Melissa Lambeth Kemp received her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from University of Washington. Dr. Kemp joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2006 after completing postdoctoral training at MIT. Her expertise is in computational modeling of metabolism and signal transduction, as well as developing statistical modeling tools to examine network relationships in high-dimension datasets. One major aspect of her research program linking ROS – the byproducts of aerobic metabolism – to the fundamental way that cells interpret instructions from their environment, their neighbors, and their own genetic blueprint. Specific applications of her diverse work include systems modeling of transient phosphatase oxidation of kinase cascades, patient-specific differences in cytotoxicity to redox-cycled chemotherapeutics and radiation, and the coordination of oxidative metabolism with epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition. Her research program also includes a component of developing high-throughput screening methods for assaying cue-signal-response relationships in cells and analytical tools for single cell gene expression. 

Dr. Kemp currently serves as the Research Director of the multi-site NSF Engineering Research Center “Cell Manufacturing Technologies”. In her former role as Associate Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center “Emergent Behavior of Integrated Cellular Systems”, she spearheaded the multi-site center’s computational activities by developing agent-based models of context-dependent cellular decisions to generate new hypotheses of intercellular communication in pluripotent stem cell differentiation and emergent patterning; this work continues currently in quantifying organizational principles and spatial relationships in iPSC-derived tissues from multi-omics data. Dr. Kemp’s career honors include a Whitaker Graduate Fellowship, Merck/CSBi postdoctoral fellowship, Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, NIH New Innovator Award, and the CSB2 Prize for Innovative Measurement Methods from the Council for Systems Biology in Boston.

Dr. Kostas Konstantinidis joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in November 2007. He received his BS in Agriculture Sciences from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) in 1999. He continued his studies at the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI) under the supervision of Prof. James M. Tiedje, where he obtained a PhD in 2004. His PhD studies were fully supported by the Bouyoukos Fellowship program and were devoted in advancing our understanding of the ecology and physiology of soil bacteria through the comparative analysis of their whole-genome sequences. This research resulted in a NSF-funded project to advance the species definition for prokaryotes, which also fostered a short post-doc position at the Center for Microbial Ecology. He then moved to MIT and the laboratory of Prof. Edward DeLong to get trained on innovating metagenomic techniques. His work at MIT provided important new insights into the complexity and function of oceanic microbial communities as well as how life is adapting in the deep and cold Oceans. His research interests are at the interface of genomics and computational biology in the context of microbial ecology with the overarching goal to broaden understanding of the genetic and metabolic potential of the microbial world. Advancing our knowledge on these issues is essential for a better understanding of the microbes that power, by and large, the biogeochemical cycles that sustain life on Earth and cause or control important diseases in humans and animals. He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) and the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP). Konstantinidis held the Carlton S. Wilder Junior Professorship for five years and subsequently received the Maulding Faculty Fellowship in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Shaheen Azim Dewji, Ph.D., (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Nuclear & Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Programs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she leads the Radiological Engineering, Detection, and Dosimetry (RED²) research group. Dewji joined Georgia Tech following three years as faculty at Texas A&M University in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, and as a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Nuclear Security Science and Policy Initiatives (NSSPI). In her prior role at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she remained for almost 9 years, Dewji was Radiological Scientist in the Center for Radiation Protection Knowledge. Her research interests include development of dose coefficients, shielding design, and nuclear material detection assay using gamma-ray spectroscopy. Her recent work has focused on associated challenges in uncertainty quantification in dose estimation/reconstruction associated with the external exposure and internal uptake of radionuclides associated with applications of emergency response, defense, nuclear medicine, and occupational/public safety using Monte Carlo radiation transport codes and internal dose modeling. Dewji completed her Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Nuclear and Radiological Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA and was a fellow of the Sam Nunn Security Program. She received her Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of British Columbia. Dewji currently serves on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine – Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board and is a member of the Board of Directors for both the American Nuclear Society and Health Physics Society.
   

Turgay Ayer is the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Ayer also serves as the research director for healthcare analytics and business intelligence in the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech and holds a courtesy appointment at Emory Medical School.

His research focuses on healthcare analytics and socially responsible business analytics with a particular emphasis on practice-focused research. His research papers have been published in top tier management, engineering, and medical journals, and covered by popular media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, U.S. News, and NPR.

Ayer has received over $2.5 million grant funding and several awards for his work, including an NSF CAREER Award (2015), first place in MSOM Responsible Research in Operations Management (2019), first place in the MSOM Best Practice-Based Research Competition (2017), INFORMS Franz Edelman Laureate Award (2017), and Society for Medical Decision Making Lee Lusted Award (2009).

Ayer serves an associate editor for Operations Research, Management Science, and MSOM, and is a past president of the INFORMS Health Application Society. He received a B.S. in industrial engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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.

Frank Rosenzweig is a Professor in School of Biological Sciences. He holds Bachelors degrees in Comparative Literature and Zoology from University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and a PhD in Biology at University of Pennsylvania. He carried out postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan. He was a professor at University of Idaho, University of Florida, and University of Montana before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 2016. He served as the Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute funded center “Reliving the Past” from 2015 to 2019.  His research group studies the ecological and evolutionary forces that produce and preserve genetic variation using experimental evolution  to illuminate how genetic variation maps onto organismal fitness.

Christine Heitsch is Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, with courtesy appointments in Biological Sciences and Computational Science & Engineering as well as an affiliation with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience.

She is also Director of the new Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology (SCMB), an NSF-Simons MathBioSys Research Center, and finishing her tenure directing the GT Interdisciplinary Mathematics Preparation and Career Training (IMPACT) Postdoctoral Program.

Heitsch's research interests lie at the interface between discrete mathematics and molecular biology, specifically combinatorial problems "as motivated by" and "with applications to" fundamental biomedical questions like RNA folding.

Students interested in pursuing graduate studies in discrete mathematical biology can do so through a number of GT PhD programs including Bioinformatics or Quantitative Biosciences as well as Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO), Computational Science & Engineering (CSE), and (of course) Mathematics.
 

Christoph Fahrni earned a master’s degree in chemistry from the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Switzerland) and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of Basel (Switzerland). After working as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), he joined the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999.

Research in the Wu lab is mainly focused on mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics. They are developing innovative methods to globally identify and quantify proteins and their post-translational modifications (PTMs), including glycosylation and phosphorylation, and applying them for biomedical research. Protein PTMs plays essential roles in biological systems, and aberrant protein expression and modification are directly related to various human diseases, including cystic fibrosis, cancer and infectious diseases. Novel analytical methods will profoundly advance our understanding of protein function, which will lead to the identification of proteins or modified proteins as effective drug targets and the discovery of biomarkers for early disease detection.

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.