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.

Jeong Woo Lee is a member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

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.

Mark Styczynski is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), doing research at the interface of synthetic and systems biology as applied to metabolic systems. His synthetic biology work focuses on the development of low-cost, minimal-equipment biosensors for the diagnosis of nutritional deficiencies in the developing world. His systems biology work uses computational and experimental methods to characterize metabolic dynamics and regulation using metabolomics data. He has received young investigator awards from the NSF, DARPA, and ORAU. He has won multiple department-and institute-level teaching awards at Georgia Tech. He founded and was the first president of the Metabolomics Association of North America (MANA), and is a Council Member in the Engineering BiologyResearch Consortium.

The Tong Lab tackles challenges in the interdisciplinary areas of bioresource engineering and sustainable chemistry. We develop innovative technologies for producing chemicals, materials, energy, and fuels from renewable resources.

Current research interests include:

• Functional biomaterials for high-efficiency circular economy
• Platform chemicals and hydrocarbon fuels from renewable resources
• Sustainable process control and modeling
• Nano-biomaterial synthesis and self-assembling
• Polymer degradation and recycling

Disciplines:

• Materials and Nanotechnology

• Energy and Sustainability

Meredith is the Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Renewable Bioproducts Institute, and the James Harris Faculty Fellow in ChBE.

Meredith's group researches the surfaces and interfaces of advanced materials. Their work aims to apply fundamentals of polymer, surface and colloid science to find new ways to engineer materials useful to society and industry. In particular, projects emphasize the utilization of renewable components and sustainable processing to achieve circular manufacturing and use of plastics, composites, foams and coatings, among others. Many of these materials are critical for food security, energy efficiency, and are closely connected to greenhouse gas reduction.

Elsa Reichmanis is Anderson Chair in Chemical Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University. Prior to joining Lehigh, she was Professor and Pete Silas Chair in Chemical Engineering in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She started her independent career at Bell Labs where she was Bell Labs Fellow and Director of the Materials Research Department. She received her PhD and BS degrees in chemistry from Syracuse University. Her research interests include the chemistry, properties, and application of materials technologies for photonic and electronic applications. She has had impact in the design of new imaging chemistries for advanced lithographic applications, and designed one of the first readily accessible and manufacturable polymers for advanced silicon device manufacturing using 193 nm lithography. 

The Reichmanis research group is currently exploring polymeric and hybrid organic/inorganic materials chemistries for a range of device and electronic and sustainable energy applications. Her research, at the interface of chemical engineering, chemistry, materials science, optics, and electronics, spans from fundamental concept to technology development and implementation, with particular focus on polymeric and nanostructured materials for advanced technologies. Currently, efforts aim to identify fundamental parameters that will enable sub-nanometer scale dimensional control of organic, polymer and/or hybrid materials for applications including transistor devices, photovoltaics, and high-capacity energy storage. 

Reichmanis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995 and has participated in several National Research Council (NRC) activities. She was an elected member of the Bureau of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC); and has been active in the American Chemical Society throughout her career, having served as 2003 President of the Society. Elsa Reichmanis is the recipient of several awards, including the ACS Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2018), the ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science (1999), the ASM Engineering Materials Achievement Award (1996), and the Society of Chemical Industry’s Perkin Medal (2001). In other service, she is an Executive Editor of the ACS Journal Chemistry of Materials. 

The Reichmanis Group works at the interface of chemical engineering, chemistry, materials science, optics, and electronics spanning the range from fundamental concept to technology development and implementation. Research interests include the chemistry, properties and applications of materials technologies for electronic and photonic applications, with particular focus on polymeric and nanostructured materials for advanced technologies. in paper-based battery applications as well. 

Krista S. Walton is the Associate Dean for Research & Innovation in the College of Engineering and Professor and Robert "Bud" Moeller Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. She received her B.S.E. in chemical engineering from the University of Alabama-Huntsville in 2000 and obtained her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 2005, working with Prof. M. Douglas LeVan. Prof. Walton completed an ACS PRF Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University in 2006 under the direction of Prof. Randall Snurr.

Her research program focuses on the design, synthesis, and characterization of functional porous materials for use in adsorption applications including carbon dioxide capture and air purification. She has published > 80 peer-reviewed articles and presented dozens of plenary lectures and invited seminars. Prof. Walton currently serves as an Associate Editor for the ACS Journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, and is the Director and Lead PI of Georgia Tech’s DOE Energy Frontier Research Center, UNCAGE-ME. Prof. Walton’s accomplishments have been recognized by many prestigious awards including the inaugural International Adsorption Society Award for Excellence in Publications by a Young Member of the Society (2013) and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2008).