The Curtis lab is primarily focused on the physics of cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions, in particular within the context of glycobiology and immunobiology. Our newest projects focus on questions of collective and single cell migration in vitro and in vivo; immunophage therapy "an immunoengineering approach - that uses combined defense of immune cells plus viruses (phage) to overcome bacterial infections"; and the study of the molecular biophysics and biomaterials applications of the incredible enzyme, hyaluronan synthase. A few common scientific themes emerge frequently in our projects: biophysics at interfaces, the use of quantitative modeling, collective interactions of cells and/or molecules, cell mechanics, cell motility and adhesion, and in many cases, the role of bulky sugars in facilitating cell integration and rearrangements in tissues.

Dr. Cassie S. Mitchell is a research engineer, elite athlete, and mentor. She is a current member of the USA Paralympic team and research faculty in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. At age 18 Cassie was afflicted with Devics Neuromyelitis Optica, leaving her as a quadriplegic and with visual impairments. Her faith and philosophy on life has helped her to overcome the resulting challenges. She graduated with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Oklahoma State University and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from GT/Emory. She enjoys mentoring high school and college students as well as new spinal cord injury patients at Shepherd Center Brain and Spinal Cord Rehabilitiation Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia.

Devesh Ranjan was named the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and took over the role on January 1, 2022. He previously served as the Associate Chair for Research, and Ring Family Chair in the Woodruff School. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and serves as a co-director of the $100M Department of Defense-funded University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH). At Georgia Tech, Ranjan has held several leadership positions including chairing ME’s Fluid Mechanics Research Area Group (2017 - 2018), serving as ME’s Associate Chair for Research (2019-present), and as co-chair of the “Hypersonics as a System” task-force, and serving as Interim Vice-President for Interdisciplinary Research (Feb 2021-June 2021). 

Ranjan joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2014. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a director’s research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2008) and Morris E. Foster Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at Texas A&M University (2009-2014). He earned a bachelor's degree from the NIT-Trichy (India) in 2003, and master's and Ph.D. degrees from the UW-Madison in 2005 and 2007 respectively, all in mechanical engineering. 

Ranjan’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary area of power conversion, complex fluid flows involving shock and hydrodynamic instabilities, and the turbulent mixing of materials in extreme conditions, such as supersonic and hypersonic flows. Ranjan is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and has received numerous awards for his scientific contributions, including the DOE-Early Career Award (first GT recipient), the NSF CAREER Award, and the US AFOSR Young Investigator award. He was also named the J. Erskine Love Jr. Faculty Fellow in 2015. He was invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2016 US Frontiers in Engineering Symposium. For his educational efforts and mentorship activity, he has received CATERPILLAR Teaching Excellence Award from College of Engineering at Texas A&M, as well as 2013 TAMU ASME Professor Mentorship Award from TAMU student chapter of the ASME. At Georgia Tech, Ranjan served as a Provost’s Teaching and Learning Fellow (PTLF) from 2018-2020, and was named 2021 Governor’s Teaching Fellow. He was also named Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Fellow for 2020-21. 

Ranjan is currently part of a 10-member Technical Screening Committee of the NAE’s COVID-19 Call for Engineering Action taskforce, an initiative to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Shock Waves and was a former Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering.

I am an engineer and neuroscientist focused on how the brain and body cooperate to allow us to move. Fundamental abilities like standing and walking appear effortless until we–or someone we love–loses that ability. Movement is impacted in a wide range of diseases because it involves almost all parts of the brain and body, and their interactions with the environment. How we move is also highly individualized, changing across our lifetimes as a function of our experiences, and adapting in different situations. As such, assessing and treating movement impairments remains highly challenging. My approach is to dissect the complexities of how we move in health and disease by bridging what may seem to be disparate fields across engineering, neuroscience, and physiology. Our current application areas are Parkinson’s disease, stroke, aging and cerebral palsy, and we are interested in extending our work toward mild cognitive impairment and concussion.

My lab uses robotics, computation, and artificial intelligence to identify new physiological principles of sensing and moving that are enabling researchers to personalize rehabilitation and medicine. Primarily, we study people in the lab, studying brain and muscle activity in relationship to the body’s biomechanics in standing and walking. We use and develop robotic devices for assessing and assisting human movement, while interpreting brain and muscle activity to personalize the interactions. Our novel computer simulations of muscle, neurons, and joints establish a virtual platform for predicting how movements change in disease and improve with interventions. Recently, we have demonstrated the critical role of cognitive function motor impairment that may increase fall risk, suggesting that how we move and how we think may be closely related. Current projects include developing physiologically-inspired controllers to enable exoskeletons to enhance user balance, identifing individual differences that predict response to gait rehabilitation in stroke survivors, and developing more precise and physiologically-based methods to interpret clinical motor test outcomes.

Nicoleta Serban is the Peterson Professor of Pediatric Research in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Serban's most recent research focuses on model-based data mining for functional data, spatio-temporal data with applications to industrial economics with a focus on service distribution and nonparametric statistical methods motivated by recent applications from proteomics and genomics. 

She received her B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Theoretical Statistics and Stochastic Processes from the University of Bucharest. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Serban's research interests on Health Analytics span various dimensions including large-scale data representation with a focus on processing patient-level health information into data features dictated by various considerations, such as data-generation process and data sparsity; machine learning and statistical modeling to acquire knowledge from a compilation of health-related datasets with a focus on geographic and temporal variations; and integration of statistical estIMaTes into informed decision making in healthcare delivery and into managing the complexity of the healthcare system.

Joe Lachance is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology and a member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute.

Lachance received his Ph.D. in Genetics from Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York. He conducted his postdoctoral studies as a NIH Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lachance's research is in the areas of human evolutionary genomics, population genetics, and health disparities. His lab integrates large genome-scale datasets with evolutionary theory and computer simulations. They have found evidence of ancient introgression in Africa, inferred that the leading edge of the out-of-Africa migration involved an excess of males, discovered that genetic risks of cancer have decreased over evolutionary time, and identified novel targets of positive selection.

Pinar Keskinocak is the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She is also co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. Previously, she served as the College of Engineering ADVANCE Professor and as interim associate dean for faculty development and scholarship. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University, and her M.S. and B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University.

Keskinocak's research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling (including Covid-19, malaria, Guinea worm, pandemic flu), evaluating intervention strategies, and resource allocation; catch-up scheduling for vaccinations; hospital operations management; disaster preparedness and response (e.g., prepositioning inventory); debris management; centralized and decentralized price and lead time decisions. She has worked on projects with companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and healthcare providers, including American Red Cross, CARE, Carter Center, CDC, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University, and Intel Corporation.

She is an INFORMS Fellow and currently serves as the president of INFORMS. Previously she served as the Secretary of INFORMS, a department editor for Operations Research (Policy Modeling and Public Sector area), associate editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and INFORMS Vice President of Membership and Professional Recognition. She is the co-founder and past-president of INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service, and Needs, and the president of the INFORMS Health Applications Society.

Saumya Jain is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences. He received a B.Tech and an M.Tech in Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Arizona. He conducted postdoctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow in the lab of Dr. Larry Zipursky. His research focuses on the regulation of gene expression in developing nervous systems across space and time.

Animal brains consist of a vast number of neurons (~100 billion in humans, ~100 million in mice), and thousands of neuron-types. These neurons generated at different times and locations in the developing brain come together in precise ways to form specific connections (~100 trillion connections in the human brain). Even subtle defects in wiring are associated with conditions such as autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy. How does biology ensure the assembly of such a complex structure? A key piece of this puzzle is ensuring that the right set of genes are expressed at the right time and in the right place. The Jain lab is trying to address the following questions: 1) How are the timing and cell-type specificity of gene expression controlled in developing neurons to ensure proper circuit formation? 2) How are these mechanisms perturbed in neurodevelopmental disorders? To address these questions, the lab applies single-cell genomics, genetics and molecular biology approaches in the developing mouse and fruit fly visual systems.

Itamar Kolvin received his B.Sc. (2007) in Physics and Mathematics and his M.Sc. (2009) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2017, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics under Prof. Jay Fineberg in the Hebrew University. He was a HFSP cross-disciplinary postdoctoral fellow in the Physics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara with Pro. Zvonimir Dogic. His research interests are in the fundamentals of soft matter out-of-equilibrium: assembly, deformation, flow and fracture. Current efforts make use of model systems that are assembled of protein machineries to investigate active and adaptive material mechanics.