looking at a protein on an individual scale and haven't frozen it or tagged it," says Aditi Das, a corresponding author and associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech.

Electron microscopy techniques image at the molecular or atomic scale, yielding detailed, nanometer-scale pictures. However, they often rely on samples that have been frozen or fixed in place, leaving scientists to try to infer how molecules move and interact — like trying to map the choreography of a dance sequence from a single frame of film.

"Usually, we have to crystalize or freeze a protein, which poses challenges in capturing high-resolution images of flexible proteins. Alternately, some techniques use a molecular tag that we track, rather than watching the protein itself,” Das says. “In this study we are seeing the protein as it is, behaving how it does in a liquid environment, and seeing how lipids and proteins interact with each other."

The technique can be used to study the dynamics of other biomolecules, breaking free of constraints that have limited microscopy to still images of fixed molecules. In this study, the team examined nanoscale discs of lipid membranes and how they interacted with proteins normally found on the surface of or embedded in cell membranes.

These membrane proteins are significant for medical treatments, and are involved in processes including muscle contraction, brain function, and immune system functions. Moving forward, the researchers plan to use their electron videography technique to study other types of membrane proteins and other classes of molecules and nanomaterials.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk0217

Aaron Levine, associate dean for research and outreach in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society.

Levine is one of 502 people named to the AAAS Fellows Class of 2023, an honor the society has been awarding scientists, engineers, and innovators since 1874 for achievements and efforts on behalf of the advancement of science and its applications. AAAS Fellows are recognized for outstanding contributions to research, teaching, technology, and science communication.

“I am deeply honored to receive this recognition from an organization that has supported and inspired me since I joined as a graduate student in 2006,” said Levine. “I am also encouraged by this acknowledgement that policy and ethics play a key role in bringing groundbreaking biomedical technologies to the people who need them.”

The organization chose Levine, who is also a professor in the School of Public Policy, for his contributions to biomedical research policy — including advancing understanding of how policy debates influence contentious areas of research. His work is at the intersection of ethics, policy, and biomedical research.

“I first became interested in bioethics and science policy while working on the human genome project and witnessing the ethical and policy issues that arose,” said Levine. “I believe addressing societal issues associated with emerging biomedical technologies is critical for these advances to reach their full potential.”

Levine’s work focuses on the development and oversight of  biomedical research and health care areas such as stem cell treatments, assisted reproductive technology, fetal tissue research, and CRISPR.

The author of Cloning: A Beginner’s Guide, an accessible introduction to the science of cloning and the ethical and policy controversies this science inspires, Levine also has a longstanding interest in science communication. He was a member of the 2019-20 cohort of AAAS’ Alan I. Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellows.

In addition to his duties in the School and College, Levine also leads ethics and policy research for the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT). From 2017 to 2022, he served as CMaT’s co-director for engineering workforce development, helping guide efforts to produce a diverse, well-trained workforce for the biomanufacturing industry.

Levine holds a Ph.D. in public affairs from Princeton University and a master of philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Churchill Scholar. He earned a bachelor of science in biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.