Dr. Susan S. Margulies leads the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Engineering in its mission to transform our world for a better tomorrow by driving discovery, inspiring innovation, enriching education, and accelerating access. With an annual budget of nearly $800 million, the NSF’s Engineering Directorate provides over 40 percent of federal funding for fundamental research in engineering at academic institutions, and it distributes more than 1500 awards supporting research and education each year.

Michelle C. LaPlaca, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint department between Georgia Tech and Emory University. Dr. LaPlaca earned her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, in 1991 and her M.S.E. (1992) and Ph.D. (1996) in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in the area of neuronal injury biomechanics.

Dr. Keilholz has been working in preclinical imaging for more than twenty years, with the goal of using animal models to improve the analysis of human MRI imaging. Her research uses multimodal approaches to extract information about neural dynamics from functional neuroimaging studies.

Bilal Haider is an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech after completing postdoctoral training at University College London.

My research interests center on control of movement by sensorimotor integration in the mammalian spinal cord. Using predominantly electrophysiological methods applied in vivo, we study neural signaling by spinal motoneurons, somatosensory neurons, and their central synapses. Our primary analyses include electrical properties, synaptic function, and firing behavior of single neurons. We are actively examining how these neurons and synapses respond soon and long after peripheral nerve injury and regeneration.

Dr. Jang’s lab uses multi-disciplinary approaches to study muscle stem cell biology and develops bioactive stem cell delivery vehicles for use in regenerative medicine. Dr. Jang’s lab studies both basic aspects of muscle stem cell biology, especially systemic/metabolic regulations of stem cell and stem cell niche, as well as more translational aspects of muscle stem cell and mesenchymal stem cell for use in therapeutic approaches for musculoskeletal aging, neuromuscular diseases, and traumatic injuries.

Dr. Chang is the director of the Comparative Neuromechanics Laboratory. His research program focuses on trying to understand how animals move through and interact with their environment.

The research focus of Boris Prilutsky's laboratory is Neural Control and Biomechanics of Movement. They study how the nervous system controls hundreds of muscles and kinematic degrees of freedom of the body to produce purposeful motor behaviors and how the neural control of motor behaviors is affected by neural and musculoskeletal injuries.

Patrick McGrath's research group is interested in understanding the genetic basis of heritable behavioral variation. In the current age, it has become cheap and easy to catalog the set of genetic differences between two individuals. But which genetic differences are responsible for generating differences in innate behaviors, including liability to neurological diseases such as autism, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia? How do these causative genetic variants modify a nervous system? Besides their role in disease, genetic variation is the substrate for natural selection.

Michael Goodisman is interested in understanding how evolutionary processes affect social systems and how sociality, in turn, affects the course of evolution. His research explores the molecular basis underlying sociality, the nature of selection in social systems, the breeding biology of social animals, the process of self-organization in social groups, and the course of development in social species. His teaching interests are centered on the importance of behavior, genetics, and ethics in biological systems. Goodisman also works to improve and advance undergraduate education.