Yajun Mei is a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Mei's research interests include change-point problems and sequential analysis in Mathematical Statistics; sensor networks and information theory in Engineering; as well as longitudinal data analysis, random effects models, and clinical trials in Biostatistics. 

He received a B.S. in Mathematics from Peking University in P.R. China, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics with a minor in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. He has also worked as a postdoc in Biostatistics for two years in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA.

Christine Heitsch is Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, with courtesy appointments in Biological Sciences and Computational Science & Engineering as well as an affiliation with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience.

She is also Director of the new Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology (SCMB), an NSF-Simons MathBioSys Research Center, and finishing her tenure directing the GT Interdisciplinary Mathematics Preparation and Career Training (IMPACT) Postdoctoral Program.

Heitsch's research interests lie at the interface between discrete mathematics and molecular biology, specifically combinatorial problems "as motivated by" and "with applications to" fundamental biomedical questions like RNA folding.

Students interested in pursuing graduate studies in discrete mathematical biology can do so through a number of GT PhD programs including Bioinformatics or Quantitative Biosciences as well as Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO), Computational Science & Engineering (CSE), and (of course) Mathematics.
 

Dr. Pamela Bhatti is Professor and Associate Chair for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech. Her research is dedicated to overcoming sensory loss in human hearing through focused neural stimulation, and novel implantable sensors. Dr. Bhatti also conducts research in cardiac imaging to assess and monitor cardiovascular disease. She received her B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley (1989), her M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington (1993), and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2006). In 2013, she earned an M.S. in Clinical Research from Emory University, and co-founded a startup company (Camerad Technologies) based on her research in detecting wrong-patient errors in radiology. Dr. Bhatti is the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, Editor-in-Chief; and, in 2017, received the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award.

Christoph Fahrni earned a master’s degree in chemistry from the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Switzerland) and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of Basel (Switzerland). After working as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), he joined the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999.

Research in the Wu lab is mainly focused on mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics. They are developing innovative methods to globally identify and quantify proteins and their post-translational modifications (PTMs), including glycosylation and phosphorylation, and applying them for biomedical research. Protein PTMs plays essential roles in biological systems, and aberrant protein expression and modification are directly related to various human diseases, including cystic fibrosis, cancer and infectious diseases. Novel analytical methods will profoundly advance our understanding of protein function, which will lead to the identification of proteins or modified proteins as effective drug targets and the discovery of biomarkers for early disease detection.

Dr. Adegboyega “Yomi” Oyelere has received PhD from Brown University in 1998. Currently, he works as an associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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).