Ravi Kane is the Garry Betty/V Foundation Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Cancer Nanotechnology. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University in 1993. Also, he received an M.S. in Chemical Engineering Practice and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT, working with Bob Cohen and Bob Silbey. After postdoctoral research with George Whitesides in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, he joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as an assistant professor in 2001. He was promoted to associate professor in 2006, to full professor in 2007, and to the P.K. Lashmet Professor in 2008. He served as the head of RPI’s Howard P. Isermann Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering before moving to Georgia Tech in 2015. Prof. Kane has graduated 27 Ph.D students and contributed to over 130 scientific publications.

Nian Liu began as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in January 2017. He received his B.S. in 2009 from Fudan University (China), and Ph.D. in 2014 from Stanford University, where he worked with Prof. Yi Cui on the structure design for Si anodes for high-energy Li-ion batteries. In 2014-2016, he worked with Prof. Steven Chu at Stanford University as a postdoc, where he developed in situ optical microscopy to probe beam-sensitive battery reactions. Dr. Liu 's lab at Georgia Tech is broadly interested in the combination of nanomaterials, electrochemistry, and light microscopy for understanding and addressing the global energy challenges. Dr. Liu is the recipient of the Electrochemical Society (ECS) Daniel Cubicciotti Award (2014) and American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award (2015).

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.