Joseph Lachance

Joseph Lachance

Joseph Lachance

Associate Professor

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.

joseph.lachance@biology.gatech.edu

404-894-0794

Office Location:
EBB 2103

Website

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    Research Focus Areas:
    • Molecular Evolution

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    Pinar Keskinocak

    Pinar Keskinocak

    Pinar Keskinocak

    H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair
    Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    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.

    pk50@mail.gatech.edu

    404-894-2325

    Office Location:
    Groseclose 422

    Website

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  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Public Health
    • Shaping the Human-Technology Frontier
    • Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation
    Additional Research:

    Health systems; humanitarian systems; modeling; simulation; analytics and machine learning; Research and Management Science; Health and Humanitarian Applications; Supply Chain Management; Auctions/Pricing; Due Date/Lead-Time Decisions; Production Planning/Scheduling; Logistics/Transportation


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    Greeshma Agasthya

    G

    Greeshma Agasthya

    Assistant Professor

    Greeshma Agasthya (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Nuclear & Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Program at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She leads the Computational Medical Physics Laboratory, and her research interests are: (1) developing multiscale digital twins for personalized radiation dosimetry for imaging, therapy, and theranostics, (2) modeling and simulations to assess novel radiation protocols from cancer diagnosis to cancer treatment, and (3) developing AI frameworks to model patient trajectories for early intervention and treatment in oncology.

    Previously, she was a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the Advanced Computing for Health Sciences section. Agasthya received her doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University and completed her postdoctoral training at Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute. She has experience in medical imaging research, modeling and simulation for radiation dosimetry, and AI and Machine learning for healthcare. Agasthya has developed and used multi-scale modeling and simulations of the human body for virtual clinical trials, radiation dosimetry, and optimization of medical imaging systems for cancer applications. She has worked on artificial intelligence (AI) for cancer surveillance, predicting disease outcomes, and clinical decision support. She has collaborated with experts in medical physics, radiology, cardiology, computer engineering, and statistics to tackle interdisciplinary challenges in medical physics and biomedical engineering. She has worked on imaging modalities including neutron imaging, x-ray radiography, computed tomography (CT), and tomosynthesis systems for cancer applications.

    greeshma@gatech.edu

    Office Location:
    Boggs 3-71

    https://sites.google.com/view/greeshma-comp

  • https://www.me.gatech.edu/user/1106
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/greeshmaagasthya/
  • University, College, and School/Department
    Additional Research:
    • Bioinformatics
    • Diagnostics
    • Healthcare
    • Machine Learning
    • Nuclear
    • Radiation Therapy

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    Alexander Vlahos

    AV

    Alexander Vlahos

    Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Alexander Vlahos is an Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Alexander received his B.S. in Biochemistry from McMaster University and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor Michael Sefton. His Ph.D. work focused on developing an injectable bioartificial pancreas that could be delivered underneath the skin. He then transitioned to mammalian synthetic biology, where he conducted his postdoctoral work as an HFSP long-term fellow at Stanford University with Professor Xiaojing Gao.

    His research integrates principles from synthetic biology, protein engineering, and tissue engineering to develop synthetic protein circuits for mammalian cellular engineering. The Vlahos lab synergizes synthetic biology and tissue engineering to create programmable gene and cell therapies for biomedical applications in regenerative medicine, cancer, and autoimmune disease. His lab has three main research themes, including 1) generating protein sensors to sense changes in internal cell states or the external microenvironment, 2) programming engineered cells to model cell-to-cell communication and elucidate the dynamics and expression of key signals that govern fibrosis and immune rejection, and 3) applying synthetic protein circuits to modulate the immune system and improve cell transplantation.

     


     

    vlahosae@gatech.edu

    Office Location:
    UAW 4103, 313 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, GA, 30332

    https://www.alexandervlahos.com

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    Additional Research:
    • Bioengineering
    • Biomaterials
    • Immunoengineering
    • Regenerative Medicine

    IRI Connections:

    Justin Kim

    Justin Kim

    Justin Kim

    Associate Professor

    Justin Kim is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He received his A.B. in Chemistry and Physics and an A.M. in Chemistry from Harvard College in 2003 then received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013. After a postdoctoral fellowship as a Miller Institute Fellow at UC Berkeley and at Stanford University, he joined the faculty of the Department of Cancer Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School in 2016 as an Assistant Professor. He later joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2024. He is the recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2018), Thieme Chemistry Journal Award (2021), and the NSF CAREER Award (2023). Professor Kim’s research program is defined by the development of biologically relevant reactions for use in chemistry, biology, and materials science. His primary research interests are in expanding the functional repertoire of bioorthogonal chemistry, specifically exploring new bond-forming and breaking methods that enable platforms for discovering and targeting small molecule-protein and protein-protein interactions as well as for creating functionally dynamic biomaterials.


     

    jkim4172@gatech.edu

    404-894-9950

    Office Location:
    MoSE 2144

    https://sites.gatech.edu/kimlab/


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    Suman Das

    Suman Das

    Suman Das

    Morris M. Bryan, Jr. Chair and Professor, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
    Director, Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory

    suman.das@me.gatech.edu

    404.385.6027

    Office Location:
    MARC 255

    Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory

  • ME Profile Page
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    Research Focus Areas:
    • Additive manufacturing
    • Biomaterials
    • Conventional Energy
    • Materials and Nanotechnology
    Additional Research:

    3D printing; Additive/Advanced Manufacturing; Biomaterials; Composites; Emerging Technologies; Nanocomposites; Nanomanufacturing; Manufacturing, Mechanics of Materials, Bioengineering, and Micro and Nano Engineering. Advanced manufacturing and materials processing of metallic, polymeric, ceramic, and composite materials for applications in life sciences, propulsion, and energy. Professor Das directs the Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory and Research Group at Georgia Tech. His research interests encompass a broad variety of interdisciplinary topics under the overall framework of advanced design, prototyping, direct digital manufacturing, and materials processing particularly to address emerging research issues in life sciences, propulsion, and energy. His ultIMaTe objectives are to investigate the science and design of innovative processing techniques for advanced materials and to invent new manufacturing methods for fabricating devices with unprecedented functionality that can yield dramatic improvements in performance, properties and costs.


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    Julie Champion

    Julie Champion

    Julie Champion

    Professor, School Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

    Julie Champion is the William R. McLain Endowed Term Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned her B.S.E. in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. She was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Champion is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and has received awards including American Chemical Society Women Chemists Committee Rising Star, NSF BRIGE Award, Georgia Tech Women in Engineering Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, Georgia Tech BioEngineering Program Outstanding Advisor Award. Professor Champion’s current research focuses on design and self-assembly of functional nanomaterials made from engineered proteins for applications in immunology, cancer, and biocatalysis.

    julie.champion@chbe.gatech.edu

    404.894.2874

    Office Location:
    EBB 5015

    Champion Lab

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    Research Focus Areas:
    • Biobased Materials
    • Biomaterials
    • Cancer Biology
    • Drug Design, Development and Delivery
    • Regenerative Medicine
    Additional Research:

    Cellular Materials; Drug Delivery; Self-Assembly; "Developing therapeutic protein materials, where the protein is both the drug and thedelivery system Engineering proteins to control and understand protein particleself-assembly Repurposing and engineering pathogenic proteins for human therapeutics Creating materials that mimic cell-cell interactions to modulate immunologicalfunctions for various applications, including inflammation, cancer, autoimmune disease, and vaccination"


    IRI Connections:

    Robert Butera

    Robert Butera

    Robert Butera

    Chief Research Operations Officer
    Professor

    rbutera@gatech.edu

    404-894-2935

    Office Location:
    UAW 3111

    Website

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    Research Focus Areas:
    • Neuroscience
    Additional Research:

    Neuromodulation of peripheral nerve activity real-time control methods applied to electrophysiology measurements Autonomic modulation of visceral organs. Our laboratory combines engineering and neuroscience to tackle real-world problems. We utilize techniques including intracellular and extracellular electrophysiology, computational modeling, and real-time computing.


    IRI Connections:

    Mark Borodovsky

    Mark Borodovsky

    Mark Borodovsky

    Regents' Professor
    Director, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics
    Senior Advisor in Bioinformatics, Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta

    Dr. Borodovsky and his group develop machine learning algorithms for computational analysis of biological sequences: DNA, RNA and proteins. Our primary focus is on prediction of protein-coding genes and regulatory sites in genomic DNA. Probabilistic models play an important role in the algorithm framework, given the probabilistic nature of biological sequence evolution.

    borodovsky@gatech.edu

    404-894-8432

    Office Location:
    EBB 2105

    Website

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    Research Focus Areas:
    • Algorithms & Optimizations
    • Machine Learning
    • Systems Biology
    Additional Research:

    Development and applicaton of new machine learning and pattern recognition methods in bioinformatics and biological systems. Development and applicaton of new machine learning and pattern recognition methods in bioinformatics and biological systems. Chromatin; Epigenetics; Bioinformatics


    IRI Connections:

    Jaydev Desai

    Jaydev Desai

    Jaydev Desai

    Professor and Distinguished Faculty Fellow, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
    Associate Director, Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines
    Director, Georgia Center for Medical Robotics

    Jaydev P. Desai, Ph.D, is currently a Professor and BME Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in August 2016, he was a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). He completed his undergraduate studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1993. He received his M.A. in Mathematics in 1997, M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in 1995 and 1998 respectively, all from the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He is a recipient of several NIH R01 grants, NSF CAREER award, and was also the lead inventor on the "Outstanding Invention of 2007 in Physical Science Category" at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also the recipient of the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. In 2011, he was an invited speaker at the National Academy of Sciences "Distinctive Voices" seminar series on the topic of "Robot-Assisted Neurosurgery" at the Beckman Center. He was also invited to attend the National Academy of Engineering's 2011 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He has over 150 publications, is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics (currently in preparation). His research interests are primarily in the area of image-guided surgical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, cancer diagnosis at the micro-scale, and rehabilitation robotics. He is a Fellow of the ASME and AIMBE.

    jaydev@gatech.edu

    404.385.5381

    Office Location:
    UA Whitaker Room 3112

    Website

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    Research Focus Areas:
    • Cancer Biology
    • Human Augmentation
    • Miniaturization & Integration
    • Neuroscience
    Additional Research:

    Image-guided surgical robotics, Rehabilitation robotics; Cancer diagnosis at the micro-scale.


    IRI Connections: