Kim joined the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering as an Assistant Professor in July 2013. Prior to his current appointment, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, where he developed biomimetic microsystems for probing nanoparticle behaviors in the inflamed endothelium and for synthesizing therapeutic and diagnostic nanomaterials. His doctorate research at CMU focused on closed-loop microfluidic control systems for lab-on-a-chip applications to biochemistry and developmental biology.

Yonggang Ke's research is highly interdisciplinary combining chemistry, biology, physics, material science, and engineering. The overall mission of his research is to use interdisciplinary research tools to program nucleic-acid-based "beautiful structures and smart devices" at nanoscale, and use them for scientific exploration and technological applications.

Faces of Research - Profile Article

Soft materials are materials whose properties are determined by internal structures with dimensions between atomic sizes and macroscopic scales. They are characterized by energies that are typically comparable to kT. As a result, they have low elastic moduli, often ~1-10 Pascals. Typical soft materials include liquid crystals, polymers, colloidal suspensions and emulsion drops. These materials, unlike conventional simple liquids, are locally heterogeneous and can have broken symmetries that affect their physical properties.

The Curtis lab is primarily focused on the physics of cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions, in particular within the context of glycobiology and immunobiology. Our newest projects focus on questions of collective and single cell migration in vitro and in vivo; immunophage therapy "an immunoengineering approach - that uses combined defense of immune cells plus viruses (phage) to overcome bacterial infections"; and the study of the molecular biophysics and biomaterials applications of the incredible enzyme, hyaluronan synthase.

Julie Champion is the William R. McLain Endowed Term Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned her B.S.E. in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. She was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Blair Brettmann received her B.S. in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. She received her Master’s in chemical engineering practice from MIT in 2009 following internships at GlaxoSmithKline (Upper Merion, PA) and Mawana Sugar Works (Mawana, India). Blair received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT in 2012 working with the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing under Professor Bernhardt Trout. Her research focused on solid-state characterization and application of pharmaceutical formulations prepared by electrospinning.

Edward Botchwey received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993 and both M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in materials science engineering and bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and 2002 respectively. He was recruited to the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2012 from his previous position at the University of Virginia. His current position is associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Botchwey is former Ph.D.