Dr. Hanjoong Jo is John and Jan Portman Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and Professor of Medicine at Emory University. He is also the Associate Chair of Emory in BME Department. Upon graduation from Korea University, Dr. Jo received PhD under the co-mentorship of Professors John Tarbell (Chemical Engineering) and Ted Hollis (Physiology) at Pennsylvania State University in 1989. Following postdoctoral training in Jay McDonald Lab at Washington University in St. Louis and University of Alabama at Birmingham, he became Assistant Professor in Pathology and BME. Dr. Jo joined the BME Department at Georgia Tech and Emory University in 2000. He directs the Cardiovascular Mechanobiology and Nanomedicine lab. His lab studies how mechanical force associated with blood flow regulates vascular biology and cardiovascular disease, especially atherosclerosis, aortic valve (AV) calcification, and abdominal aortic aneurysms. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and edited two books. He developed the mouse model of atherosclerosis, known as partial carotid ligation model, induced by disturbed flow. His work led to the discovery of several genes (mechanosensitive genes and microRNAs) and epigenetic controlling mechanisms that are regulated by bad blood flow and play key roles in atherosclerosis and AAA. By targeting some of these mechanosensitive genes, his lab has been able to treat atherosclerosis and AAA in mice. His lab is now working on nanotechnologies to developing targeted gene and drug therapies in an effort to translate mouse studies toward clinical application. He is an elected fellow of American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering Society, American Heart Association and American Physiological Society. He serves as associate editors and editorial board members of several cardiovascular and biomedical engineering journals including Scientific Reports, Circulation Research, Atherosclerosis Thrombosis Vascular Biology, Am J Physiology, Cell Molecular Bioengineering and Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology. He also has been serving as reviewers and chairs of study sections of the NIH, NSF, Veterans Administration and Am Heart Association. He also organized several international meetings, and in 2012, he served as the Chair of the Annual BME Society Meeting. He is also the founding President of Korean-American BME Society and Chairs of US-Korea Annual BMES Workshops since 2013. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ewha Womans University and Chonbuk National University.

Dr. Nie received her B.S. degree in Biology from Peking University in China in 2002. In 2007, she received her Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she worked on elucidating signaling pathways in vertebrate gastrulation movements. Thereafter, she conducted postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Marianne Bronner at California Institute of Technology. She joined Georgia Tech in Fall 2014.

Facundo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received his MSc in Chemistry from the College of Exact and Natural Sciences, Buenos Aires University in 1995 and his PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the same University, in 1999.  In August 2000, he joined the research group of Prof. Richard N. Zare in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University.  His work focused on several aspects of Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry with an emphasis on coupling this technique to capillary-format separation methods.  In 2002, he joined the group of Prof. Vicki Wysocki in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona, to develop novel tandem mass spectrometers for gas-phase peptide ion studies. In 2004 he joined the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he currently holds the position of Vasser-Woolley Endowed Professor in Bioanalytical Chemistry and Associate Chair for Research and Graduate Training. He is the author of over 185 peer-reviewed publications and numerous invited presentations at national and international conferences. He has received several awards, including the NSF CAREER award, the CETL/BP Teaching award, the Ron A. Hites best paper award from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and the Beynon award from Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, among others. He serves on the editorial board of The Analyst and as an Associate editor for the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. His current research interests include the field of metabolomics and the development of new ionization, imaging, machine learning and ion mobility spectrometry tools for probing composition and structure in complex molecular mixtures. In his (limited) free time, Facundo enjoys a number of activities that include camping with his family, rock climbing, paddling, archery, photography and ham radio. 

Nicholas Hud was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He received his B.S. degree in physics from Loyola Marymount University. His Ph.D. was conferred by the University of California, Davis for physical investigations of DNA condensation by protamine. From 1992-1995 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the biology and biotechnology research program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with Rod Balhorn. From 1995-1998 he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA where he worked with Juli Feigon and Frank A. L. Anet on the application of NMR spectroscopy to the study of DNA-cation interactions. Hud joined the faculty at Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in 1999 and was promoted to full professor in 2008. He has been visiting professor of chemistry at the National NMR Center in Slovenia, and at Imperial College London. Hud currently serves as PI of the NSF Center for Chemical Evolution, as chair of the biochemistry division of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, as co-director of the Georgia Tech-Emory University Center for Fundamental and Applied Molecular Evolution (FAME), and as associate director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

The effortlessness of moving your body belies the lurking complexity driving it. We are trying to understand how the nervous system makes something so complicated as controlling a human body feel so natural. We use human subjects studies, animal experiments, mathematical biology, and artificial intelligence to understand neural control of movement. New theories and insight promise advances in physical therapy, human-machine collaboration, brain-computer interfaces, neural modulation of peripheral reflexes, and more.

The Shoichiro's lab primary research interest is the mechanisms that regulate dynamic rearrangement of the actin cytoskeleton during various cellular events including development, cell movement, cytokinesis, and human diseases. We have been studying this problem using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system. C. elegans has been used to study many aspects of development, because of its relative simplicity in the body patterning, and application of genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and cell biology. We are especially interested in the functions of the actin depolymerizing factor (ADF)/cofilin family of actin-binding proteins, which are required for enhancement of actin filament dynamics. We found that two ADF/cofilin proteins that are generated from the unc-60 gene have different actin-regulating activities. Mutation and expression analyses demonstrated that one of the two ADF/cofilin isoforms (UNC-60B) was specifically required for organized assembly of actin filaments in muscle. ADF/cofilin promotes depolymerization and severing of actin filaments, but tropomyosin inhibits this effect by stabilizing filaments. The other ADF/cofilin isoform (UNC-60A) is highly expressed in early embryos and regulates cytokinesis and embryonic patterning. In addition, we found that actin-interacting protein 1 (AIP1) is a new regulator of muscle actin filaments. AIP1 (UNC-78) specifically interacts with ADF/cofilin-bound actin filaments and enhances filament depolymerization. We also found that the gene product of sup-12 (an RBM24 homolog) regulates alternative splicing of the unc-60 gene and is required for generation of the unc-60B mRNA. We are currently studying functions of these proteins and other regulators of actin dynamics in several developmental aspects in C. elegans.

James Dahlman is a bioengineer / molecular engineer whose work lies at the interface of chemistry, nanotechnology, genomics, and gene editing. His lab focuses on targeted drug delivery, in vivo gene editing, Cas9 therapies, siRNA therapies, and developing new technologies to improve biomaterial design. 

The DahlmanLab is known for applying 'big data' technologies to nanomedicine. The lab is pioneering DNA barcoded nanoparticles; using DNA barcodes, >200 nanoparticles can be analyzed simultaneously in vivo. These nanoparticles are studied directly in vivo, and used to deliver targeted therapies like siRNA, mRNA, or Cas9. As a result of this work, James was named 1 of the 35 most innovative people under the age of 35 by MIT Technnology Review in 2018. James has won many national / international awards, and has published in Science, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Cell Biology, Cell, Science Translational Medicine, PNAS, JACS, ACS Nano, Nano Letters, and other journals. James has also designed nanoparticles that efficiently deliver RNAs to the lung and heart. These nanoparticles can deliver 5 siRNAs at once in vivo, and are under consideration for clinical development. As a result, the lab has an interest in immunology and vascular biology. 

James supports entirely new research students come up with independently. To this end, DahlmanLab students learn how to (i) generate new ideas, (ii) select the good ones, and (iii) efficiently test whether the good ideas will actually work. 

Dahlman Lab students learn how to design/characterize/administer nanoparticles, how to isolate different cell types in vivo, how to rationally design DNA to record information, Cas9 therapies, and deep sequencing. As a result, the lab is an interdisciplinary group with students that have backgrounds in medicinal chemistry, BME, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and other fields. The lab welcomes students with all types of scientific backgrounds. The lab firmly stands by students, independent of their personal beliefs, preferences, or backgrounds.

Dr. Gabe Kwong is an Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine. His research program is conducted at the interface of the life sciences, medicine and engineering where a central focus is understanding how to harness the sophisticated defense mechanisms of immune cells to eradicate disease and provide protective immunity. Kwong has pioneered numerous biomedical technologies and published in leading scientific journals such as Nature Biotechnology and Nature Medicine. His work has been profiled broadly including coverage in The Economist, NPR, BBC, and WGBH-2, Boston 's PBS station. Professor Kwong earned his B.S. in Bioengineering with Highest Honors from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from California Institute of Technology with Professor James R. Heath. He conducted postdoctoral studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Sangeeta N. Bhatia. For his work, Dr. Kwong has been awarded the NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, named a "Future Leader in Cancer Research and Translational Medicine" by the Massachusetts General Hospital, and awarded the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, a distinction given to the 10 most innovative bioengineers in the nation. Dr. Kwong holds seven issued or pending patents in cancer nanotechnology.

Michelle C. LaPlaca, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint department between Georgia Tech and Emory University. Dr. LaPlaca earned her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, in 1991 and her M.S.E. (1992) and Ph.D. (1996) in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in the area of neuronal injury biomechanics. Following post-doctoral training in Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania’s Head Injury Center from 1996-98, she joined the faculty at Georgia Tech. Dr. LaPlaca’s research interests are in neurotrauma, specifically: traumatic brain injury, injury biomechanics, cell culture modeling of traumatic injury, neural tissue engineering, and cognitive impairment associated with brain injury and aging. Her research is funded by NIH, NSF, and the Coulter Foundation.

Nick Sahinidis is the Butler Family Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. His current research activities are at the interface between computer science and operations research, with applications in various engineering and scientific areas, including: global optimization of mixed-integer nonlinear programs: theory, algorithms, and software; informatics problems in chemistry and biology; process and energy systems engineering. Sahinidis has served on the editorial boards of many leading journals and in various positions within AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers). He has also served on numerous positions within INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), including Chair of the INFORMS Optimization Society. He received an NSF CAREER award, the INFORMS Computing Society Prize, the MOS Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize, the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award, the Constantin Carathéodory Prize, and the National Award and Gold Medal from the Hellenic Operational Research Society. Sahinidis is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of AIChE and INFORMS.