Vinny is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech with joint appointments at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Biological Sciences.

A majority of antibiotics and drugs that we use in the clinic are derived or inspired from small organic molecules called Natural Products that are produced by living organisms such as bacteria and plants. Natural Products are at the forefront of fighting the global epidemic of antibiotic resistant pathogens, and keeping the inventory of clinically applicable pharmaceuticals stocked up. Some Natural Products are also potent human toxins and pollutants, and we need to understand how these toxins are produced to minimize our and the environmental exposure to them.

We as biochemists ask some simple questions- how and why are Natural Products produced in Nature, what we can learn from Natural Product biosynthetic processes, and how we can exploit Nature's synthetic capabilities for interesting applications?

Broadly, we are interested in questions involving (meta)genomics, biochemistry, structural and mechanistic enzymology, mass spectrometry, analytical chemistry, and how natural product chemistry dictates biology.

Lily Cheung got her research start as a sophomore at Rutgers University, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2008. She then earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 2013. Under the supervision of Stanislav Shvartsman, she characterized gene regulatory networks controlling the development of the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, using a combination of molecular biology, genetics, and reaction-diffusion modeling.

During her postdoctoral training with Wolf Frommer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, she designed biomolecular sensors to quantify sugar transport in plants. Her current interests include the use of high-throughput quantitative techniques and mathematical modeling to advance our understanding of how metabolic and gene regulatory networks interact to control plant growth.

Lily is the recipient of a NSF NPGI Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology, a NSF CAREER Award, and a Human Frontier Science Program Early Career Award.

The Blazeck Lab tackles challenges at the interface of immunology, engineering, and metabolism to improve human health. We utilize our expertise in cellular and protein engineering to control biological function and to develop novel therapies to fight disease.

Synthetic Immune Systems

Our immune system uses very complex processes to make exquisitely specific receptors that recognize disease causing agents, and much of our ability to fight diseases is contingent upon the development of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors. Many questions remain unanswered about these immune receptors. For instance, at a population level, can we characterize the millions of receptors each person makes? And then further determine which of these millions of receptors is most important towards recognizing and targeting a pathogen? And can we control the generation of immune receptors to have desired properties? We are striving to answer these questions by harnessing our immune system’s power in a synthetic setting to improve understanding and treatment options for numerous diseases, while developing applications for vaccine design, personalized medicine, and enzyme engineering.

Engineering Cellular Therapies

Immunotherapies are treatments designed to modulate the immune response that have shown astounding clinical potential, yet there are no current treatments with guaranteed success. We are working to engineer cellular systems with controllable, enhanced, and non-native functions that improve their impact and capability. By developing high throughput technologies to interrogate immune function, we hope to translate our findings into improvements in the next generation of cellular therapeutics. 

Developing Proteins that Fight Cancer and Control Metabolism

It is widely accepted that cancer cells have a significantly altered genomic and metabolic makeup relative to normal cells, but how can we best target these differences? By combining our expertise in metabolism and therapeutic protein engineering, are working to engineer proteins to directly target and fight cancer. For instance, certain enzymes can control the metabolic environment around tumors to inhibit their growth or to stimulate a native anti-cancer immune response. We utilize directed evolution approaches to optimize protein function and efficacy.

Dr. F. Levent Degertekin received his B.S. degree in 1989 from M.E.T.U, Turkey; M.S. degree in 1991 from Bilkent University, Turkey; and his Ph.D. in 1997 from Stanford University, California, all in electrical engineering. His M.S. thesis was on acoustic microscopy, and his Ph.D. work was on ultrasonic sensors for semiconductor processing, and wave propagation in layered media. He worked as an engineering research associate at the Ginzton Laboratory at Stanford University from 1997 until joining the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in spring 2000. 

He has published over 150 papers in international journals and conference proceedings. He holds 20 U.S. patents, and received an NSF CAREER Award for his work on atomic force microscopy in 2004. Dr. Degertekin served on the editorial board of the IEEE Sensors Journal, and on the technical program committees of several international conferences on ultrasonics, sensors, and micro-opto-mechanical systems (MOEMS).

Bilal Haider is an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech after completing postdoctoral training at University College London.

Haider’s research measures, manipulates and deciphers neural circuit activity underlying normal and impaired visual perception, providing new insights into how the brain processes information and orchestrates behavioral actions.

Haider has received several prestigious awards, including from the Whitehall Foundation, Simons Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His work has been published in leading journals, including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Communications and Neuron.

Ingeborg Schmidt-Krey is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. Her research interests lie in the structure and function of eukaryotic membrane proteins, two-dimensional crystallization, electron crystallography, single particle analysis, and electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM).

Munmun De Choudhury is an Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Computing in Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. De Choudhury is renowned for her groundbreaking contributions to the fields of computational social science, human-computer interaction, and digital mental health. Through fostering interdisciplinary collaborations across academia, industry, and public health sectors, Dr. De Choudhury and her collaborators have contributed significantly to advancing the development of computational techniques for early detection and intervention in mental health, as well as in unpacking how social media use benefits or harms mental well-being. De Choudhury's contributions have been recognized worldwide, with significant scholarly impact evidenced by numerous awards like induction into the SIGCHI Academy and the 2023 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award. Beyond her academic achievements, Dr. De Choudhury is a proactive community leader, a persistent contributor to policy-framing and advocacy initiatives, and is frequently sought for expert advice to governments, and national and international media.

My research laboratory uses a multidisciplinary approach to design and develop micro/nano-scale tissue engineering technologies with the ultimate goal of generating functional bioartificial tissues and organs. Reaching this goal requires the skills and expertise from several disciplines including cell biology, medicine, nanotechnology, biochemistry, and materials science and engineering. Current projects in my lab include: 1) Bioengineering iPSC-derived, functional cardiac tissues using 3D bioprinting technology for in vitro disease modeling and drug screening; 2) Engineering cardiac patch systems to regenerate damaged myocardium in murine and swine models of ischemic heart injury; 3) 3D bioprinting-based liver and bone tissue engineering; and 4) Synthesis and characterization of smart nanobiomaterials (e.g., functionalized nanoparticles) for diverse biomedical applications including drug delivery and medical imaging.