Roman Mezencev is an adjunct associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech and a scientist at the U.S. EPA’s National Center of Public Health and Environmental Assessment. His areas of research interest include cancer biology, pharmacology, toxicogenomics, protein misfolding diseases, and public health. In cancer biology, his main research focuses on using omics data to identify new cancer subtypes through molecular profiling, which can help enhance their diagnosis and treatment. Additionally, Mezencev explores the use of omics data to predict and understand chemically-induced cancer and other adverse outcomes to protect public health. He is also investigating the intriguing epidemiological associations and mechanistic connections between cancer and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), as well as other protein-misfolding diseases. By understanding these associations, we can identify shared risk factors and molecular mechanisms that can lead to the development of new anti-cancer and anti-AD drugs and enhance our understanding of these complex diseases.
 

Josiah Hester works broadly in computer engineering, with a special focus on wearable devices, edge computing, and cyber-physical systems. His Ph.D. work focused on energy harvesting and battery-free devices that failed intermittentently. He now focuses on sustainable approaches to computing, via designing health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for conservation. 
   
His work in health is focused on increasing accessibility and lowering the burden of getting preventive and acute healthcare. In both situations, he designs low-burden, high-fidelity wearable devices that monitor aspects of physiology and behavior, and use machine learning techniques to suggest or deliver adaptive and in-situ interventions ranging from pharmacological to behavioral. 
   
His work is supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, and DARPA. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022. He was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant Ten, won the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Most Promising Scientist/Engineer Award, and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2021. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC, Popular Science, Communications of the ACM, and the Guinness Book of World Records, among many others.

King Jordan is Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and Director of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has a computational laboratory and his group works on a wide variety of research and development projects related to: (1) human clinical & population genomics, (2) computational genomics for public health, and (3) computational approaches to functional genomics. He is particularly interested in the relationship between human genetic ancestry and health. His lab is also actively engaged in capacity building efforts in genomics and bioinformatics in Latin America. 

Grover’s research activities in process systems engineering focus on understanding macromolecular organization and the emergence of biological function. Discrete atoms and molecules interact to form macromolecules and even larger mesoscale assemblies, ultimately yielding macroscopic structures and properties. A quantitative relationship between the nanoscale discrete interactions and the macroscale properties is required to design, optimize, and control such systems; yet in many applications, predictive models do not exist or are computationally intractable.

The Grover group is dedicated to the development of tractable and practical approaches for the engineering of macroscale behavior via explicit consideration of molecular and atomic scale interactions. We focus on applications involving the kinetics of self-assembly, specifically those in which methods from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics do not provide closed form solutions. General approaches employed include stochastic modeling, model reduction, machine learning, experimental design, robust parameter design, and estimation.

Fedorov's background is in thermal/fluid sciences, chemical reaction engineering as well as in applied mathematics. His laboratory works at the intersection between mechanical and chemical engineering and solid state physics and analytical chemistry with the focus on portable/ distributed power generation with synergetic CO₂ capture; thermal management of high power dissipation devices and electronics cooling; special surfaces and nanostructured interfaces for catalysis, heat and moisture management; and development of novel bioanalytical instrumentation and chemical sensors. Fedorov joined Georgia Tech in 2000 as an assistant professor after finishing his postdoctoral work at Purdue University.

David Hu is a fluid dynamicist with expertise in the mechanics of interfaces between fluids such as air and water. He is a leading researcher in the biomechanics of animal locomotion. The study of flying, swimming and running dates back hundreds of years, and has since been shown to be an enduring and rich subject, linking areas as diverse as mechanical engineering, mathematics and neuroscience. Hu's work in this area has the potential to impact robotics research. Before robots can interact with humans, aid in minimally-invasive surgery, perform interplanetary exploration or lead search-and-rescue operations, we will need a fundamental physical understanding of how related tasks are accomplished in their biological counterparts. Hu's work in these areas has generated broad interest across the fields of engineering, biology and robotics, resulting in over 30 publications, including a number in high-impact interdisciplinary journals such as Nature, Nature Materials, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as well as popular journals such as Physics Today and American Scientist. Hu is on editorial board member for Nature Scientific Reports, The Journal of Experimental Biology, and NYU Abu Dhabi's Center for Center for Creative Design of Materials. He has won the NSF CAREER award, Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty award, and best paper awards from SAIC, Sigma Xi, ASME, as well as awards for science education such as the Pineapple Science Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize. Over the years, Hu's research has also played a role in educating the public in science and engineering. He has been an invited guest on numerous television and radio shows to discuss his research, including Good Morning America, National Public Radio, The Weather Channel, and Discovery Channel. His ant research was featured on the cover of the Washington Post in 2011. His work has also been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, National Geographic, Popular Science and Discover His laboratory appeared on 3D TV as part of a nature documentary by 3DigitalVision, "Fire ants: the invincible army," available on Netflix.

My research integrates my work in complex fluids and granular media and the biomechanics of locomotion of organisms and robots to address problems in nonequilibrium systems that involve interaction of matter with complex media. For example, how do organisms like lizards, crabs, and cockroaches cope with locomotion on complex terrestrial substrates (e.g. sand, bark, leaves, and grass). I seek to discover how biological locomotion on challenging terrain results from the nonlinear, many degree of freedom interaction of the musculoskeletal and nervous systems of organisms with materials with complex physical behavior. The study of novel biological and physical interactions with complex media can lead to the discovery of principles that govern the physics of the media. My approach is to integrate laboratory and field studies of organism biomechanics with systematic laboratory studies of physics of the substrates, as well as to create mathematical and physical (robot) models of both organism and substrate. Discovery of the principles of locomotion on such materials will enhance robot agility on such substrates

Faces of Research - Profile Article