Fall 2021 Magazine | Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

FA L L 2 0 2 1 M A G A Z I N E

Where Ideas Grow PLUS: E N D I N G PA R K I N S O N'S D I S E A S E • S T O RY-D R I V E N L E A R N I N G I N N O VAT I N G O N I N C LU S I O N • B I O LO C I T Y • G R O U N D B R E A K I N G R E S E A R C H

BME at a Glance

Coulter BME by the Numbers #2

graduate BME program in the nation

#3

#1

...in women graduating with BME degrees in the nation ... in students from underrepresented backgrounds graduating with BME degrees in the nation

U.S. News & World Report, 2022 Best Colleges

22

$57M Annual Research Awards (FY21)

1,208

Faculty startups since 2015

undergraduate students

62% women 22% URMs nearly

1

3/4

of BME undergrads engage in research

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

undergraduate BME program in the nation U.S. News & World Report, 2022 Best Colleges

2

licenses to industry

355

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product launches

graduate students

43% women 26% URMs After graduating,

51% of BME PhDs go into academia 42% take industry or government positions

BME at a Glance

Degree Programs

Leadership

B.S. in Biomedical Engineering Georgia Tech

SUSAN S. MARGULIES Outgoing Wallace H. Coulter Department Chair

M.S. in Biomedical Engineering Georgia Tech

MACHELLE T. PARDUE Interim Department Chair

Master of Biomedical Innovation and Development Georgia Tech

ESSY BEHRAVESH Director of Student Services

Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering Emory University & Georgia Tech Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering Emory University, Georgia Tech, & Peking University M.D. / Ph.D. Emory University & Georgia Tech Interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs Georgia Tech • Bioengineering • Bioinformatics • Computational Science and Engineering • Machine Learning • Robotics

PAUL J. BENKESER Senior Associate Chair LAKSHMI “PRASAD” DASI Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies HANJOONG JO Associate Chair for Emory SHELLA KEILHOLZ Interim Associate Chair for Faculty Development JOSEPH LE DOUX Executive Director of Training and Learning MANU PLATT Associate Chair for Graduate Studies JOHNNA S. TEMENOFF Associate Chair for Translational Research CHENG ZHU Executive Director for International Programs LUKE O’CONNELL Director of Development, Georgia Tech SHAWN STERN Director of Development, Emory

The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) is a true success story in risk-taking and innovation — a visionary partnership between a leading public engineering school and a highly respected private medical school.

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From the Chair

O

ur work — and the fields of biomedical engineering and medicine, of health and disease — are intrinsically tied to what’s happening in the world around us. We must respond to events impacting our communities, and more than that, we’re called to anticipate significant challenges ahead so that we can begin the process of discovery and knowledge-building to be ready for those challenges.

As we all have said many times throughout these last 18 months — the challenges facing our society have been great. We have been hard at work, as always, to meet the demands of our world. Certainly, the coronavirus pandemic has continued to affect what we do; and so, too, have the important, sometimes painful, conversations in America about racism, exclusion, and equity.

The result has been a year of tremendous activity and progress and impact, all influenced by events globally, nationally, and right here on our campuses.

I’m proud to present to you our fall magazine from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, where you can explore some of that impact. I thoroughly enjoy putting together this collection each year; it’s a reminder of how far-reaching our work is, how many corners of health and society we touch, and how special our Coulter BME family is.

In this issue, you’ll see researchers tackling common diseases impairing the vision of millions, exciting new treatment approaches for influenza and the virus that causes Covid-19, a promising molecule that could be a

critical key to arterial disease, creative approaches to transiting the formidable blood-brain barrier, and tools to understand why some tumors just won’t respond to radiation. Our teams have developed advanced imaging capabilities to serve clinicians, and they are harnessing the power of data to understand our immune systems and predict diseases like Alzheimer’s.

This year, we have been incredibly fortunate to welcome new partners in our work who are enabling us to pursue ambitious, transformative research in Parkinson’s disease and how we train the next generation of engineers. We continue to see our students use their skills to innovate, address unmet clinical needs, and build startups. You’ll meet students who are dedicated to service on campus and beyond, who are creating new categories of products, and who are headed to interesting and fulfilling careers.

So much happens every day, and we can’t share it all here. I encourage you to stay connected with us year-round on social media @CoulterBME, by signing up for our e-newsletters, and by visiting our new website at bme.gatech.edu for the latest stories.

I admit, this is a bittersweet time for me: As you’ll read in these pages, this will be my last magazine as chair of our Department. In August, I joined the National Science Foundation in Washington, where I have been appointed head of the Engineering Directorate. It is an opportunity to serve the nation that I could not turn down, and it comes with the benefit of remaining on the faculty in Coulter BME and continuing my own research. Still, the last four years leading this Department have been fulfilling, tremendously rewarding, and fun, and I expect to continue participating in our vibrant community.

Everything you read about here is made possible only through partnership — between Emory and Georgia Tech; among our students, faculty, and staff; and, critically, with you. Thank you for all you do to share our message and support our work.

Warmly,

Susan S. Margulies Outgoing Wallace H. Coulter Chair and Professor Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

From the Chair

Fall 2021

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Coulter BME Plants

SEEDS OF GROWTH

in New Design Garden The most visible sign of the new Design Garden approach in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering is a new collaboration and creative space in the BioQuad at Georgia Tech. More on that in a moment.

The Design Garden idea is about those things — collaboration and creativity and design — and it’s also a broader concept about offering opportunities for students studying biomedical engineering at Tech and Emory University.

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Coulter BME previously had 1.4 square feet of design instructional space per student. The new Design Garden increases the ratio to 4 square feet per student.

Opposite page: Professor of the Practice James Rains talks with students about their senior design project in the Department’s new Design Garden collaboration space, which opened in August.

CRAIG BROMLEY.

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“We're creating an environment where we can encourage and support students' growth — not just in their learning, but also in their ideas,” said James Rains, professor of the practice and a key architect of the Department’s design curriculum as leader of BME Capstone. “The new space is a location where they can do part of this growing, and it also happens in the classes that we teach, where we're including new content and skills to hopefully educate and inspire our students.”

The Design Garden idea infuses new topics in design and innovation that expand students’ capabilities — teaching them about the regulatory environment, quality control, manufacturing technology, intellectual property, and business development. As Rains puts it, “the big picture.”

“Our students are not just going into one kind of job,” he said. “We want to make

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

sure we're offering the avenues where they can learn about all the different potential career paths for a biomedical engineer.”

These topics are showing up in existing design-related courses, new courses already on the books, and other new courses that faculty members will develop in the future.

“This Design Garden concept is about creating opportunities within and beyond our curriculum to cultivate and support our students’ innovative and entrepreneurial endeavors,” said Susan Margulies, former Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Department who helped create the idea. “As our Department has grown, so have the many ways our students use engineering design as a pathway to create impact in society. The Design Garden space and related programs are where the creative ideas of Coulter BME students can emerge, grow, and thrive.”

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CRAIG BROMLEY

About that space — a beautiful, new open area that’s a substantial down payment on nurturing the seedlings of learning and ideas. It opened for students in the fall.

The newly renovated area will serve as the hub for building a community of innovation and collaboration in the Department that engages students, alumni, clinicians, and companies. It was made possible by a gift from Joan Stanescu and Terrance Hahn, parents of a third-year Coulter BME student who found the idea compelling. Both have material science and engineering backgrounds, and Stanescu has spent much of her career focused on developing and commercializing technology. Her work has included helping set up a nonprofit innovation lab along the France-Switzerland border to support entrepreneurs.

“You’ve got to have a place where cross-functional teams can come together,” Hahn said. “Joan has always been really good at pulling cross-functional teams together. She is always like the center of the wheel, connecting people.”

Stanescu picked up the thought: “It’s such a different feeling when you have a group supporting you; you don’t waste your time. They’ll say, ‘Don’t do this, but do that — that’s a good idea.’ That community is so important in this field.”

Stanescu and Hahn said they resonated with the idea of having a place where people can physically interact, bounce ideas off each other, innovate, and share experiences. And that’s precisely how the Design Garden will function.

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

“We want them using the space at the same time as other teams or groups, so when you're trying to tackle a problem, there's somebody that you may be able to lean on or ask for help — or maybe you can help others with their projects.”

JAMES RAINS

The space will host design courses alongside other events and activities, and it triples the design-focused square footage in Coulter BME. Biomedical engineering students will have access 24/7, so teams can gather to work on projects whenever it’s convenient. It’s designed with secure storage so groups can leave their equipment or prototypes and quickly pick up their work anytime — a key limitation of the current classroom space, where students have to pack up whenever they’re not in class to make way for other courses.

For students participating in hackathons, design events, and other kinds of competitions, the space will be a place to work and store their stuff. That’s something the Department hasn’t been able to offer before for the 20-30 teams who come together every year on their own to compete in those kinds of events.

Rains said lots of thought and effort went into making the Design Garden space welcoming so it’s a place where students feel they belong from the get-go.

“We want them using the space at the same time as other teams or groups, so when you're trying to tackle a problem, there's somebody that you may be able to lean on or ask for help — or maybe you can help others with their projects,” Rains said.

He also pointed to the impact of students at every stage of their academic career in Coulter BME working in the same place.

“Imagine you're a freshman or sophomore: You can use this space alongside juniors, seniors, maybe master’s or Ph.D. students, and you can see what your trajectory could be,” he said. “We really love the idea of, say, a capstone student team working right beside a group of first-year students and the potential for synergy there.”

Hahn and Stanescu said they, too, love the opportunities for cross-pollination the Design Garden presents.

“It’s important for young people to learn how to speak with people who are not their age. Freshmen may be intimidated by students who are seniors, but in this environment, that’s encouraged. They get used to asking questions of people who it might be intimidating to ask,” Stanescu said. “You might not have the answer, you might look stupid, but that’s the thing about entrepreneurship: try things and have them fail. And part of that is discussing things with people.” •

Students discuss design ideas with James Stubbs, professor of the practice. CRAIG BROMLEY.

Another group of students prepares a pitch for their senior design project. These groups are among the first to use the new Design Garden collaboration and design space that opened in August. CRAIG BROMLEY.

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A TRANSFORMATIONAL COMMITMENT TO

END PARKINSON’S DISEASE

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G

ordon Beckham Jr. has felt the painful impact of Parkinson’s personally. His father, Hank McCamish, died from the disease in 2013.

Losing the family patriarch to an intractable disease with no cure has spurred Beckham and his family to focus on advocating for Parkinson’s patients and supporting efforts to beat the disease — to help create a future where all Parkinson’s related conversations begin with, “Remember when.”

A landmark multimillion dollar commitment to the Coulter Department from the McCamish Foundation will turn that goal into reality, establishing the McCamish Parkinson’s Disease Innovation Program to accelerate the scope and impact of Parkinson’s disease studies and to position Georgia as a hub for collaborative research on this and other neurological diseases.

“The McCamish Foundation has been in discussions on and off with Georgia Tech, since my dad’s passing, about innovative approaches to dealing with Parkinson’s,” said Beckham, CEO of the Atlanta-based McCamish Group and president of the McCamish Foundation. “More recently, we met Susan Margulies and learned of the formal biomedical engineering collaboration between Tech and Emory, two of the top institutions in the country in their respective fields.

At the same time, the University of Georgia (UGA) is making major investments in Parkinson’s research.

“Given all this momentum within the state of Georgia, with BME as a nexus, the McCamish Foundation felt the timing was right to try something new at Tech and

Emory while also leveraging the existing powerful collaboration between Tech, Emory, and UGA,” Beckham said.

The McCamish Foundation commitment is one of the largest in Georgia Tech’s history and is the first of its kind for the Institute.

“The fact that Parkinson’s disease is so complex, affects people in different ways, and changes as the disease progresses, means that we need a comprehensive set of diverse approaches and tools that directly confront these complexities,” said Garrett Stanley, professor in Coulter BME and founding director of the McCamish Parkinson’s program. “This ranges from using sensors to precisely measure movement, to technologies for interacting with the underlying brain circuits, to data analytics to capture things that are hidden in the wealth of data being collected, and beyond.”

Neurological disorders like Parkinson’s are complex diseases of neural circuits that impact virtually every aspect of a person’s life, from moving to sensing to cognition, and ultimately render even the most fundamental aspects of daily life a significant challenge. The cause of Parkinson’s remains unknown, to say nothing of curing the disease.

Stanley said understanding, treating, and ultimately finding a cure for such diseases requires a comprehensive, coordinated, and technology-driven effort at the intersection of fundamental neuroscience, neuroengineering and neurotechnology, data science, and clinical translation — an approach that goes well beyond traditional avenues of scientific research.

“The Coulter Department is uniquely positioned

“Given all this momentum within the state of Georgia, with BME as a nexus, the McCamish Foundation felt the timing was right to try something new at Tech and Emory.”

GORDON BECKHAM JR.

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to catalyze this exciting, new interdisciplinary research effort,” Stanley said, “and we are grateful for the significant opportunity the McCamish Foundation has provided.”

To accomplish such lofty ambitions, the McCamish Parkinson’s program will support “Blue Sky” multi-investigator, early stage research; new therapeutics and delivery systems; research translation to commercialization; and the cultivation of a collaborative network with Emory, Georgia Tech, and UGA to position Georgia as a leader in Parkinson’s research.

The program’s first round of eight grants was awarded in the summer. Five awards of $40,000 are like seed grants to help get great ideas off the ground. Three larger awards of $125,000 are designed to help the research teams go after resources from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation or even to pursue commercialization. “Blue Sky” is exactly what the name implies, Stanley said: “It means we’re aiming high; we’re going for it. We’re trying to do something new and innovative.”

The eight projects run the gamut from basic science to more practical, quality-of-life technologies. One group is working on deep brain stimulation methods to treat motor symptoms. Two groups are focusing on freezing of gait (FOG), a symptom of Parkinson’s – one using computer vision to measure FOG, another using spinal cord stimulation to treat it. And another team is trying to better understand the erratic, involuntary movements that 80-90% of Parkinson’s patients experience as a side effect of L-DOPA, the most common treatment for the disease.

Principal investigator Ellen Hess, professor of pharmacology and chemistry in Emory’s School of Medicine, is collaborating with Coulter BME Assistant Professor Chethan Pandarinath on identifying the neuron activity related to L-DOPA-induced-dyskinesias, or LID. “After we identify the abnormal firing patterns, we hope to use that information to lead us to therapeutics that nudge the firing patterns back to normal to alleviate the LIDS while still allowing patients to experience the beneficial effects of L-DOPA,” said Hess, whose team will use a deep learning method developed by Pandrarinath’s lab. “It is a unique system and really the only way that we could accomplish our goals.”

Other teams are developing algorithms to optimize electrical brain stimulation and medication dosages, biofeedback devices to help Parkinson’s patients better communicate through vocal therapy, and wearable technology to continuously monitor patients’ cardiac activity and blood pressure.

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

“‘Blue Sky’ is exactly what the name implies...

It means we’re aiming high; we’re going for it.

We’re trying to do something new and innovative.”

GARRETT STANLEY

And sometimes the research involves reapplying an established technology to a slightly different task.

For example, the project being led by Cassie Mitchell will build on her lab’s successful text mining platform for identifying repurposed drugs for Covid-19.

“We’ll use predictive medicine techniques with machine learning, network pathology dynamics, and large-scale text mining of millions of journal articles,” said Mitchell, whose team received a $40,000 award.

Her goal is to personalize and optimize diagnostic and treatment protocols. Mitchell and her co-investigators will build a data network and text mining foundation for making prioritized predictions for Parkinson’s and Parkinson’s-like disorders.

Those eight projects are just the beginning, said Susan Margulies, an architect of the program who just stepped down as Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Coulter Department: “Our vision is to create the next frontier in neuroscience and neurotechnology by confronting the enormous complexities of the dynamic brain and nervous system.”

Advancing frontiers requires partnership, which makes the McCamish Foundation gift essential, Emory President Gregory Fenves said.

“New treatments and cures require a deep commitment — I am grateful for our friends at the McCamish Foundation, who will help us make the progress and find the answers that patients and families so urgently need.”

“For 22 years, Georgia Tech and Emory University have collaborated to improve the lives of individuals diagnosed with many of the world’s most challenging diseases,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “This visionary and generous commitment from the McCamish Foundation will allow us to expand and accelerate collaboration and discovery to the point that an exciting new treatment for Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders could be within our reach.” •

Initial Blue Sky Grants Striatal cell-type specific patterns of abnormal activity in L-DOPA-induced dyskinesias • Ellen Hess, Pharmacology & Chemical Biology/Neurology (Emory) • Chethan Pandarinath, Biomedical Engineering (Emory/Georgia Tech) Developing improved deep brain stimulation designs employing real-time feedback methods to treat motor dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease • Dieter Jaeger, Biology (Emory) • Garrett Stanley, Biomedical Engineering (Emory/Georgia Tech) Human activity recognition to track freezing of gait in Parkinson’s disease • J. Lucas McKay, Biomedical Informatics/Neurology (Emory) • Gari Clifford, Biomedical Informatics/Biomedical Engineering (Emory/Georgia Tech) • Stewart Factor, Neurology (Emory) Transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation for freezing of gait • Svjetlana Miocinovic, Neurology (Emory) • Nicholas Au Yong, Neurology, (Emory) • Stewart Factor, Neurology (Emory) Artificial intelligence dynamic network analysis for the multi-factorial and multi-scalar prediction of Parkinsonian disorders • Cassie Mitchell, Biomedical Engineering (Emory/Georgia Tech) • Roman Grigoriev, Physics (Georgia Tech) • Chao Zhang, Computational Science & Engineering (Georgia Tech) • Chad Hales, Neurology (Emory) Multimodel meta-optimization for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease • Robert Gross, Neurology (Emory) • Matthew Gombolay, Interactive Computing (Georgia Tech) Development and validation of personal technology for the treatment of communication deficits in people with Parkinson’s disease • Amanda Gillespie, Otolaryngology (Emory) • David Anderson, Electrical and Computer Engineering (Georgia Tech) • Adam Klein, Otolaryngology (Emory) Wearable sensing and artificial intelligence to continuously examine acute and long-term measures of cardiovascular autonomic function in Parkinson’s disease and Multiple System Atrophy • Omer Inan, Electrical and Computer Engineering (Georgia Tech) • Chris Rozell, Electrical and Computer Engineering (Georgia Tech) • Paul Beach, Neurology (Emory)

Learn more about the McCamish Parkinson’s Disease Innovation Program at parkinsons.gatech.edu.

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Expanding the Reach of

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Story-Driven Learning ATHARVA DESHMUKH had to share a story in front of his

classmates in BMED 4000, The Art of Telling Your Story, now a required course in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Deshmukh thought about the core values he wanted to convey — resilience and perseverance. Now there was nothing left to do but dive in.

He told the story about the time he almost drowned as a young boy while visiting his grandparents in his native India. “I was four, and I get to the pool, very excited. I’ve got my floaties on and I’m feeling great,” said Deshmukh, a senior. “I’m going back and forth across the pool, feeling like a champion, until …”

Until his instructor took off the floaties and he sank like a rock, 12 feet to the bottom. He remembers this clearly. He also remembers, “my instructor and my grandfather diving down to get me. Then an irrational fear set in. I didn’t touch the water for years. I hated going to the beach, hated pool parties. I would not go anywhere near the water.”

His story could have ended there, with the fear. But his mother stepped in, buoyed his spirits, enrolled him in a YMCA swimming program. After a few tantrums, Deshmukh said, “I started liking it — loving it, actually.

The more time and effort I put into it, the better I got.

By the time I got to high school I was competing at the state level, something I never thought was possible.”

It felt good to share the story, to openly Deshmukh admit his childhood fear and, especially, to explain how he not only overcame it, but crushed it. His experience gets to the heart of why BMED 4000 has become a favorite class among Coulter BME undergrads.

“We’re all engineers, we all have tough courses, research, internships, a lot of pressure. Then you come into this class for two hours a week, and you’re able to sit down and think and reflect on yourself and what you’ve accom-

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Storytelling is how we share ideas and culture. It’s how we build relationships.

plished, and share, all in a safe place,” Deshmukh said.

Storytelling is how we share ideas and culture. It’s how we build relationships.

Telling stories also helps us learn and integrate that new information into our existing knowledge, which is partly why helping students tell their stories has become an important part of the curriculum in the Coulter Department. Now the idea is reaching other disciplines in the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech with the support of a $3.1 million grant from the Kern Family Foundation.

Under the new project led by Coulter BME Professor Joe Le Doux, the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the College’s CREATE-X entrepreneurial program will infuse story-driven learning into their curricula to help students build “entrepreneurial mindsets.”

The idea is to help students see themselves as engineers ready and able to act, using all the skills they’re learning to solve problems and improve the human condition.

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

“Throughout engineering education, I would argue, we often don't give students a chance to sit back, reflect, and make connections about what they’re learning and how they can use it,” said Le Doux, executive director of training and learning in the Coulter Department. “Some students do it on their own. But some don't. Those who do, really benefit from it. So, the whole concept of the story-driven learning piece is to help students make these connections about what they're learning, who they are, where they're going.”

The Coulter Department has been developing this story-driven learning idea for a few years through the Foundation’s Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN). It has developed into a thread that weaves throughout students’ courses: All along their journey, students have significant learning experiences that add to their bank of stories (Le Doux thinks of it like a pensieve from the Harry Potter novels — a storehouse of memories and stories).

Often, students are asked to reflect on what they’re

learning and how it connects to their own life experiences. They spend significant time talking to each other about their work and doing peer reviews. They interview people to discover real-world problems to solve and understand user needs. They even write articles in the style of The New York Times.

Then, near the end of their coursework, they take BMED 4000, where they pull from all their experiences at Tech and beyond. It’s here that they learn what makes a good story with the help of award-winning Atlanta playwright Janece Shaffer. She co-teaches the course alongside Le Doux and another faculty member, Cristi Bell-Huff.

“This is one of the best BME departments in the country, so the students are hyper aware that they’ve made it into the room,” Shaffer said. “It’s easy to feel like, ‘Did I sneak in when no one noticed?’ But I know how hard they’ve worked. I know how high their expectations are, how badly they want to succeed. So, my motivation is to create a place where they can breathe easy and feel part of a community.”

Adopting an entrepreneurial mindset requires some risk, and sharing personal stories can be a great training ground, because it is risky business, opening up the storyteller to all manner of feedback and external conclusions.

“We don’t promote the idea of competing against each other in this course,” Shaffer said. “We can all struggle with the inner critic that holds onto everything we’ve done that’s been less than perfect. But the idea of being perfect is a down payment on being really disappointed.

What we often think of as failure is an accepted part of taking risks. As soon as we let go of the idea of being perfect, we can enjoy the process and celebrate the progress. And that’s when you see them exhale, and once they exhale, they are comfortable with taking risk.”

Shaffer is BMED 4000’s ringer, an experienced dramatist who can discuss with her students the deeper relevance of their stories, helping them connect the dots, “so that they see themselves in the best light, and develop a level of clarity and confidence so when somebody says, ‘Hey, Atharva, tell us your story,’ you’re ready, because you’ve spent time thinking about who you are and what you value and what you hope for yourself.”

In Deshmukh’s case, Shaffer noted, he could have ended his story with the struggle of nearly drowning, “but he was encouraged to explore and make larger connections.” For instance, he became a swimming coach, inspiring athletes in the U.S. and abroad, and what began as a story of helplessness and fear became a narrative that illustrates the young man’s grit.

“Now when he meets an obstacle, he can apply that deep knowing and confidence to take on bigger challenges, make more impactful connections, and create even greater value,” Shaffer said.

The new grant expands these ideas into the other programs, scaling up story-driven learning.

“It's really exciting, because 40% of College

Atlanta playwright Janece Shaffer, who helps students learn in BMED 4000 what makes a good story so they can begin to tell their own. PHOTO COURTESY JANECE SHAFFER.

of Engineering students will be impacted,” Le Doux said. “Every civil, environmental, aerospace, and CREATE-X student will get it — but in different ways.”

Le Doux doesn’t plan to stop there: The goal is to continue developing story-driven learning as a teaching approach and create tools to train engineering faculty anywhere to use it. Building out the approach in disparate disciplines at Tech will offer key insights in how to do that.

“We want to impact all of engineering education — it’s an ambitious goal — so we're looking at it from the perspective of organizational change,” Le Doux said. “When people try to adapt this in different programs, different cultures, what are the barriers? What works?”

Undergrad Atharva Deshmukh said what works is the connection stories inspire, and learning to do so in a safe space makes all the difference.

“It really feels like students were sharing things they wouldn’t share anywhere else, showing their vulnerability,” Deshmukh said. “That’s where [The Art of Telling Your Story] class sets itself apart from others. There were a few times when I got emotional. Not because of what I shared, but because of something that someone else shared. Inciting emotion in someone else, and forming that connection — that’s the art of storytelling.” •

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Susan Margulies Selected to Lead NSF Engineering Directorate

W

hen the call to service came, Susan Margulies just couldn’t refuse. Which should be no surprise to anyone who has worked with her during her long career.

Margulies stepped down as chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering in August to answer that call — as head of the Directorate of Engineering at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). She is the first biomedical engineer to lead the directorate, which supports fundamental research, enhances the nation’s innovation through a range of initiatives, and is a driving force behind the training and development of the United States’ engineering workforce. Margulies will remain a member of the Emory and Georgia Tech faculties.

“Susan’s NSF appointment will impact the nation,” said Vikas P. Sukhatme, dean of the Emory School of Medicine and Woodruff Professor. “Her leadership at Coulter BME over the last four years has been transformative. I have enjoyed working closely with her and respect the high standards she has set for all our missions.”

Margulies began her tenure as chair of the Department in August 2017, overseeing a unique collaboration between a leading public engineering school and a highly respected private medical school that graduates more women and underrepresented students than any other biomedical engineering program in the nation. She is the first woman to chair a basic science department in the Emory School of Medicine and the second woman to serve as chair in the history of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering.

“Susan has served as a pioneer while leading BME, diligently working to increase access and diversity, while also strengthening our cross-university collaboration with a sincere commitment to research excellence,” said Raheem Beyah, dean and Southern Company Chair of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering. “I look forward to continuing the College’s partnership with the NSF as Susan and the Foundation expand its engineering goals and initiatives.”

As chair, Margulies worked to building a deeper sense of community in Coulter BME, including increasing shared governance with faculty, staff, and students and convening a 50-member committee

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

charged with developing and implementing programs to boost the Department’s community, diversity, and inclusion. Margulies helped raise $41 million in philanthropic gifts to support the Department; led development of a new strategic plan for Coulter BME to increase impact, enhance engagement, and enrich community; and provided leadership to campus-wide strategic planning efforts at both Emory and Georgia Tech.

“The opportunity to serve the NSF resonates with my values — catalyzing impact through innovation, rigor, partnership, and inclusion. It’s an irresistible invitation, and it has to be to pull me away from my Coulter BME family,” Margulies said. “I’m so proud to have worked alongside this unmatched group of students, staff, and faculty in our shared drive to improve health and well-being.”

Building on initiatives she developed at the University of Pennsylvania, Margulies prioritized career development for faculty members and Ph.D. graduates during her years leading Coulter BME. She added dedicated staff to help doctoral students prepare for increasingly popular career paths outside of academia. The Department increased the diversity of Ph.D. students and improved faculty diversity at all ranks during her tenure.

Margulies’ popular weekly office hours with the chair were a year-round forum for students to share their ideas and consult with her one-on-one on all kinds of topics. Those weekly hours became one of her favorite parts of the job.

“Our students inspire me, and these conversations emboldened students to create their unique pathways to integrate who they are with their studies in biomedical engineering — to become who they want to be,” she said.

“I’m so proud to have worked alongside this unmatched group of students, staff, and faculty in our shared drive to improve health and well-being.”

SUSAN MARGULIES Much as she has in the Coulter Department and throughout her career, Margulies said, she plans to forge partnerships in her new role across industry, foundations, academia, and around the world to help NSF address some of the most pressing challenges in science and engineering.

"Susan Margulies' extensive experience and expertise is a valuable addition to the National Science Foundation's work to advance the frontiers of science and engineering research,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “Her strong leadership, combined with her deep knowledge of research translation, will help accelerate our nation's progress to be at the vanguard of discovery and innovation. I am looking forward to her insights and perspectives.”

Margulies is a renowned scholar in pediatric traumatic brain injury and lung injury associated with mechanical ventilators, where she has worked to open avenues for prevention, intervention, and treatment. She has conducted more than $35 million in research with funding from the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and industry sources.

Her career has been marked by interdisciplinary research and education, thanks in part to her training in mechanical and aerospace engineering, bioengineering, and physiology and biophysics. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. •

Machelle Pardue Named Interim Chair Professor Machelle Pardue has stepped in as interim chair of the Coulter Department, starting in August.

Pardue is associate chair for faculty development and has been a member of the Coulter BME faculty since 2015, when she moved her academic appointment from the Emory University Department of Ophthalmology.

“I welcome the opportunity to lead the transition to a new chair for the Coulter Department and to continue to promote the success of our one department on two campuses,” Pardue said. “I am focused on supporting the positive culture of innovation, inclusion, and impact in Coulter BME that we have built together.”

Pardue’s research focuses on developing life-changing treatments for people with vision loss, particularly those with retinal degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and myopia.

Her work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and private industry.

For more than 20 years, Pardue has been a leading teacher and researcher in Atlanta. In addition to her positions at Emory and Georgia Tech, Pardue is a research career scientist at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Healthcare System and executive associate director of the Atlanta VA Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation.

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INNOVATING ON

Inclusion The coronavirus pandemic was enough to knock all of us on our heels. And yet 2020 also brought to the fore the challenges many Americans face living their daily lives even outside a pandemic.

The killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and others. Targeted attacks on Asian Americans in Atlanta and elsewhere. These events and others sparked the beginnings of a reckoning in American society, one that is ongoing and incomplete. It also sparked many conversations in the Coulter Department about our own culture and how to continue to build a more welcoming, inclusive, fair community in Coulter BME — as well as on our campuses and in the broader academic and scientific world.

We recognize this moment for the catalyst it is. We’re listening.

We’re launching. We’re learning.

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

I

t all started with listening — and some difficult conversations as faculty members began exploring how to make a difference within our community and more broadly. Those conversations yielded two key initiatives: a series of workshops to equip faculty members and Department leaders with skills to intervene in situations where students feel marginalized or excluded, and a round of seed grants to create new tools to help understand diseases that disproportionately affect Black Americans.

Models of Health Disparities

The first of those tools will be animal models specifically designed to replicate risk factors prevalent among people with African ancestry or to mimic social determinants of health experienced by Black Americans. The work is made possible by a seed grant program developed by Coulter BME faculty members Edward Botchwey and Johnna Temenoff that has awarded $25,000 to four projects.

“What I personally hope is one of the outcomes of this is that we all in BME, and the broader bioscience community at Georgia Tech, can realize that we have something to contribute to solving the problems of healthcare disparities, and that it is something that's important not just for the Black and underrepresented minority community but it's important for

all of us,” said Botchwey, associate professor in the Department.

The projects cover a wide range of health problems: traumatic brain injury, alopecia, breast cancer, and glaucoma. Botchwey said that range demonstrates the different ways researchers in the Department can make a real difference in addressing disparate outcomes.

The seed-grant model is designed to address a gap that faculty members often face as they consider applying for federal research grants: they need preliminary data to show agency reviewers.

“Our faculty members helped us identify that we need to develop the relevant animal models to generate the preliminary data,” said Susan Margulies, who recently stepped down as Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Department. “The important piece of this is really about providing seed funds with the goal of using it over the next 12 months to develop these models, verify them, and, ideally, gather a little bit of preliminary data so that our teams can subsequently pursue federal funding.”

Botchwey added: “Part of our motivation, in fact, was that, through the success of this seed grant and the dialogue that we're having here at Georgia Tech, we could really spur extramural funding agencies into action to put a much larger set of resources in place to address the healthcare disparities in the U.S. Through our seed grants, we can really show how those types of investments can pay off.”

Interrupting Acts of Microaggression and Exclusion

Meanwhile, faculty members and Department leaders are working to build their own personal tools to improve the experiences of students in Coulter BME and across our campuses. And again, listening was the beginning.

Coulter BME’s Community, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee collected experiences of racism and exclusion from students that served as the starting point for a faculty discussion.

The stories were moving — and prompted a realization among the group that they needed more tools to intervene and address situations where students feel marginalized or excluded.

“The stories were powerful and generated good discussion amongst faculty about the experiences that students have that we are unaware of — and our roles and responsibilities when these types of things happen,” said Todd Fernandez, a member of the Community, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee and a lecturer in the Department.

A series of focused and intensive workshops was one of the ways professors, instructors, and department leaders have been learning those skills. Facilitated by Dan Morrison, an expert in anti-racist education who specializes in diversity and inclusion in academia, the program gathered small groups of faculty members for six weeks of training and

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conversations. The goal was to equip them with knowledge and skills to help make the Coulter Department a more inclusive space — to reinforce our community’s stated ideals and offer practice with specific strategies to accomplish those ideals.

“We are committed to doing the work necessary to build a more equitable and inclusive community,” Margulies said. “As a start, we need to build our skills so that we can take concrete actions to live our values. The discussions and practice through these workshops will help us to better understand and grow — and to make our Department and our campuses places where our students and colleagues thrive.”

Thought Leadership in Academia

Two Coulter BME faculty members also have been among the leading voices on structural racism in federal research funding for Black scientists.

Karmella Haynes joined other biomedical engineers across the nation to publish a paper in the journal Cell calling on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies to address Karmella Haynes disparities in allocating support for Black researchers.

Despite studies on the distribution of NIH research funding to Black scientists over the past decade, little has changed. And the authors argued the result is that Black faculty members’ careers stall, and they cannot achieve their full potential.

“Several reports to describe inequities had been published before, but there seemed to be very little effective action in response,” said Haynes, assistant professor in Coulter BME. “For instance, there are certain program announcements that aim to increase workforce diversity, but these don’t receive enough funding to make a difference. Also, NIH merit review panels sometimes include black scientists like myself — and seem to have become more diverse, in general — but subsequent NIH council review, where actual finding decisions are made, is a closed process.”

In their paper, titled “Fund Black Scientists,” Haynes and 18 other deans, chairs, and distinguished faculty — all women — argued the effects are potentially generational, as fewer Black scientists remain to serve as role models and mentors for up-and-coming researchers. What’s more, the impacts on society are far-reaching: Vital research questions are not being asked because the perspectives, creativity, and knowledge of a diverse population of scientists are not being tapped. The public also does not see the faces or hear the voices of Black scientific experts speaking on important issues.

Manu Platt made similar arguments directly to the National Advisory Council for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering as part of his Lopez Lecture in February and offered some suggestions to support Black scientists and researchers.

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

LEARN MORE about the health disparities seed grants at bme.gatech.edu.

“Cite Black professors — we WATCH care about our Platt’s NIBIB Lopez Lecture h-index as much at bit.ly/platt-lopez-lecture as everyone else,” said Platt, professor and, as of July, associate chair for graduate studies. “Score Black professors high in grant reviews.

It’s so interesting to be in those rooms where people find reasons to score their buddies high or to score well-known professors high — even for poorly written proposals.

So, find a reason to score Black professors high.”

For several years, Platt has led graduate student recruiting for the Coulter Department, and he drew on that experience for ways to improve grad student and faculty recruitment. He said institutions must address implicit bias in the application review process and be explicit and intentional about being anti-racist in the student and faculty candidate selection process. He said it’s also essential to orient admissions and hiring committees and all faculty members, and keep the training going.

After NIH released a plan in June to close funding gaps between white and minority biomedical engineers, Platt praised the agency for acknowledging the problem and taking steps to address it.

“I love that they are doing things. I like they are saying the word racism,” Platt told STAT News. Yet he cautioned the agency may not be moving quickly enough to fix the underlying structural problems: “It’s very difficult out there.

Funding Black investigators needs to be the linchpin.”

Platt said the NIH could prioritize funding for Black scientists just as it does for early career researchers, suggesting that would have more impact than grantwriting workshops and other programs to improve the skills of underrepresented researchers.

“I’d like to see more programs that don’t want to fix the investigators but want to fix the system,” Platt told STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling. •

Coulter BME’s Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech is a diverse and international community of faculty, students, and staff who promote equity, diversity, and inclusion on our campuses. We believe that the diversity and contributions from all of our members are essential and make us who we are. We strive to create and maintain a welcoming and inclusive educational and work environment that values and respects our individual and communal differences. We believe that our impact must reach beyond the classroom, research labs, our campuses, and the technology we create in order to improve the human condition where injustice lives. We believe that Black Lives Matter and therefore stand committed in the fight against racism, discrimination, racial bias, and racial injustice.

“I’d like to see more programs that don’t want to fix the investigators but want to fix the system.”

MANU PLATT

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Research

Groundbreaking Research Biomaterials & Regenerative Technologies • Biomedical Imaging & Instrumentation Biomedical Informatics and Systems Modeling • Biomedical Robotics Cancer Technologies • Cardiovascular Engineering • Engineering Education Immunoengineering • Neuroengineering

Research

A Super-Resolution Picture of Flowing Cells For the first time, a microscopy system has been able to demonstrate super-resolution imaging of living cells in flow.

Coulter Department Assistant Professor Shu Jia recently introduced his lab’s super-resolution optofluidic scanning microscopy system (OSM). It can view sub-diffraction-limit details of flowing cells and includes a high-quality microscope, a microfluidic system, and a micro lens array. These elements combine to create a grid of light spots that illuminate the sample inside a microfluidic channel.

Current microscopy technologies often sacrifice high-resolution images for a high throughput rate — the number of cells moving through the system to be analyzed. These systems need to stop the flow of cellular material in order to obtain a high-resolution image and therefore disturb the throughput rate. The flaws inherent in the current systems pose problems to researchers who need to analyze a large number of samples and want to take high-resolution images continuously. Jia’s new OSM system provides users the ability to do both.

“When you want to look at a cell, much of its organelles and structures are smaller than the conventional limit of the microscopes,” Jia said. “You want to have a higher resolution so that you can resolve finer structures. We’re trying to provide a

system that can generate super-resolution images of the cells in flow so that you can learn more information from the cells and glean more biological insights.”

Jia and his team described their optofluidic scanning microscopy technology in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Lab on a Chip. Their study appeared on the back cover of the third issue for 2021.

‣ ZOE ELLEDGE

Illustration of super-resolution optofluidic scanning microscopy, which allows for imaging of living cells in flow. ILLUSTRATION

COURTESY: SHU JIA.

Amping Up Existing Antibiotics The resistance of bacteria to antibiotics is a global challenge that has been exacerbated by the financial burdens of bringing new antibiotics to market and an increase in serious bacterial infections as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Researchers in the lab of Coulter Department Assistant Professor Kyle Allison are tackling the problem of antibiotic resistance not by creating new drugs, but by boosting the safety and potency of ones that already exist.

Aminoglycosides are antibiotics used to treat serious infections caused by pathogenic bacteria like E. coli or Klebsiella. Importantly, bacteria haven’t developed widespread resistance to aminoglycosides like they have to other types of antibiotics. These antibiotics are used sparingly by doctors, in part because of the toxic side effects they can sometimes cause.

In research published in the journal PLOS One, Allison and co-authors Christopher Rosenberg and Xin Fang report that lower doses of aminoglycosides 25

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

could be used to treat bacteria when combined with specific metabolic sugars, such as the simple sugar glucose or mannitol, a sugar alcohol often used as sweetener.

Testing these treatment combinations against Gram-negative pathogens E. coli, Salmonella, and Klebsiella showed significantly reduced concentrations of the antibiotic could kill those pathogens.

Of note, the authors also demonstrated that this treatment combination did not increase bacterial resistance to aminoglycosides and was effective in treating antibiotic-tolerant biofilms, which are bacterial communities that act as reservoirs of infection.

The study suggests that there may be simple strategies to boost the safety and effectiveness of the drugs already available, and that this type of approach could be a useful alternative to developing new antibiotics.

‣ QUINN EASTMAN

Allison

Forget Drugs and Surgery.

Hydrogel Could Open New Path for Glaucoma Treatment Researchers have developed a potential new treatment for the eye disease glaucoma that could replace daily eyedrops and surgery with a twice-a-year injection to control the buildup of pressure in the eye. The researchers envision the injection being done as an office procedure that could be part of regular patient visits.

The possible treatment uses the injection of a natural and biodegradable material to create a viscous hydrogel — a water-absorbing crosslinked polymer structure — that opens an alternate pathway for excess fluid to leave the eye. It could become the first non-drug, non-surgical, long-acting therapy for glaucoma.

“The holy grail for glaucoma is an efficient way to lower the pressure that doesn’t rely on the patient putting drops in their eyes every day, doesn’t require a complicated surgery, has minimal side effects, and has a good safety profile,” said Ross Ethier, Coulter BME professor and Georgia Research Alliance Lawrence L. Gellerstedt Jr. Eminent Scholar in Bioengineering. “I am excited about this technique, which could be a game-changer for the treatment of glaucoma.”

The research, which was supported by the National Eye Institute and the Georgia Research Alliance, was published in the journal Advanced Science. The research was conducted in animals, and shows that the approach significantly lowered the intraocular pressure.

As many as 75 million people worldwide have glaucoma, which is the leading cause of irreversible blindness.

As many as 75 million people worldwide have glaucoma, which is the leading cause of irreversible blindness.

Glaucoma damage is caused by excess pressure in the eye that injures the optic nerve. Current treatments attempt to reduce this intraocular pressure through the daily application of eyedrops, or through surgery or implantation of medical devices, but these treatments are often unsuccessful.

To provide an alternative, Ethier teamed up with Mark Prausnitz, professor and J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, to use a tiny hollow needle to inject a polymer preparation into a structure just below the surface of the eye called the suprachoroidal space (SCS).

Inside the eye, the material chemically crosslinks to form the hydrogel, which holds open a channel in the SCS that allows aqueous humor from within the eye to drain out of the eye through the alternative pathway.

That gel structure can keep the SCS pathway open for a period of months.

A microneedle less than a millimeter long is used to inject a natural, biodegradable material into the eye. The material forms a hydrogel that allows excess fluid to drain and reduce eye pressure. ROB FELT.

“By opening up that space, we tap a pathway that would not otherwise be utilized efficiently to remove liquid from the eye,” Prausnitz said.

The pressure reduction was sustained for four months. The researchers are now working to extend that time by modifying the polymer material — hyaluronic acid — with a goal of providing treatment benefits for at least six months. That would coincide with the office visit schedule of many patients. ‣ JOHN TOON

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A bioprinted embryonic human heart model at 84 times the actual size. This is one of two different kinds of models Serpooshan is developing that are 3D printed using soft, flexible hydrogel materials infused with cells from specific patients. PHOTOS COURTESY: VAHID SERPOOSHAN.

Bioprinting a New Model of the Developing Human Heart When babies are born with severe heart defects like pulmonary artery atresia or hypoplastic left heart syndrome, the prognosis is difficult. There is no cure, no reliable therapy for many of these defects. Just uncertainty. And drastic efforts to fix the parts of the heart that didn’t develop properly.

Ultimately, these tiny babies may face multiple significant surgeries in their early weeks of life.

That’s what Coulter Department Assistant Professor Vahid Serpooshan thinks about when he’s in his lab using a sophisticated 3D bioprinter to create models of the earliest stages of heart development: the babies and their families and how his team can help by unravelling some of the mysteries of the developing human heart.

“These are babies who are a few days old and who are suffering from very severe, acute heart disease and heart defects. And many of them do not survive — even after multiple surgeries,” Serpooshan said. “Being able to simulate such severe situations in bioprinted and bioengineered platforms where there's no real limit to their manufacturing for study and analysis — that has a really high value for us in terms of how we're able to help patients and save patients’ lives.”

Understanding normal heart development — and thus, what can go wrong and lead to severe defects — is the cornerstone of the Faculty Early Career Development award Serpooshan received from the National Science Foundation.

He will create the first 3D-printed model of heart tissue using soft, flexible hydrogel materials that are infused with cells from specific patients. He’s working to develop models that mimic the exact structure of the heart at two stages: the embryonic heart tube present at roughly 20 days after concep-

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

tion and a more fully developed fetal heart at 30-34 weeks.

Serpooshan and his team will connect the models to a bioreactor that produces a flow of stand-in material similar to blood, creating a dynamic system that functions just like the real thing.

“Up until this point, printing a synthetic, plastic model and perfusing it with different types of media has been done. But when it comes to hydrogels, and adding cells, and then having this flow going through — this is something that is a lot more complex, and no one has really tried this before,” Serpooshan said.

Animal models are imperfect substitutes for human heart development, and 2D models lack fidelity to the three-dimensional structures and flow at play.

“Having a bioprinted, engineered model that you can print hundreds of is one of our main advantages. You can order the machine to print hundreds of consistent models,” Serpooshan said. “This allows us to change parameters and study how cells behave without using any animals or even going to clinical trials.”

That means the models could be used to accurately test promising new drugs. They could also be used to help surgeons hone their techniques and develop new methods.

Of course, what Serpooshan is proposing is not easy. Heart tissue is complex, so creating this kind of model wasn’t even imaginable until 3D bioprinting came along, he said. The technique allows Serpooshan to deposit specific kinds of cells and biomaterials in specific areas of the tissue models to accurately reflect actual heart tissue composition.

‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Research

Easy-to-Deliver mRNA Treatment Shows Promise for Stopping Flu and Covid-19 Viruses With a relatively minor genetic change, a new treatment appears to stop replication of both flu viruses and the virus that causes Covid-19.

Best of all, the treatment could be delivered to the lungs via a nebulizer, making it easy for patients to administer themselves at home.

The therapy is based on a type of CRISPR, which normally allows researchers to target and edit specific portions of the genetic code, to target RNA molecules.

In this case, the team used mRNA technology to code for a protein called Cas13a that destroys parts of the RNA genetic code that viruses use to replicate in cells in the lungs. It was developed by researchers in Philip Santangelo’s lab with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

“In our drug, the only thing you have to change to go from one virus to another is the guide strand — we only have to change one sequence of RNA. That's it,” said Santangelo, a professor in the Coulter Department. “We went from flu to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. They're incredibly different viruses. And we were able to do that very, very rapidly by just changing a guide.”

The guide strand is like a map that tells the Cas13a protein where to attach to the viruses’ RNA and begin destroying it. Santangelo’s team tested its approach against flu in mice and SARS-CoV-2 in hamsters. In both cases, the sick animals recovered.

Their results are reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology. It’s the first study to show mRNA can be used to express the Cas13a protein and get it to work directly in lung tissue rather than in cells in a dish. It’s also the first to demonstrate the Cas13a protein is effective at stopping replication of SARS-CoV-2.

What’s more, the team’s approach has the potential to work against 99% of flu strains that have circulated over the last century. It also appears it would be effective against the new highly contagious variants of the coronavirus that have begun to circulate.

The approach means the treatment is flexible and adaptable as new viruses emerge, said Daryll Vanover, a research scientist in Santangelo’s lab and the paper’s second author.

“One of the first things that society and the CDC is going to get when a pandemic emerges is the genetic sequence,” Vanover said. “Once the CDC publishes those sequences — that's all we need. We can immediately screen across the regions that we're interested in to target it and knock down the virus.”

Vanover said that can result in lead candidates for clinical trials in a matter of weeks — which is about how long it took them to scan the sequences, design their guide strands, and be ready for testing in this study. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Researcher Daryll Vanover works with the nebulizer he adapted to test a new mRNA-based treatment for flu and Covid-19. PHOTO COURTESY: DARYLL VANOVER.

The team used mRNA technology to code for a protein called Cas13a that destroys parts of the RNA genetic code that viruses use to replicate in cells in the lungs.

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Research

Engineering and Empathy: How Students Learn a Critical Skill Before they can create solutions, engineers must assess the needs of the people they’re trying to help. That requires empathy — an understanding of the experiences and perspectives of others.

Cristi Bell-Huff has been thinking for a few years how important empathy skills are for students to really be effective engineers. She’s even created exercises to help foster empathy skills. But just teaching students to collect customer or user perspectives to inform their designs seemed somehow incomplete.

“Once I started digging into it, research shows there are multiple dimensions to empathy. Perspective-taking is one of those dimensions, but there's also this idea of experience sharing — sharing people's emotions — and there's another piece about caring, being moved to act to help someone,” Bell-Huff said. “If all we're doing is engaging in the cognitive perspective-taking piece of it, we're doing a disservice to our students, because we need our engineers to be moved to action.”

Bell-Huff wants to understand how engineering educators can foster all three of those dimensions of empathy in their students so they’re ready to tackle the global grand challenges and complex health problems they will encounter. She’s taking the first steps this year in a National Science Foundation-supported project examining learning activities in five core classes in the Coulter Department, where Bell-Huff

Teaching empathy to engineering students is more than design thinking. It’s a skill essential to working in teams, collaborating with others, and exercising leadership — experiences common across engineering curriculum and practice. is a lecturer and director of faculty and student training.

“We really want to understand which learning activities foster empathy,” she said, “and if they do foster empathy, what construct of empathy — is it mostly just about perspective-taking or are we getting into some emotion sharing?”

Teaching empathy to engineering students is more than design thinking, too. It’s a skill essential to working in teams, collaborating with others, and exercising leadership — experiences common across engineering curriculum and practice. What’s more, it’s a skill on the decline. A University of Michigan study found students in the early 2000s had 40% less empathy than students in the 1980s and ‘90s.

“That's alarming for engineers,” Bell-Huff said. “Our profession is supposed to be technical excellence and service to society. You solve problems to help people. If we're losing empathy levels, we're losing that part of the profession, that service to society.” ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Cristi Bell-Huff, center, works with students during one of her classes. Bell-Huff wants to understand how engineering educators can foster empathy in their students. WALTER RICH.

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Research

Leading a New Phase in Skin Research Assistant Professor Felipe Garcia Quiroz is leveraging his discovery of a key process involved in skin-barrier formation to dive deeper into the skin’s mysteries.

Quiroz outlined the implications of liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), a new concept in cell biology, for the field of skin research in the journal JID Innovations. The review article “presents a stimulating outlook on how the discovery of LLPS in skin, and our new bioengineered tools, will shape the future of research in skin biology and skin barrier diseases,” Quiroz said.

As a postdoctoral researcher, Quiroz demonstrated that liquid-liquid phase separation drives formation of the skin barrier. As skin cells migrate outward toward the body surface, they lose their nuclei and other organelles, becoming corneocytes that replace sloughedoff cells and form our skin barrier.

Quiroz and his colleagues were interested in dense protein deposits that form in the skin cells before they become corneocytes — resembling droplets of vinegar in oil. This is phase separation in action, when liquids Illustration of skin cell migration pattern from of mismatched the basement membrane toward the corneum properties come and the skin surface.

ILLUSTRATION: FELIPE QUIROZ together. Called keratohyalin granules, or KGs, they resemble other membraneless organelles in cells, because they are not bound by lipid membranes. An absence of KGs is common in skin barrier disorders.

Despite this strong association with human disease, the function of KGs was unknown. Quiroz and his team showed that intrinsically disordered proteins of the skin program the formation and properties of KGs through a vinegar-in-oil type of phase separation.

The main protein involved, filaggrin, is often mutated in skin barrier disorders. When it is faulty and phase separation doesn’t happen, it opens the door to diseases of the skin barrier. The team’s research was first to establish a role for LLPS in a human tissue.

“We’re communicating here with the scientists and clinicians who are always thinking about diseases of the skin, the dermatologists and skin biologists,” Quiroz said. “And that will have an impact on the eventual translation of our LLPS-inspired ideas.” ‣ JERRY GRILLO

Is HEG1 the Key to Atherosclerosis?

Good flow through blood vessels protects against atherosclerosis, while bad blood flow triggers the disease. Hanjoong Jo and his team have been working to understand the detailed reasons why — and how — and recently found an interesting protein that could be a key.

The protein, known as HEG1, is found on the endothelial cells lining our blood vessels.

It appears to act as a critical blood flow sensor, keeping everything humming along as it should when flow is good and turning on inflammatory signals, a critical step toward atherosclerosis, when blood flow is bad.

Jo wants to know just how HEG1 works, and a new $2.68 million National Institutes of Health grant will help.

“We are really excited about this flow-sensitive protein, HEG1, because this could be potentially a new sensor that detects how blood is flowing in the vessel — whether it goes one way or multiple directions, at a high speed or low speed — and this flow sensor could then play a very important role in preventing or causing atherosclerosis,” said Jo, Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair and Professor in Coulter BME. “We have shown some evidence, which allowed us to get this grant, that good flow makes more of this HEG1 gene and protein, preventing inflammation. If you have a bad flow, this potential flow sensor is reduced, causing inflammation.”

Jo described the HEG1 protein like a big tree with lots of branches sticking out to catch the wind as it blows. HEG1 has branches jutting out from endothelial cells into arteries to catch the blood flowing by: “It is just perfectly shaped and positioned, but nobody has studied it. So, we are studying it.”

Scientists have known for a while that HEG1 is important. Other researchers removed the gene in zebrafish and mice and the results were catastrophic: blood vessels — normally tightly sealed conduits — started to leak, and hearts without HEG1 grew very large and very fragile. That’s where HEG1 gets its name: It’s the “heart of glass” gene.

The question now is, does HEG1 have another crucial role in cardiovascular disease?

Jo and his team — including M.D./Ph.D. student Ian Tamargo and postdoctoral fellow Aitor Andueza — want to establish the link. If it’s there, it opens up new targets for therapies to treat atherosclerosis, a disease that can lead to heart attacks, strokes, and peripheral artery disease. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART 30

Research

The Inhibitory Role of World’s Most Famous Molecule A so-called “checkpoint” protein found on the immune system’s all-important T cells called PD-1 might be the most famous molecule on the planet. It was an anti-PD-1 drug, along with radiation therapy, that disintegrated former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s brain tumors in 2015.

Under normal conditions, PD-1 serves an important role as an off-switch, preventing well-intentioned T cells from running amok and attacking normal, healthy cells by mistake. It does this by binding with a protein called PD-L1, found on some normal and some cancer cells.

This interaction basically signals the T cell to leave the other cell alone. Unfortunately, sometimes the other cell is cancer, which then goes unbothered because PD-1 told the T cell to stand down.

“It has become a very hot molecule,” said Coulter BME Professor Cheng Zhu. “But only a minor fraction of cancer patients — about one third of the melanoma patients who have been treated with the blockade therapy — are responsive, indicating an incomplete understanding of how PD-1 works.”

Zhu and his colleagues are particularly interested in explaining how PD-1 inhibits T-cell activity, and they unravel one part of the mystery in a paper in Nature

Communications. Using technology Zhu developed decades ago that measures the biochemistry on live cell membranes, the researchers discovered that PD-1 disrupts the recruitment of CD8, a protein co-receptor that partners in T cell signaling and activation.

“The results of our study identify a PD-1 inhibitory mechanism that disrupts cooperative molecular interactions and prevents CD8 from augmenting antigen recognition,” Zhu said. “This explains the molecule’s potent inhibitory function regarding T cell activation and also explains its value as a target for clinical intervention.”

The lead author on the paper is Kaitao Li, a research scientist in Zhu’s lab.

“What excites me most is that [this study] reinforces and extends the work that Dr. Zhu did 10 years ago on the sequence of events leading up to T cell activation, but now it brings PD-1 into the story, revealing how PD-1 dampens T cell activation,” explained Simon Davis, paper co-author, whose immunology lab at the University of Oxford has studied PD-1 and other proteins for about 20 years. “We had proposed a long time ago that the activation sequence is dictated by the relative strengths of protein interactions involves, but Dr. Zhu’s lab was able to tease all this apart.” ‣ JERRY GRILLO

Above: A cell chamber is mounted on a microscope. Three micropipettes, inserted into the chamber from both sides, are used to aspirate individual cells, bringing them into contact so that researchers can study their interactions. This is the kind of methodology that Cheng Zhu and his colleagues used to study PD-1. ROB FELT.

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Research

Using Deep Learning to Better Predict Alzheimer’s In the age of big and bigger biomedical data, researchers like Most studies of Alzheimer’s, as well as mild cognitive Coulter BME Professor May Wang are appropriating a powerful disorders, use a single mode of data — imaging, for analytics tool from the realm of artificial intelligence to help. example — to make predictions of what may lie ahead, AI systems use algorithms to automatically learn, pathologically, in a patient’s neurological journey. describe, and improve data, using statistical techniques Wang and her collaborators wanted to know if deep to spot patterns and then perform actions. Deep learning learning could combine multiple kinds, or modalities, of AI uses a pattern of logic that mimics how a human data to offer a fuller picture. It did — their multimodal might arrive at a conclusion. Only much faster. model outperformed the traditional single-mode model, “The ultimate, long-term goal of this research would be to “significantly improving our prediction accuracy, providing provide clinicians with a better tool for predicting the different a more holistic view of disease progression,” Wang said. stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” Wang said. “We aren’t there Still, the study was limited to a relatively small yet. But we feel that this work is like an early spark in a larger number of patients. As Wang explained, all 2,004 explosion of research demonstrating the power of deep learning.” patients in the ADNI database had clinical data, but Wang and her colleagues tested the concept and only 503 had imaging data and 808 had genetic data; wrote about it in Nature Scientific Reports. just 220 patients had all three data modalities.

Wang’s team used data gathered from the Alzheimer’s “That isn’t a large group,” Wang said. “My hope is that Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a multicenter this study and others will inspire hospitals and health care study of 2,000-plus patients (originated by the Uniorganizations to collect multiple modalities of data from versity of Southern California) that aims to develop the same cohorts of patients so that we can develop a more clinical, imaging, genetic, and biochemical biomarkers complete picture of what disease progress is like. We need to for the early detection and tracking of Alzheimer’s. test our models on larger, richer data sets.” ‣ JERRY GRILLO

Expanding the Utility of 3D Tomography In recent years, three-dimensional refractive index (RI) tomography has emerged as an effective, label-free imaging tool in biological studies. But, according to researchers Francisco Robles and colleague Patrick Ledwig, “its limitation to thin samples, resulting from a need of transmissive illumination, and small fields of view has hindered its utility in broader biomedical applications.”

Those days could be coming to an end. Robles and Ledwig describe a new approach in the journal Optica that enables RI tomography of arbitrarily thick samples with a large view.

Refractive index technology has been moving toward rendering more detailed 3D information, but it remained limited to individual cells.

“People have been trying to use the technique for various medical applications because you get these beautiful 3D tomographic images, but the fact that this was only possible on individual cells, and not at tissue-level structures, was really limiting,” said Robles, a Coulter Department assistant professor.

Robles and Ledwig used a simple, low-cost microscope system with epi-illumination, which reflects light off the sample to create contrast. Existing techniques use transmissive illumination, which passes light through a sample. That works fine for translucent samples but not at all in thicker, more complex structures.

Robles said the new approach allows researchers to perform label-free imaging, which is a non-invasive way

Robles

to view a biological sample in its natural state. Many labs use chemical or fluorescent labels to track cellular activity. But the labeling process is invasive and can be toxic to cells, compromising research findings.

“This technique opens the door to many biomedical applications that were previously out of reach of refractive index tomography,” Robles said.

Robles described their solution as, “elegant and simple, providing near real-time information, without heavy computational processing. You don’t need an expensive laser — we actually used $8 LEDs for this system — and we can convert any basic brightfield microscope into this new tomographic imaging technology for a low cost.” ‣ JERRY GRILLO

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Research

Understanding How Violet Light Can Stop Myopia Progression An international team of researchers has taken an important step toward understanding a powerful potential treatment for myopia, which is fast becoming a public health crisis in Asia.

Previous work found that violet light can stop the progression of myopia, an elongation of the eye between the cornea and the retina that results in nearsightedness where far-away objects appear blurry. Now researchers at Keio University in Japan, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and the Coulter Department have discovered that the protective effects of violet light depend on a newly discovered photoreceptor protein in the eye called OPN5, or neuropsin, which was known to be sensitive to violet light.

“Among all the light that reaches our eyes, we have known for sure that violet light is special,” said Toshihide Kurihara, assistant professor at Keio University. “The human eye seems to use it as a clue to control its size, whereas we knew neither the mechanism nor the necessity behind this phenomenon.”

A few years ago, the Keio team reported that violet light could prevent myopia progression. Violet light is abundant in outdoor sunlight but largely absent indoors, where it’s not emitted by artificial lights and ultraviolet protective coatings on windows also filter out violet light wavelengths.

In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team explained the molecular mechanism behind this violet light effect on myopia progression and presented a new function of the OPN5 protein. OPN5 is part of a group of photoreceptor proteins called opsins found in the membranes of cells that are not involved in forming visual images but that play other important roles in the eye.

The researchers used an established mouse model of myopia to demonstrate that without OPN5, violet light did nothing to halt elongation of the eye. Mice without the OPN5 protein also saw continued thinning of the choroid, a vascular layer that decreases in thickness in myopic eyes.

Understanding how violet light protects against worsening myopia is key as the condition’s prevalence accelerates. Already, roughly a third of people around the

Breaching the Blood-Brain Barrier to Deliver Precious Payloads

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The expression pattern of the photoreceptor protein OPN5 in a mouse retina.

PHOTO COURTESY: TOSHIHIDE KURIHARA.

world are myopic, and some projections suggest nearly 5 billion people will have the condition by 2050.

Nearsightedness typically begins in school-age children, and it’s often not considered a significant problem since it can be corrected with glasses. Yet, in China, myopia is the second-leading cause of blindness.

“This study really does point to the fact that violet light is protective, and now there's a mechanism, this OPN5, that may underlie that,” said Coulter BME Professor Machelle Pardue. “Next is to understand how you could use violet light to be protective in the human population. There are still some mechanistic aspects that need to be investigated to really understand how OPN5 may be doing this.” ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Despite all their potential to change the standard of care for many diseases, RNA-based drugs haven’t been very useful in getting through to the well-protected brain to treat tumors or other maladies.

Now a team of researchers led by Coulter Department Assistant Professor Arvanitis Costas Arvanitis has figured out a way: using ultrasound and RNA-loaded nanoparticles to get through the protective blood-brain barrier and deliver potent medicine to brain tumors. They describe their next-generation, tunable delivery system in the journal Science Advances.

RNA drugs have two major weaknesses: limited circulation time and limited uptake by cells. To overcome these challenges, the drugs are packaged in robust nanocarriers, typically 100 nm in size, to improve their bioavailability. Still, these nanocarriers have typically been too large to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, the tightly-connected and

Research

Radiation Resistance: Why Some Tumors Are So Stubborn More than half of cancer patients receive radiation as part of their treatment. But around 20 percent of them will find that they need different options, and researchers are trying to understand why.

“It’s a significant hurdle to the long-term survival of many patients,” said Joshua Lewis, who sought answers to the radiation resistance question while a graduate student in Coulter Department Professor Melissa Kemp’s lab.

So, they studied the underlying metabolism and built a tool to predict which tumors would be the unresponsive kind. In back-to-back papers in Cell Systems and Nature Communications, with Lewis as lead author, they created a new pipeline, “in which you can automatically take data, plug it into our whole cell modeling of metabolism, and actually predict the way certain tumors of various cancer types, from various patients, are going to respond,” Kemp said. “This is the first example of really asking, with respect to radiation resistance, why there are differences that manifest themselves in tumor metabolism.”

Lewis used a well-established type of cellular modeling called flux balance analysis, in which “you try to model the entire metabolism of a cell — all the different chemical reactions. We model them using different biochemical equations.” The researchers then plug those equations into a computer. Within seconds, they can accurately analyze about 13,000 different metabolic reactions.

“We came up with our own approach for making more accurate flux balance analysis models by integrating multiple different types of omics data,” said Lewis, who’s now pursuing his medical degree in the Emory M.D./ Ph.D. Program. By integrating genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics data, the researchers could model redox metabolism in cancer cells and use that to predict how certain tumors react to radiation therapy.

“Imagine if you’re giving a patient radiation therapy, and you could also give them a chemotherapeutic at the same time that inhibits the action of a particular enzyme to make a tumor more sensitive to radiation,” Lewis said.

The researchers integrated machine learning with genome-scale metabolic modeling to better predict biological features associated with a patient’s radiation response.

“Josh’s computational platform turns easy-to-acquire data into a model representation of hard-to-acquire attributes like metabolic fluxes and metabolite changes, that are otherwise very challenging to measure with the scale it takes to cover many different patients,” Kemp said. ‣ JERRY GRILLO

Melissa Kemp and Joshua Lewis

JOSHUA STEWART

selective endothelial cells surrounding blood vessels in the brain.

To get the drug safely across, the team deployed a modified version of ultrasound in mouse models. They combined this technology with microbubbles — tiny gas pockets in the bloodstream, designed as vascular contrast agents for imaging — which vibrate in response to ultrasound waves, changing the permeability of blood vessels.

“Focusing multiple beams of ultrasound energy onto a cancerous spot caused the microbubbles’ vibrations to actually stretch, pull, or shear the tight junctions of endothelial tissue that make up the blood-brain barrier, creating an opening for drugs to get through,” said graduate student and lead author Yutong Guo. Still, even when bloodborne drugs succeed in penetrating the blood-brain barrier, the job isn’t complete if they are not taken

up by the cancer cell. Arvanitis and his team packaged siRNA, a drug that can block the expression of genes that drive tumor growth, in lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles, and combined that with the focused ultrasound technique in pediatric and adult preclinical brain cancer models. Using single-cell image analysis, they demonstrated a more than 10-fold improvement in delivery of the drug, reducing harmful protein production and increasing tumor cell death in preclinical models of medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumor in children.

“This is completely tunable,” Arvanitis said. “We can fine tune the ultrasound pressure to attain a desired level of vibration and, by extension, drug delivery. It’s non-invasive, because we are applying sound from outside the brain, and it’s very localized, because we can focus the ultrasound to a very small region of the brain.” ‣ JERRY GRILLO 34

Research

A New Way to See Coronary Arteries in 3D Despite the widespread impact of coronary artery disease — it kills 366,000 people every year in the United States — gaps in information make treating the condition a challenge.

With the support of a four-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Brooks Lindsey is leading a team working to fill these gaps by developing a new tiny ultrasound device attached to the catheters commonly used to reopen clogged arteries.

Many patients are treated via a minimallyinvasive procedure that uses a catheter to place a stent and reopen arteries that have become narrowed with plaques. Partially occluded coronary arteries can result in heart attack in some of these patients. However, other patients have a similar blockage but have stable disease and do not require intervention.

The challenge is deciding which patients are which.

“In the cardiac catheterization lab where these procedures are performed, there are a number of separate approaches for quantifying functional markers. However, all of these tools function independently and in isolation from one another,” said Lindsey, assistant professor in Coulter BME. “Most are one-dimensional measurements, which makes it difficult to measure everything going on in the complex, 3D, local biomechanical environment. This includes tissue and plaque mechanical properties, artery geometry, and hemodynamics, all of which vary dynamically as the heart beats.”

All of these factors together contribute to the likelihood of plaque rupture and heart attack, so acquiring all of this information together, and with spatial and temporal information intact, would be hugely beneficial.

Lindsey aims to do that with an ultrasound imaging device approximately 1 millimeter in diameter that will measure all of these properties in 3D from the tip of the catheter during procedures in the cardiac catheterization lab. His team’s approach will be designed to allow simultaneous measurement of blood flow velocity, mechanical properties of tissue, and artery geometry for the first time.

“More than 1 million cardiac catheterizations are performed each year in the U.S. — even patients who ultimately do not require intervention undergo diagnostic catheterization,” Lindsey said. “Our goal is to develop a system that uses ultrasound on the tip of catheter to give cardiologists a complete picture of the patient’s individual anatomy and physiology, including dynamic behavior in coronary arteries as the heart beats. This imaging information, in turn, allows development of improved computational models of coronary arteries in health and disease.” ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Inset: Proposed design of a 1mm catheter-based, 3D imaging ultrasound device. Above: This figure shows 3D functional imaging with a prototype forward-viewing device in laboratory models of narrowed vessels: (A) Conventional ultrasound imaging of lesion morphology in straight and stenotic, or narrowed, vessels, with extracted lumen shape shown in yellow, (B) 3D vector velocity imaging in straight and stenotic vessels, and (C) Strain rate imaging of a control vessel model and a model with a soft inclusion on the right inner surface. IMAGES COURTESY: BROOKS LINDSEY.

Research

A Breakthrough in the Physics of Blood Clotting Heart attacks and strokes — the leading causes of death in human beings — are fundamentally blood clots of the heart and brain. Better understanding how the blood-clotting process works and how to accelerate or slow down clotting could save lives.

Research published in the journal Biomaterials sheds new light on the mechanics and physics of blood clotting through modeling the dynamics at play during a still poorly understood phase of blood clotting called clot contraction.

“Blood clotting is actually a physics-based phenomenon that must occur to stem bleeding after an injury,” said Coulter Department Professor and W. Paul Bowers Research Chair Wilbur A. Lam. “The biology is known. The biochemistry is known. But how this ultimately translates into physics is an untapped area.”

The workhorses to stem bleeding are platelets – tiny 2-micrometer cells in the blood in charge of making the initial plug, Lam said. The clot that forms is called fibrin, which acts as a glue scaffold that the platelets attach to and pull against. Blood clot contraction arises

when these platelets interact with this fibrin scaffold.

When the researchers simulated a clot where a large group of platelets was activated at the same time, the tiny cells could only reach nearby fibrins because the platelets can extend filopodia that are rather short, less than 6 micrometers. “But in a trauma, some platelets contract first.

They shrink the clot so the other platelets will see more fibrins nearby, and it effectively increases the clot force,” said Alexander Alexeev, professor and Anderer Faculty Fellow in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Just due to the asynchronous platelet activity, the force enhancement can be as high as 70% leading to an 90% decrease of the clot volume.

“The simulations showed that the platelets work best when they’re not in total sync with each other,” Lam said.

“These platelets are actually pulling at different times and by doing that they’re increasing the efficiency [of the clot].”

“If we know why this happens, then we have a whole new potential avenue of treatments for diseases of blood clotting,” Lam said. ‣ ANNE WAINSCOTT-SARGENT

Above, from left: researchers Wilbur Lam, Alexander Alexeev, and Yueyi Sun hope their new understanding of the physics involved in clotting will open medical options for people with clotting issues. REGINALD TRAN.

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Research

Stopping Vascular Damage in Sickle Cell Disease Manu Platt and Edward Botchwey are working on a potential therapy for children with sickle cell disease that would help protect their arteries from damage that can lead to strokes.

Right now, the only way to cure this genetic disease is with a bone marrow transplant. The researchers want to understand if the damage to the vascular system persists even after properly functioning red blood cells are being produced by the new marrow — and how they can stop it.

“In general, arteries don’t heal so much,” said Platt, a professor in Coulter BME. “So when children with sickle cell have had bone marrow transplants, if they've had a stroke already, they might still have additional strokes.”

With a National Institutes of Health grant, Platt and Botchwey aim to inhibit production of an enzyme called cathepsin K. Platt’s previous work has shown the chronic inflammation caused by sickle cell disease increases expression of cathepsin K in arteries, where it leads to stiffer arteries more prone to damage.

In the new study, the team is targeting cathepsin by going after another molecule entirely, one that turns on cathepsin production. It’s an attempt to overcome the key limitation of previous efforts: more than a dozen drugs have been developed to inhibit cathepsin K, but have not been through FDA approval because of terrible side effects.

“We’re developing therapies to prevent the arterial remodeling to find out if, even after you do bone marrow transplant, do you still need to add these therapies

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Botchwey (above) and Platt (right)

for a little while to protect the vasculature while the blood is being reconstituted with healthy cells,” Platt said. “We think that may improve outcomes for patients who will receive bone marrow transplants.”

Platt and Botchwey will work with Coulter BME’s Rudy Gleason, who is an expert in arterial mechanics, and Julie Champion in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She has a nanoparticle delivery system to help them target the upstream signaling molecule that stops cathepsin production.

Along with research scientist Hannah Song, the team will work to find out the best time to introduce the potential therapy, how effective their approach is at controlling cathepsin production, and if the intervention has protective benefits for bone marrow transplants in a sickle cell disease mouse model. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Research

Mapping Tissue Structure and Function in 3D A newly published approach to profiling human tissue samples can build a 3D picture of structure and function at the molecular level.

The procedure marries techniques from chemistry, biology, and data science and could help doctors design precision therapies in the coming years for patients who aren’t responding to treatment.

In a study of human tonsil tissue, the researchers combined a labeling scheme using isotopes to “tag” specific kinds of cells — in this case, immune cells such as T cells and B cells — with imaging mass spectrometry that can identify metabolites, the molecules around those cells that A conceptual diagram illustrates how researchers used a single imagining technique called time-of-flight secondary ion are used for various mass spectrometry to capture metabolic and cellular profiles of more than 190 compounds in human tissue samples. metabolic functions. And instead of doing this on a single, two-dimensional “slice” of tissue, they used “Drug libraries attack this specific data from about 150 slices to create a 3D map of the tissue.

“An analogy to our system is actually geography: We mechanism or that specific mechanism, create the geography of tonsils,” said Ahmet Coskun, Bernie so by comparing the drug libraries Marcus Early Career Professor in Coulter BME. “When we and a specific patient's structure and are doing that, we are looking at more granular features, [including] which molecular distributions are around, and function profiles, you can actually design how do they really change within this tonsil tissue.” personalized drugs for that specific patient.”

Coskun’s team used tools from data science to turn all of that data into a 3D map of the tonsil tissue, which AHMET COSKUN Coskun said is more accurate since the tissues are threedimensional themselves. They described their unique approach — combining two disparate measurements also can pinpoint how cells are using energy, depleting into a single test and processing a huge amount of data oxygen, or otherwise working in the body, Coskun said. to make a 3D map — in the journal Science Advances.

“You can use this information to design precision therapies Coskun and his team studied B cells in tonsils, important and to find the best drugs for that specific person,” Coskun harbingers of a potential infection. Tonsils are one of the said. “Drug libraries attack this specific mechanism or that first areas that sense a foreign bacteria or virus, and the specific mechanism, so by comparing the drug libraries and immune cells there warn the body to prepare to fight an a specific patient's structure and function profiles, you can invader. The team’s spatial map showed the locations of actually design personalized drugs for that specific patient.”

T cell and B cell concentrations. It also discovered lower That’s still a few years down the road — Coskun said concentrations of specific kinds of fat molecules called lipids the specialized machines his team used to develop the that the B cells use to proliferate and create antibodies. metabolic profiling are still expensive and mostly In experiments looking at nearly 200 different kinds housed in research centers. of metabolites and lipids, the researchers uncovered a unique “code” that identified where specific lipids But: “The biochemical methods that we developed, they're related to different kinds of cell function were depleted. easy; they can be done in any lab,” he said. “Getting the measureUnderstanding structure and function in conjunction ments done is the rate-limiting step here.” ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

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Biolocity

Biolocity GUIDING MEDICAL INNOVATION TO MARKET

What is Biolocity?

Welcoming New Leadership

Biolocity grew from the successful pilot of the Coulter Translational Fund. The program uses an integrated approach to accelerate the development and commercialization of promising innovations from faculty members at Emory University and Georgia Tech.

Biolocity provides a combination of funding, project management, and consulting resources to technologies, diagnostics, and therapies that address unmet clinical needs and have compelling commercial appeal.

The Biolocity approach encompasses three components: • Biolocity U – educational resources focused on lifescience commercialization, including consultations, workshops, internships, and legal office hours.

• Biolocity Fund – more than $1.5 million in funding available each year to Emory and Georgia Tech innovations through a multistage, competitive application process.

• Biolocity Launch – active project management and formal coordination with the life-sciences commercialization ecosystem for Biolocity Fund awardees.

Law

Nicosia

Courtney Law joined Biolocity as managing director in late 2020 followed in short order by a new associate director, John Nicosia.

As managing director, Law provides business leadership and commercialization strategy at the intersection of academia, medicine, investment, and industry to successfully bridge early-stage technologies into successful startups and licenses to industry. She earned a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Nicosia is responsible for developing and executing product development strategy for the Biolocity portfolio. He also leads the Biolocity internship program. Nicosia earned his doctorate from the Coulter Department and a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Rochester.

“As a scientist without formal business training, I had no idea how to speak with venture capitalists or create an appropriate pitch deck. The Biolocity team helped me learn these valuable skills.”

James Dahlman ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, COULTER DEPARTMENT OF BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Biolocity

New This Year A gift to the Emory School of Medicine from John and Rosemary Brown has expanded project funding for Biolocity for 2021. The Browns established an innovation-to-market fund to take a multi-pronged approach to advancing new technologies, including $1.5 million in support for Biolocity over three years through the Brown Innovation Fund. Learn more about the Brown Family’s gift on page 60.

Biolocity also has been working to fill a critical gap for life-sciences startups across the region: academic spin-outs tend to stall due to a lack of early-stage funding.

With the support of a 2020 Capital Challenge Grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, the Biolocity team is working to build the Emory Catalyst Fund, which will combine this support with funding from Emory and philanthropic donations from Emory supporters to fill this gap and avoid the startup “valley of death” — where startups and emerging-stage companies struggle to reach scale.

The fund — focused on technologies with the potential to impact human health — extends Biolocity’s bench-to-business support to helping Emory innovations reach scale and business success.

“Biolocity has truly enabled me to pursue dreams that would otherwise have been impossible.

I never knew I could do so much with an idea, and I feel much more knowledgeable with Biolocity guiding me through the process.”

Andrea Joyner ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF GYNECOLOGY & OBSTETRICS, EMORY UNIVERSITY

Proud Partner in the BARDA DRIVe Accelerator Network Biolocity is now in year two of a five-year, $1 million award as a DRIVe Accelerator through the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA. This national network of top medical technology accelerators expands Biolocity’s reach to health security technology teams, connecting innovators with BARDA’s development resources.

As BARDA’s focus and resources shifted to Covid-19 response efforts in 2020, Biolocity responded and facilitated connections throughout the program's ecosystem. The Biolocity team also supported BARDA’s nationwide Mask Innovation Challenge, providing expert reviewers for the more than 2,000 applications and hosting the Southeast regional mask showcase of teams creating innovative masks for public use.

Erika Tyburski, co-founder of Sanguina — one of Biolocity's success stories. Inset: Sanguina's AnemoCheck device. GARY MEEK.

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Biolocity

58

projects funded

10.8x

ROI leverage in follow-on funding

“We applied with the idea that funding would be the primary determinant necessary for our success. What we learned is that the guidance, advocacy, mentorship, and regulatory resources received were every bit as critical. Our team is profoundly grateful to the Biolocity team for their guidance in translating a technical idea into a real-world clinical resource that will soon benefit patients.”

Frank Tong ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF NEUROSURGERY, EMORY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

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startups

2

licenses to industry

4

product launches

The NozeBot device. PHOTO COURTESY: NOZEBOT.

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Biolocity

Peter Yunker, co-founder of Heteroresistance AST.

Success Stories Guide Therapeutics was acquired by Beam Therapeutics in 2021.

Founded by Coulter BME’s James Dahlman, Guide develops nonviral drug-delivery vehicles for genetic medicines. Dahlman participated in the Biolocity Launch program in 2019, receiving funding, project management, and business mentoring to achieve commercialization milestones for his technology. Read more about the acquisition on page 58.

Sanguina entered into a new partnership with drugmaker AstraZeneca on a study to develop a custom version of the AnemoCheck Mobile smartphone app for patients with anemia of chronic kidney disease. The app provides noninvasive and equipment-free estimates of hemoglobin levels from a simple snapshot of a finger, foregoing a measurement that typically requires special equipment a laboratory blood draw. The AnemoCheck/ Sanguina team of Coulter BME Professor Wilbur Lam and Erika Tyburski, BME 2012, received support from Biolocity in 2016.

Dr. Noze Best launched sales of the Biolocity-supported NozeBot in January 2021. NozeBot is a battery-powered suction device designed to clear nasal congestion in babies and young children that features a unique, patented nosepiece.

Recent Biolocity Launch graduate Heteroresistance AST has secured a five-year, $11 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The grant will support their continued work studying heteroresistance, a stealthy form of antibiotic resistance that undermines the treatment of bacterial infections.

“The Biolocity team provided invaluable assistance that moved our project from an NIH focus to a commercial venture.

They recognized the value of our technology and how to promote it to industry.

We would not have succeeded without their expertise.”

Jeff M. Sands DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF RENAL MEDICINE, EMORY UNIVERSITY

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Student Stories

Student Stories Student-Built Site Pairs Undergrads and Research Mentors After seeing so many of her fellow undergraduates struggle to find the right lab to join, Coulter BME student Amy Liu decided to create a platform to streamline and personalize the process of getting involved in research. It’s a website called PairMe. Just like students learn in the engineering design process, Liu started by listening: first, was there a need she could address from the perspective of mentors — graduate students, postdocs, research scientists? She surveyed graduate students in the Coulter Department

and other schools in the College of Engineering and College of Science.

“I found that mentors are mostly passive when seeking a mentee. Most just wait for emails to come in to their principal investigators,” Liu said. “But many would like the option of actively recruiting a student.”

With that feedback — and with the support of Coulter BME’s leadership — she built PairMe. Through the site, mentors can post and manage project openings for undergraduate students. Students browse available research opportunities. They can find research for course credit or pay as well as volunteer opportunities.

“I hope that this continually updated virtual platform will facilitate communication between groups and bring benefits to all

three parties involved: the mentee, the mentor, and the principal investigator,” said Liu, who has partnered with the Coulter Department’s Community, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee, “to ensure that students of all backgrounds are provided the resources necessary to engage in research.

“With greater awareness, more options, and broader reach, this platform has the potential to not only improve inclusion at Tech, but also promote Georgia TechEmory connections as well,” Liu said.

‣ JERRY GRILLO

NISHA ROCKWELL

First-year student // Prattville, Alabama With my dad being a disabled veteran, I spent a lot of my childhood seeing people in difficult situations at hospitals. I knew BME would provide me a way to use my love of STEM to improve the lives of others, including other disabled veterans. Georgia Tech has been my dream school. It has one of the best BME programs in the nation and is in Atlanta, a city full of opportunities and culture.

After touring Georgia Tech, I immediately felt a sense of community. I knew that if I attended Georgia Tech, I would learn so much, inside and outside of the classroom, and have a true sense of belonging.

Student Stories

Exploring Blast Exposure and the Brain Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is often considered an “invisible” wound of war. A large explosion on the battlefield or from an improvised explosive device can cause a variety of head traumas, seen and unseen.

The effects of repetitive, low-level blasts, however — such as those associated with the mortars and other concussive weapon systems — have gone relatively unexamined in the military sector, according to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. A single mortar blast will not cause as much damage as a high-impact explosion, but the effects of these blasts can add up over time, and soldiers may begin to report symptoms of a brain injury.

Enter a group of five Coulter BME students, who collaborated this year with the National Security Innovation Network to find ways to quantify the effects of those repeated, low-level blast exposures.

Working with the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, the team spent a week measuring the physiological effects of low-level blasts from mortars and other weapons systems. They used blast gauges to measure the blast overpressure, pupilometers to measure pupillary light reflex in the soldiers, and symptom questionnaires before and after training.

“The problem that our project sponsors presented to us was that during training and deployment, the Rangers were reporting symptoms like headaches, dizziness, ringing in their ears, and in some of the severe cases, they felt nauseous and would vomit after a long day of firing mortars,” said Jessica Nicholson, a fifth-year student.

The constant exposure to low level blasts becomes an occupational hazard for Rangers, especially the mortarmen, who can fire these larger weapons systems for five to 10 years if they have

a long career. The team, which also included fellow fifth-year students Brady Bove, Jordyn Sak, Grace Trimpe, and Julia Woodall, even used their data to create a prototype blast attenuator to fit over the muzzle of a mortar.

“The brain is already really confusing, especially when it comes to understanding how a single blast affects function,” Woodall said. “Understanding how, over a span of 10 years, a small blast can continually damage the brain is a really novel space in research and has not been significantly looked at.” ‣ ZOE ELLEDGE

A single mortar blast will not cause as much damage as a highimpact explosion, but the effects of these blasts can add up over time, and soldiers may begin to report symptoms of a brain injury.

Above: Five Coulter BME students worked with the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, to measure the effects of low-level blast exposures. PHOTOS COURTESY: PROJECT HALO.

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Student Stories

Bhatia Wins 2021 Barry Goldwater Scholarship

These Students Have Something Up Their Sleeves Mike Pullen was a high school football wide receiver when he first conjured the idea that became LZRD Tech.

“There wasn’t a good way to protect a wide receiver’s arms from turf burn,” said Pullen, a Coulter BME senior.

“There are plenty of protective sleeves, but they’re slick, which makes it easy to drop the football,” he explained. “I wanted to make something that would help protect an athlete from turf burn, and also secure the ball.”

The idea evolved in his Materials Science and Engineering of Sports class at Georgia Tech, where he and fraternity brother Mat Quon (a 2019

BME graduate) developed the concept, and course instructor Jud Ready’s enthusiastic support kept the momentum going. They filed a provisional patent, made prototypes, and started a company – LZRD Tech, with Pullen as CEO, Quon as COO, and Ready as CTO. “We designed it for athletes, but once the pandemic hit last spring, we had to find other applications,” Pullen said.

And they have — package delivery people, warehouse workers, and construction workers all have to handle and hold objects as part of their jobs.

Atlanta-based package giant UPS has been giving their protective sleeve a trial run. FedEx also has shown interest. And the fledgling company is already getting media attention.

“I think what makes it appealing is, it’s a universal product,” Pullen said.

“Who carries things? Almost everybody.” ‣ JERRY GRILLO

Three Georgia Tech engineering students have been named 2021 scholars

by The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.

Among them: third-year Coulter BME undergraduate Shovan Bhatia.

Bhatia has been involved in Professor Jaydev Desai’s Medical Robotics and Automation (RoboMed) Lab since Fall 2019, where he has been able to blend his love of robotics with his goal of working in the medical field. Bhatia is currently working on creating an assistive robotic exoskeleton to improve the quality of life for those living with spinal cord injury.

“Through the research I’m performing, I have had the unique opportunity to design and iterate at the benchtop and then translate our work into the clinical space through spinal cord injury human subject testing,” Bhatia said.

Bhatia applied for the Goldwater Scholarship to become part of a community of highly motivated individuals that the program cultivates, he said. The scholarship is one of the most prestigious one of its kind for natural science, engineering, and mathematics students. ‣ ZOE ELLEDGE

YUKINA YAJIMA Third-year student // Location: Japan [In high school,] I conducted research for the first time to develop an early-detection system for colorectal cancer using bioengineering. I was amazed by how the rapidly growing bioengineering field has a lot of potential to improve the lives of patients. After doing some research, I learned about the BME major and some fascinating ongoing research projects within the Department and decided to pursue a degree in BME at Georgia Tech.

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Student Stories

InVenture Prize Finalists Turn Focus to Next Steps for Their Startups Though they didn’t win this year’s competition, the Georgia Tech InVenture Prize finals were just the beginning for the two teams featuring students from the Coulter Department. They’re already working on the next steps to turn their ideas into commercial products.

For fourth-year student Sammie Hasen and BCase, that meant finishing a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help pay for the tooling to begin injectionmold manufacturing. Team CADe and Sean Cody, who earned his biomedical engineering bachelor’s in December, turned their focus to the Startup Launch program this summer through Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X program and releasing their smartphone app.

CADe (pronounced like “Caddy”) is an app that turns a smartphone into another input device for 3D computeraided design (CAD) software, a tool used by millions of engineers every day.

Users can manipulate the models using their phone’s touch interface: pinch to zoom, use two fingers to move the model around, one finger to rotate.

“It’s the movements that everyone in this day and age is familiar with using on a mobile interface, and because of that, a user can pick it up and start using it right away,” Cody said. “CADe functions with your traditional mouse, so you’re basically doubling your user input into the computer. You’re improving the

user experience of the app, and you’re improving the user’s efficiency.”

Cody said initial tests showed users can see 20% efficiency gains using the CADe app on a phone in one hand and

manipulating the mouse in the other. And with 20 million people using the most common 3D CAD packages, capturing just 5% of that market — the team’s goal — would mean a million subscribers.

BCase attaches directly to the back of a smartphone, where it discreetly carries birth control — or potentially any similar multi-pill pack.

Hasen came up with the idea after many an interrupted dinner or evening out with friends. Their smartphone alarms would go off to remind them it was time to take their pill, and they’d realize it was at home. With BCase, the pill and the alarm are in the same place.

“You know you’re onto something when you have everyone saying, ‘How has this not been done before?’ It’s just something that’s so in plain sight that no one sees it,” Hasen said.

Hasen said she’s building more than a product and a business with BCase; she wants to build a platform to make women’s lives better.

“Plan B, tampons, birth control, IUDs — they were all designed by men. There are huge user flaws to them because the designers never used the product,” Hasen said. “My goal would be to have a primarily female team. I really want to make sure that the customer is the designer, and the designer is the customer.”

‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Above: CADe is a smartphone app that turns a phone into a second input device for 3D computer-aided design software.

PHOTO COURTESY: TEAM CADE.

Left: BME undergrad Sammie Hasen with BCase, a storage solution for birth control or other multi-pill packs that attaches to a smartphone.

PHOTOS COURTESY: SAMMIE HASEN.

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Student Stories

As Grad SGA Vice President, Jarquin Balances Service and Research Biomedical engineering Ph.D. student PJ Jarquin has always been passionate about serving his campus and his fellow students. He has a significant chance to do that this year as executive vice president of the Graduate Student Government Association (GSGA) at Georgia Tech.

It may seem like a big responsibility on top of the all-consuming work of pursuing a doctorate, but it’s the kind of thing Jarquin has been doing his whole college career — first as an undergraduate and then as an executive cabinet member in Tech’s Graduate SGA last year.

“Research and lab work and classes are important, but GSGA is something for me to kind of get away from all the research while still being productive with my time and making a positive impact,” said Jarquin, who is entering his third year of doctoral work in the Coulter Department.

Jarquin was elected in the spring alongside Stephen Eick, a Ph.D. student in computer science. They’ll serve over the next year in what Jarquin said is a critical time as more people return to campus and find ways to reconnect and rebuild some of the community that has been lost during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Definitely our main priorities center around student well-being and mental health. There are grad students, and of course also undergrads, who really never got to interact with their peers as much. The biggest challenge is, how do we transition safely to more meaningful interactions that aren’t virtual,” Jarquin said.

Of course, Jarquin will continue to push forward on his graduate work. He studies the process of red blood cell formation called erythropoiesis using a unique 3D model that mimics the architecture of bone marrow and produces functional cells so the team can study the linkages between the marrow microenvironment and the cells.

“The only kind of model that usually can do that is a mouse model. So being able to link that to the human condition really interests me,” Jarquin said. In particular, he focuses on anemia and is using the model to find possible treatment targets for the disease. “There are a lot of unknowns or unanswered questions, and that is what interests me the most about it.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jarquin already has an idea of how he’ll blend service and uncovering the unknown even after he leaves Emory and Georgia Tech. He plans to pursue a career as a research scientist at a federal agency, where he wants to ensure underrepresented voices are heard.

“For me, it’s like serving the country,” he said. “You’re not doing it for a financial gain for a company; the research that’s being done belongs to the people, belongs to us.” ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

JARQUIN WINS 2 YEARS OF SUPPORT FROM HEMATOLOGY SOCIETY Heading into his third year of doctoral studies in the Coulter Department, PJ Jarquin has the support of the American Society of Hematology. Jarquin has won a 2021 Minority Hematology Graduate Award, which includes two years of funding from the professional society for stipends and research costs along with connections to mentors and other researchers studying blood and blood disorders.

“This award gives me a chance to conduct independent research that will hopefully lead to a career in transforming hematological research into engineered solutions to treat hematological disorders,” Jarquin said. “I see this as a stepping stone for enhanced mentoring and professional activities that are usually more difficult for Hispanic students, like myself, to access.”

The Minority Hematology Graduate Award encourages graduate students from historically underrepresented minority groups to pursue careers in academic hematology, according to the society.

It comes with society membership, invitations to present research, and opportunities to meet leaders in the field. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Student Stories

Student Startup Elbowroom Piloting Passenger Counting Tech with Atlanta’s MARTA At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, a group of six Georgia Tech students decided to apply what they had learned about data science in their classes to pandemic-inspired social distancing requirements in public transportation.

The team built a device that tracks the number of people moving in and out of public transit cars. They took their automated passenger counter device to the MIT Covid-19 Challenge hackathon, won their division, and created a startup, initially called PopTracker.

“I knew some of the skills that Georgia Tech taught me could help make a difference in communities if I applied them the right way, and so Thomas Beckler and I organized a team full of people that wanted to do something,” said Davis White, who now has

The team’s device uses WiFi sensors and Bluetooth sniffing to count devices in a train car. Of course, the number of devices in a train car doesn’t usually equate to the exact number of passengers, which is where the team’s novel machine learning algorithms came into play.

finished his biomedical engineering degree and is CEO and project lead of the renamed company, Elbowroom.

The team included Coulter BME students White, Beckler, and Jaime Vera with mechanical engineering student Ricardo Meizoso, computer science student Leonardo Ricci, and industrial design student Nicolas Mirchandani.

The team’s device uses WiFi sensors and Bluetooth sniffing to count devices in a train car. The idea is to report that data in real time to a travel app, like Google Maps or Waze. Of course, the number of devices in a train car doesn’t usually equate to the exact number of passengers, which is where the team’s novel machine learning algorithms came into play.

“We’re taking a data science approach to solve the inaccuracy that WiFi and Bluetooth sniffing brings up,” White said. “We use machine learning algorithms to take in not only the data we’ve collected from the sensors, but also data from other disparate data streams to get more accurate estimates of how many people are in a train car.”

To test their approach, Elbowroom has partnered with Atlanta’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, or MARTA. The team installed four of their devices on MARTA train cars. They will use the real-world data to validate their algorithms and, eventually, begin to branch out and work with other transit agencies.

Additionally, with the data from their devices on MARTA trains, the new company plans to market to transit applications that could use and broadcast the data collected by Elbowroom devices.

“The problem is not a lack of transit apps,” White said. “The problem is that there are no data producers because this type of technology is too expensive for general public transport. We’re going to develop an enterprise software through which agencies can access the transit car data in a way that’s helpful for them to broadcast.” ‣ ZOE ELLEDGE

Members of the Elbowroom team install one of their passenger-counting sensors in a MARTA train.

PHOTO COURTESY: ELBOWROOM.

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Student Stories

Machine Learning to the ‘Max A pair of Coulter BME students leveraged their experiences in problem-based learning courses and skills from their computer science minors to win the 2021 CarMax Analytics Showcase.

Suraj Rajendran and Prathic Sundararajan used machine learning models to propose roughly 15 marketing and inventory strategies for CarMax, and they proposed a new technology platform the company could use to employ those models. They emerged from nearly 200 teams in the spring to win the $3,000 top prize.

“Oftentimes, it’s difficult for students learning data science to get their hands on real-world challenges that are derived from industry-collected data,” Rajendran said. “This is especially true in the biomedical field and anything healthcare related due to privacy concerns. This was a great opportunity

to practice similar skill sets in a slightly different industry.”

Rajendran and Sundararajan worked with Benjamin John, a computer science student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

They credited the Coulter Department’s problem-based learning approach for helping them tackle a very different kind of problem than they’ve encountered before.

“Early on, we used the methods taught through our BME classes and identified the needs of our stakeholders. This really helped put the whole project in perspective in terms of what we hoped to accomplish,” Sundararajan said.

“We identified novel methods we could apply to the given dataset to differentiate

Sundararajan (left) and Rajendran

ourselves from the other teams and provide unique insights,” he said.

The trio incorporated publicly available information with the proprietary data CarMax provided to the teams. They also added the element of proposing a new software platform powered by their machine learning models. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

UDAI MALLEPOOLA First-year student // Location: Savannah, Georgia Going to a Georgia high school with an engineering program, my peers and I had Georgia Tech as our target school from day one. However, it wasn’t until I visited campus for CEISMC summer camp that I really began to fixate on Tech. I felt a sense of belonging on campus in just a couple days due to the friends I made and the vibrant urban setting. I chose this major because my current goal is to work with brain-computer interfaces to improve the way we communicate and express ourselves as humans.

Ortiz Blends Biomedical, Aerospace Engineering with New Fellowship The Patti Grace Smith Fellowship’s inaugural class of fellows includes Coulter BME second-year student Ciarra Ortiz.

The fellowship focuses on addressing discrimination in the aerospace industry by providing first- and second-year Black undergraduate students with experience and guidance early in their collegiate careers. As a part of the fellowship, each student receives an internship at one of the nation’s top aerospace firms with a living wage, two personal mentors, and a grant of approximately $2,000.

“I applied to the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship because there is a lack of Black representation in the aerospace industry,”

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Ortiz said. “I saw it as an opportunity to be a part of a community of driven Black individuals working towards the common goal of making a name for themselves in the aerospace industry with the guidance of accomplished mentors.”

Ortiz has always been passionate about space exploration and biomedical engineering. She said the fellowship is a great way to get experience that will help her build a career that combines them.

“It would be a dream to work with life support systems, space suit development, and/or crew health operations” after she finishes her degree, Ortiz said.

‣ JANAT BATRA

Student Stories

NSF Awards Prestigious Graduate Fellowships to 6 Coulter BME Students Students may only apply once for National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, so the stakes are high. For six Coulter Department students, the rewards were well worth the work when they were selected this spring for some of the most prestigious funding for graduate students in the United States.

This year’s fellows include students working on neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, cell manufacturing, 3D printing models for surgical planning and device testing, and flow mechanics related to strokes. The fellows also include a pair of Coulter BME undergraduates who will embark on their doctoral studies next year. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART ANA CRISTIAN Fourth-year undergraduate Undecided on Ph.D. program Research: “My current advisor at Georgia Tech is Dr. James Dahlman. I work in the Lab for Precision Therapies developing lipid nanoparticles that can efficiently and safely deliver nucleic acid therapies to target cell populations. I have assisted in the development of two new highthroughput screening systems that can be used in any mouse strain to screen for novel lipid nanoparticle formulations.”

RETTA EL SAYED Second-year Ph.D. student Advisors: John Oshinski & Jason Allen Research: “Currently, I am working on understanding the fluid mechanics and thrombosis formation mechanism in carotid webs (CaWs) using 4D Flow magnetic resonance imaging and computational fluid dynamics. CaWs appear as shelf-like projections in the internal carotid artery bulb and may account for up to 21% of young patients who suffer cryptogenic strokes. This study will be the first to

quantitatively measure CaWs flow metrics, which has the potential to define patient-specific treatment options.”

JAKARI HARRIS First-year Ph.D. student Advisor: David Frakes Research: “[My work] aims to produce 3D printed models that not only achieve a specific geometry, but also react to physical stimuli (like pressure) in intentional ways. We will use patient-specific image data and computer simulations to create 3D-printed models that look and move like the real thing. These models will be used for surgical planning and medical device testing among many other things.”

ANGELA JIMENEZ Second-year Ph.D. student Advisor: Krishnendu Roy Research: “My research is in the cell therapy manufacturing space, specifically looking at mesenchymal stromal cells — working towards improving the predictive quality of these cells and understanding their applications in mediating inflammatory states.”

KAI LITTLEJOHN First-year Ph.D. student Advisor: Felipe Quiroz Research: “My work involves contributing to a deeper understanding of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). I will engineer disease-related proteins with additional functions (i.e., fluorescence, proteomics) in order to evaluate their assembly behavior in brain cells as it relates to the progression of brain disorders.”

NADINE ZUREICK Fourth-year undergraduate Pursuing a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University Research: “My current research is in Dr. Hee Cheol Cho’s lab at Emory University.

The focus is on developing gene therapies to treat cardiac arrhythmias. At Johns Hopkins, I will be continuing in the field of cardiac cell and tissue engineering.”

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Student Stories

Grad Students Montgomery and Nieves Receive Tau Beta Pi Fellowships Two women from the Coulter Department are among the 28 U.S. engineering students receiving Tau Beta Pi Fellowships for the 2021-22 academic year.

Veronica Montgomery and Elisa Nieves each received cash stipends of $10,000 as part of the engineering honor society’s newest class of fellows, whose selection is based on academic performance, campus leadership and service, and the promise of future contributions in their fields.

“I was an officer in my Tau Beta Pi chapter as an undergrad, and it was a fabulous experience,” Montgomery said. “It is such a great honor now to receive the fellowship as a grad student.”

Montgomery’s undergraduate research in a large drug delivery lab inspired her to pursue that route as a Ph.D. student. She joined the lab of Mark Prausnitz, the J. Erskine Love Jr. Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech.

“I have a lot of intellectual freedom to explore the fields that I’m most interested in,” said Montgomery, whose research is focused on engineering the skin microbiome for drug delivery. “It’s been a great opportunity to prepare for my career.”

Nieves grew up surrounded by medical professionals in Naples,

Gathering Better Data on Brain Stimulation for PTSD Patients

Montgomery

Florida — her parents are a phlebotomist and a physiNieves cian’s assistant.

“Hearing their stories from work first sparked my interest in the medical field,” Nieves said. “I love how interdisciplinary this field is. It’s constantly challenging me to learn new material and apply that knowledge for creative solutions.”

As an undergrad, she presented her research on tissue scaffolds at two national conferences for minority students as well as the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Annual Meeting. She also worked as a trainee in a program designed to support minority students interested in pursuing a Ph.D. She participated in the Georgia Tech Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, and now she studies with Andrés García, executive director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience.

She said she has always been drawn to Tau Beta Pi’s emphasis on community service.

“I wanted to inspire the next generation of engineers and become a role model to females and underrepresented minorities interested in STEM careers,” Nieves said. ‣ JERRY GRILLO

ELIF KULAKSIZOGLU

Second-year student // Location: Turkey I chose Georgia Tech mainly because it has a very highly-ranked BME program. I chose BME because chemistry and biology interested me the most among all of my classes back in high school. I also liked doing research and experimenting in a lab environment, and I thought BME would be a good fit. I thought that I had an engineering mindset, and wanted to grow and develop it in the area of biotechnology.

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Ph.D student Mohammad Sendi has won a grant from Bio-Medical Instruments and the Foundation for Neurofeedback and Neuromodulation Research to support his work applying neuromodulation to treat brain disorders.

Sendi proposed adding portable EEG brain scans to an existing study looking at the effectiveness of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for patients experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The goal is to better understand the functional changes in the brain from the stimulation, which induces a small, safe electrical current in targeted areas.

“Despite the significant impact of TMS in treating PTSD patients, an unresolved issue is that the response varies across individuals,” Sendi said.

“Quantifying transcranial magnetic stimulation’s functional and neurophysiological effects and their link to changes in symptom severity is an essential step towards understanding TMS’s neural mechanisms and developing more effective, and individualized, TMS therapies.”

The mini-grant is designed to support projects with the potential of enhancing knowledge of basic processes involved in neuromodulation methods or understanding the clinical effects of those methods, especially in under-researched areas.

Sendi will integrate his portable EEG approach before, during, and after brain stimulation treatments that are part of the ongoing Grady Trauma Project at Emory University.

“Optimizing TMS protocol and individualizing TMS treatment parameters can substantially benefit patient-specific therapy of PTSD and restore function and induce longer-lasting results,” Sendi said.

‣ JOSHUA STEWART

From BME Grad Student to Venture Capitalist As a naturally inquisitive person, Melissa Lokugamage has satisfied her diverse interests with a steady diet of new experiences — playing piano and violin, ballet, mentoring, community activism.

Now that she’s earned a Ph.D. from the Coulter Department, Lokugamage is ready for the next new experience on her polymathic journey as a venture capital associate for Massachusetts-based Alloy Therapeutics.

“As a graduate researcher, I was taught to think critically about data,” she said.

“This thinking can help me evaluate and identify promising new technology.

Joining Alloy will allow me to apply my deep understanding of drug delivery to new biotech company development.”

Her Ph.D. advisor, James Dahlman, is confident in what Lokugamage brings to the table, even though going into venture capital straight from a research Ph.D. isn’t a typical path.

“I’m not surprised Melissa was able to do it,” said Dahlman, an associate professor. “She can see around corners, so to speak, meaning she is great at

identifying large scale trends before others. At the same time, she can evaluate the nitty gritty details of the science.”

That attention to the details, the kind of investigative skills developed over years in a lab, will allow Lokugamage, “to predict whether a company’s scientific foundation is sturdy enough to survive the valley of death between early stage science and the clinic,” Dahlman added.

“I can’t wait to see what world-changing technologies she helps develop at Alloy.”

With her colleagues in Dahlman’s lab, Lokugamage’s Ph.D. research

focused on RNA drug delivery. Now she wants to expand on that.

“While I enjoyed my time as a scientist and researcher, I was ready to use my understanding of drug delivery and medicine in a new way,” Lokugamage said.

“The space of venture capital and investing are very new to me,” she said.

“My biggest goal is to learn as much as possible. This new role is my chance to absorb as much information as possible, provide my assistance to a new team, and create new tech.” ‣ JERRY GRILLO

Medical Instrumentation Association Supports 3 Undergrads Three biomedical engineering students have won national scholarships from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, including the group’s most-prestigious award.

Alessandra Yoldas received the AAMI-Health Systems Engineering Alliance Engineering Scholarship, which supports students interested in health systems engineering. Kelly Qiu and Suraj Rejendran received 2021 Michael J. Miller scholarships. All three are undergraduates in Coulter BME. “I am grateful and thankful for my friends at Georgia Tech, who have spent hours studying with me and supporting me throughout my time here,” Yoldas said.

“I am truly honored to be receiving this opportunity. This will help accelerate my path towards working on the front line

of medical research and technology as we continue to bridge the gap between healthcare and robotics.”

The association says the scholQiu arships are more than financial support: the group’s members and staff rally behind winners to support their education and careers and help them continue to succeed. The group awards only six scholarships each year.

Qiu said she wants to use computing

Rajendran

Yoldas

to enhance medical devices. Rajendran plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computational biology, merging his interests in biomedical engineering and computing technology. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Fall 2021

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Faculty

New Faculty LESLIE CHAN, PH.D. Assistant Professor RESEARCH “Localized changes to the tissue microenvironment during disease provide engineering opportunities for early disease detection, treatment, and monitoring. In particular, nanoscale materials have the necessary resolution to interface with disease biology and can be engineered to interrogate or control biological processes at the molecular scale. My work focuses on the development of bioresponsive nanomaterials that are delivered in vivo to harness biochemical cues in diseased tissue as triggers for disease readouts or site-specific therapeutic activity. My lab is especially interested in developing these tools to study, detect, and treat microbedriven disease states (e.g., infections, microbiome dysbiosis). Our goal is to develop solutions that can be readily translated at the point of care or deployed for infectious disease surveillance to promote public health.”

YUE CHEN, PH.D. Assistant Professor RESEARCH “My research focuses on the exploration of robotic technologies in the medical field. By collaborating with physicians, radiologists, and engineers, we investigate and improve novel robot designs, robot sensing techniques, optimal control algorithms, and medical image guidance (such as MRI, CT, and ultrasound) that could lead to optimized procedure workflow, treatment efficacy, and patient outcomes. Medical robotics is a rapidly growing field that allows me to work closely with surgeons and witness how my designs directly improve people’s lives in the operating room and activities of daily life.”

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Faculty

LAURA CHRISTIAN, PH.D. Lecturer BACKGROUND “I started out as a chemistry major, and my passion for biology relies on its intersection with chemistry, engineering, and many other fields. I discovered a love of teaching during graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin. One of the highlights of my teaching career has been developing a Classroom-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) to bring true research into biology and chemistry teaching.

Working with a national, like-minded group of faculty members allowed me to develop many tools that I plan to bring into my teaching in Coulter BME. I am also excited to bring a biologist's perspective to biomedical engineering problems.”

MING-FAI FONG, PH.D. Assistant Professor RESEARCH “My lab is interested in plasticity, or the capacity for cells and circuits within the nervous system to change. We study the conditions that allow for long-lasting plasticity to occur, and develop tools for recapitulating these conditions in order to drive specific forms of plasticity that support rehabilitation from neurological disease. We are particularly interested in neurodevelopmental visual disability. Plasticity occurs across the entire central nervous system, so principles uncovered may be broadly applicable to other neural circuits beyond the visual system. In the future, we hope to develop treatments for a variety of sensory and motor disorders. Treatment strategies range from neuroprosthetic implants that directly stimulate the brain to minimally invasive manipulations to experience or behavior.”

JEFFREY MARKOWITZ, PH.D. Assistant Professor, arriving March 2022 RESEARCH “Almost everything we do in our daily lives — from reaching for a cup of coffee to walking through the front door — can be described as a series of actions. Each individual action is precisely chosen such that, in the end, we perform an effortlessly fluid sequence. This process of selecting what do to at every moment, or action selection, is the primary focus of my lab. We are interested in understanding how the brain controls action selection using a combination of modern computational, engineering, and biological approaches. The same brain circuits that control action selection also, when they go awry, lead to debilitating disorders such Parkinson’s disease. We hope that through advancing our understanding the function and logic of these circuits, and through engineering new approaches to controlling their activity, we can pave the way toward new therapeutics for neurological disease.”

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Faculty

Faculty News & Awards Coulter BME Appoints Five New Distinguished Faculty Fellows These three-year distinguished fellowships offer discretionary funding that allows faculty members to explore new areas of research, support students, purchase key equipment, or cultivate new industry and research relationships, and conduct pilot studies.

“Each of these fellowships recognizes the ongoing and outstanding impactful contributions of these faculty members to Coulter BME — and the biomedical engineering profession, writ large,” said Susan Margulies, Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Department. “They are national and international leaders, scholars, and mentors.”

The new faculty fellows are: • Jaydev Desai – Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Distinguished Faculty Fellow • Gabe Kwong – Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow • Manu Platt – Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow • Peng Qiu – Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow • May Dongmei Wang – Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow

Clockwise from top right: Desai, Platt, Wang, Qiu, Kwong

Kemp Named New Flanagan Professor Melissa Kemp is the new Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Professor in Coulter BME. The professorship supports eminent teacher-scholars in biomedical engineering for a five-year term.

“I’m so delighted and honored to have the support of the Flanagan family for my research program,” said Kemp, who also is a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar. “The professorship will provide my research group with the funding flexibility to take bold, intellectual risks in our development of computational tools for cancer precision

55

medicine. We are particularly excited in the upcoming years to investigate the role of metabolism in why individuals respond variably to radiation and chemotherapies.”

Kemp joined the Department in 2006, earning tenure in 2012 and promotion to full professor in 2020. Her research uses computational systems biology to understand how metabolism influences the decisions that cells make.

She has produced key insights into the influence of cellular redox processes on chemotherapy drug metabolism.

‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Faculty

Four Faculty Appointed to New McCamish Endowed Positions More evidence of the deepening partnership between the McCamish Foundation and Coulter BME came in August when James Dahlman and Annabelle Singer were named to McCamish Foundation Early Career Professorships and Garrett Stanley and Lena Ting became the inaugural McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chairs.

These newly established endowments recognize high-performing faculty members whose research has great potential to impact treatment of Parkinson’s disease.

Each of the recipients said the endowed positions represent new opportunities for their work, allowing them to pursue promising high-risk, high-reward ideas to help patients with Parkinson’s.

Stanley’s lab develops engineering approaches to control neural circuits that underlie many aspects of brain function. He said the McCamish Chair will help them target the circuits associated with Parkinson’s disease and other related neurological diseases. Ting focuses specifically on the neural basis of human motor function, an area where the chair’s resources can help her lab push into new approaches to understanding brain-body interactions in healthy and impaired movement.

Dahlman’s lab focuses on targeted drug delivery, gene editing, and nanomedicine. He has led development of DNA-barcoded nanoparticles that are used to deliver targeted therapies based on RNA molecules. He said the connection to the Parkinson’s community through the professorship will be hugely valuable in identifying and pursuing solutions to help clinicians and patients. Likewise, Singer aims to test how non-invasive stimulation treatments her team has developed for Alzheimer’s might also prevent the neurodegeneration of brain circuits in Parkinson’s.

The endowed positions are an outgrowth of a landmark gift to Coulter BME that also established the McCamish Parkinson’s Disease Innovation Program to take big leaps in the treatment and understanding of the disease. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Clockwise from top right: Dahlman, Stanley, Ting, Singer

LEARN MORE about how Coulter BME and the McCamish Foundation are working together to end Parkinson’s disease on page 9.

Dasi Appointed to Wesley Professorship Lakshmi “Prasad” Dasi has been named the Rozelle Vanda Wesley Professor in the Coulter Department.

Dasi came to Coulter BME in 2020 after establishing his research program at Colorado State University and then Ohio State University. It was a homecoming: Dasi earned his doctorate from Georgia Tech and Emory and did postdoctoral work with Regents Professor Emeritus Ajit Yoganathan.

“The Wesley Professorship offers a great opportunity for my lab to pursue bold, high-risk and high-impact cardiovascular translational research projects while accelerating our current trajectory in translational projects, training, outreach,

and service activities,” said Dasi, who also serves as the Department’s associate chair for undergraduate studies. “I have had the honor of discussing my research program with the Wesley family, and I am looking forward to engaging them more deeply with the students in our lab.”

Dasi studies prosthetic heart valves, cardiovascular biomechanics, biomaterials, and devices. He also works internationally to develop low-cost heart valves in lowresource countries. His team’s patientspecific precision medicine technology is in use in Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital, with simulations helping patients every week.

‣ JOSHUA STEWART

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Faculty

Alexanders Expand Support for Heart Valve Research Arline and Scott Alexander’s relationship with heart valves began in 1979, before they even married.

“Arline was born with a congenital heart defect, and she got very sick very quickly at work one day,” said Scott Alexander, IMGT 1976. “We were dating then, and I went over to her place to check on her because she’d left work sick, and the next thing I knew she was at Emory Hospital getting her first valve implant.”

Their relationship with these life-saving devices will continue for many years, thanks to their support of research in Regents Professor Emeritus Ajit Yoganathan’s lab in Coulter BME. When the Alexanders moved to Hilton Head from Denver in 2020, they updated their wills. In the process, they continued — and expanded — their generous philanthropy in support of Georgia Tech through a will provision.

“I had read about the research that Dr. Y was doing with heart valves, and it blew me away,” Scott Alexander said. Arline is now a two-time recipient of a heart valve,

so the couple felt a strong connection to helping fund this research. The second — implanted in 1996 — “is the exact model Dr. Y. helped develop,” Alexander said.

The Alexanders have since made an outright gift to support this research, along with the most recent bequest. “We were able to meet with Dr. Y and his team. They are still doing great research, including Star Wars-type research with laser printers,” Alexander said. At a subsequent meeting with their financial advisor, the couple “decided to direct the balance of our estate to Georgia Tech to support biomedical research,” he said.

As for their philanthropy: “We aren’t the kind of people who need a marching band and a Goodyear Blimp – we like to stay more under the radar in terms of giving. But Dr. Y’s team’s dedication and devotion to their work amazes us,” he said. “We are grateful to be able to help shape the future of this life-changing cardiology research and the development of better heart valves.” ‣ JENNIFER CARLISLE

Master’s student Sahar Ibrahim, right, shows Scott and Arline Alexander an example of a 3D-printed vascular structure that can be designed to mimic a specific patient’s anatomy. The Alexanders visited the integrated labs of Ajit Yoganathan, Lakshmi “Prasad” Dasi, and David Frakes this summer. Ibrahim works with Frakes, a Coulter BME Associate Professor. JOSHUA STEWART.

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Faculty

Abouelnasr, Behravesh Become ABET Program Evaluators

Beam Therapeutics Acquires Dahlman’s Gene Therapy Startup A startup spun out of Georgia Tech in 2018 to guide gene therapies using lipid nanoparticle technology has been acquired by Beam Therapeutics.

Guide Therapeutics was born out of DNA barcoding and data storage work in the lab of Coulter BME Assistant Professor James Dahlman. Dahlman co-founded Guide to efficiently develop safe gene therapies with a former graduate researcher in his lab, Cory Sago.

The company uses patented DNA barcoding technology to tag lipid nanoparticles and then simultaneously test thousands of the molecules in search of those that can deliver drugs to different kinds of cells in the body.

"This was my first company, and it felt good to sell it to the right people,” Dahlman said. “Beam has some great scientists and real scientific leaders — their chief science officer helped develop the Moderna vaccines [for Covid-19]. It's the perfect home for our technology because it maximizes the chance that what we've done will make it into patients."

Already, one FDA-approved drug uses Guide Therapeutics’ lipid nanoparticle delivery approach to target cells in the liver.

Guide is searching for nanoparticles that will work to deliver therapies to other cells and says it can generate drug delivery data at a rate 15,000-fold higher than traditional experiments.

Guide received project management and business mentorship from the Coulter Department’s Biolocity technology commercialization program in 2019. The company also won a Deal of the Year award from Georgia Bio in 2020 after an initial equity investment from GreatPoint Ventures. ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

Two Coulter Department faculty members are part of a new class of biomedical engineering program evaluators for ABET (originally the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology).

“I have always appreciated the accreditation process as a means to ensure that we continuously strive to assess, evaluate, reflect, and improve upon programs and student experiences,” said Dana Abouelnasr, senior lecturer in the Department. “I have had the unique opportunity to work in a new program in a new university, which was at the beginning of its accreditation journey.

The resulting improvements, enhancements, and new culture of reflection and continuous improvement were quite amazing.”

Evaluators are key in the reviews of engineering education programs that happen every six years. They look at program materials and visit campuses to assess programs and help them with their continuous improvement processes. Abouelnasr and Essy Behravesh will join Senior Associate Chair and Professor Paul Benkeser in the work; he’s served as an evaluator for nearly two decades and recommended both of them.

“The industry and government experience they bring to the table is very attractive,” Benkeser said. “We really try to involve as many folks from industry as we can in evaluating programs to round out the perspective of the accrediting committees.

Dana and Essy bring that experience, which is a big plus along with their work in academia.”

Behravesh spent several years in industry before coming to Georgia Tech.

He’s now the director of student services in the Department and teaches a systems-level engineering physiology lab.

“As a program evaluator, I get to learn how other biomedical engineers run their programs. I think to be the best, you have to understand the rest,” Behravesh said.

“I’m looking forward to seeing how other programs leverage their strengths, and more importantly, how we can be more efficient in our use of data for continuous improvement.”

He added: “The ideals of continuous improvement at the heart of ABET are very much aligned with the DNA of our Department.” ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

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Faculty

Platt Honored with Mentor Award from AAAS Enriching. Transformative. Nurturing. Authentic.

Those adjectives, and more like them, are how his former students have described Coulter Department Professor Manu Platt and his influence on their education and careers.

Platt’s work growing — and pushing — the next generation of biomedical engineers has won him the 2021 Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an honor that recognizes “extraordinary leadership to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in science and engineering fields and careers.”

“Dr. Platt pushed me outside of my comfort zone to a growth zone, which molded me into a better engineer and helped me find my place to be my full, authentic self as a Black woman in academia,” said Simone Douglas-Green, who earned her Ph.D. with Platt and now is a postdoctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “He always saw the potential in me before I could see it.”

Another nominator, Monet Roberts, said she met Platt when she was a first-year student in Coulter BME. It was that relationship that convinced her academia was the place for her.

“He was the first Black biomedical engineer and professor that I had ever seen,” Roberts said. “He took me under his wing as an informal mentor and adviser. He started to invite me to his lab meetings. I helped out in his lab as a lab assistant and became interested in the research and transitioned to an undergraduate researcher.”

For Platt, the award was touching — and a surprise: “I have had amazing mentors along my way, some who looked like me and many who did not. It has opened up doors for me where I did not even know there was a door,” Platt said. “That has led me to this exciting career in science and engineering. It has been so much more than what I would have ever thought it would be when I was a young nerd.”

Which is why, he said, mentoring has been so important to him: “Others should have that opportunity.” ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Ethier Wins ASME’s Lissner Medal C. Ross Ethier won the prestigious H.R. Lissner Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2020, the fourth Coulter Department professor honored with the award.

“I’m really honored. This is a big deal for me, since this is my professional community,” said Ethier, who follows previous winners Bob Nerem, Don Giddens, and Ajit Yoganathan. “I’m proud to join some illustrious names on the list. It’s kind of cool because it speaks to the tradition, history, and impact of Georgia Tech in biomechanics.”

The Lissner Medal is the highest honor bestowed by the Bioengineering Division of ASME. The former head of the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, Ethier was originally trained as a mechanical engineer and his research homes in on the biomechanics and mechanobiology of cells, tissues, and organs, with the goal of understanding how cells respond to mechanical stimuli, and how that response affects the function and properties of tissues and organs.

His lab focuses specifically on understanding and developing treatments for glaucoma and VIIP, a condition affecting astronauts’ visual health.

In nominating Ethier for the medal, University of Minnesota Biomedical Engineering Professor Victor Barocas wrote that his contributions to the bioengineering community are deep and wide: associate editor (and now editor) of the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering, program chair for numerous conferences, division chair, service on award committees, all while making “major research contributions (especially in the area of ocular mechanics), being an outstanding educator, and taking leadership roles at his home institutions.”

“Very few people in the biomedical engineering business share Ross’s commitment to good science, positive social impact, and education of the next generation of engineers,” Barocas wrote. ‣ JERRY GRILLO

Faculty

Brown Family Gift Bolsters Human Health Innovation Recognizing that development in biology and medicine today often requires multi-disciplinary collaborations — and inspired by the strategy of the Emory University School of Medicine — the John and Rosemary Brown Family Foundation has pledged $5 million to establish the Brown Innovation to Market Fund within the School and provide focused philanthropy that drives connectivity and creativity in advancing human health.

"Rosemary and I are excited to see the opportunity for the disciplines of engineering and medicine to collaborate with a common goal. This focus will accelerate innovation that allows clinical needs to move forward more quickly to license, start-up, and commercialization,” said John Brown, chairman emeritus of the Stryker Corporation and a chemical engineer. Rosemary Brown is a lifelong educator who studied chemistry and taught math.

The joint Emory-Georgia Tech Coulter Department and Biolocity will be key drivers of the fund’s goals, which will advance technologies through a three-pronged approach: provide foundational information for medical technology development, reducing risk in grant funding driven by heavy market and technical diligence, and nondilutive funding to prepare market-ready projects through industry expertise and ecosystem connectivity.

“Rosemary and I are excited to see the opportunity for the disciplines of engineering and medicine to collaborate with a common goal.”

JOHN BROWN “We’ve identified a broad list of initiatives to grow the interface between Emory and Georgia Tech far beyond biomedical engineering that will enrich opportunities for students and faculty to solve challenging problems together,” said Coulter Department Chair Susan Margulies. “This was the result of many conversations with our colleagues across the School of Medicine and the College of Engineering and research leaders across both campuses, and we are grateful to the Brown family for enabling us to pursue these ideas.”

“At Emory, we believe in re-envisioning the future and never being satisfied with what has been done before.

We're fueled by curiosity and know there's more than one right answer to every problem,” said Vikas P. Sukhatme, dean of the Emory School of Medicine. “That’s why we are honored and grateful for the John and Rosemary Brown Family Innovation to Market Fund, which will allow us to continue bolstering interdisciplinary interactions and changing the way we think of medicine.” ‣ JOSHUA STEWART

In its first year, THE BROWN INNOVATION TO MARKET FUND will: • Expand project funding opportunities through Biolocity.

• Create a workshop series leveraging engineering and design expertise at Georgia Tech to teach Emory School of Medicine students, trainees, faculty, and staff concepts of design thinking in medicine, including applications for health and healthcare disparities in Atlanta.

• Provide seed funds for Emory-Georgia Tech collaborative early-stage research projects in novel health care technology, including those that lower the cost of healthcare.

Above, left to right: daughter Janine Brown, Rosemary Brown, John Brown, and daughter Sarah Beth Brown.

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Faculty

Architect of BME Curriculum Retires — Sort of For more than 20 years, Wendy Newstetter has been the steady chief architect of the Coulter Department’s innovative problem-driven learning curriculum. This year begins a new era for her — and for the Department — as Newstetter steps into her version of retirement, leaving behind her full-time role as assistant dean for educational research and innovation in the Georgia Tech College of Engineering.

“I’ve had the opportunity to spend 20 years working with some of the most creative, thoughtful, and ambitious people, and it has been a great ride,” she told a virtual audience of 120-plus in December during the inaugural Newstetter Distinguished Lecture, a new annual event started in her honor. “I can’t imagine a better place to spend that time. I was given a ridiculous amount of freedom to do crazy, fun, innovative things.”

Celebrating that kind of innovation is the crux of the Newstetter Lecture. Each year, a new scholar in engineering education will present their ideas in honor of Newstetter’s accomplishments — work for which she, Paul Benkeser, and Joe Le Doux won the Bernard M. Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

“Wendy and the Department really were at the leading edge of an evolution in engineering education,” said Don Giddens, former dean of engineering at Georgia Tech and the founding chair of the Coulter Department who tapped Newstetter to lead the design of BME’s curriculum. “That was one of the best decisions I made in my life.”

What started as a single problem-driven learning class is now a suite of carefully designed engineering courses in the Coulter Department. In the problem-based learning environment,

“We’re saying, ‘Here’s a big problem. It needs to be constrained; it needs to be defined.’ Then the students figure out what they need to learn to solve that problem. It’s dramatically different.” students divide into teams and work together to solve a complex, open-ended, real-world problem — the kind of challenge they might face in a research lab. The answers to their questions may not be available in their past experiences or classes.

It’s unfamiliar to many students, but it turns out to be an empowering experience, Newstetter has found.

“The typical course doesn’t empower students,” Newstetter said. “It tells the student to read Chapter 3 and there will be a quiz on Thursday. That takes power away from students. Instead, we’re saying, ‘Here’s a big problem. It needs to be constrained; it needs to be defined.’ Then the students figure out what they need to learn to solve that problem. It’s dramatically different.”

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Maria Liu says taking Newstetter’s BME 2250 course is what finally made her excited about what she was learning.

In fact, after she took the course herself as a sophomore, she came back as a teaching assistant in Fall 2020. Working closely with her professor gave Liu a deeper appreciation of Newstetter — and what the Coulter Department and Georgia Tech will be missing with her retirement.

“Her passion, her research, her life’s work is centered around her students and how we learn,” said Liu, now a fourth-year undergraduate. “She has done so much in her career and had so many experiences, and yet she chooses to spend her time with students who are just starting their careers to provide them with direction. We will genuinely miss her and her presence.”

Newstetter is retiring — but she won’t be very far away.

She said she still has plenty of research to do and papers to write. And other schools across Georgia Tech want to learn more from the learning expert — including how to be funny.

“I’m working with a collaborator in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering,” she said. “We got a grant from the National Science Foundation to infuse humor into the chemical engineering curriculum.” ‣ JERRY GRILLO

WATCH the Inaugural Newstetter Distinguished Lecture: bit.ly/newstetter-lecture-2020

Faculty

Other BME Faculty Awards & Honors CRISTI BELL-HUFF

WILBUR LAM

Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award, Georgia Tech

Golden Helix Deal of the Year Award, Georgia Bio

LAKSHMI “PRASAD” DASI

Faculty Diversity Champion Award, Georgia Tech

Fellow, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow, American College of Cardiology Emerging Leaders, Georgia Tech Best Associate Editor 2020, Annals of Biomedical Engineering JAYDEV DESAI

Distinguished Service Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society

CASSIE MITCHELL

Young Faculty Award, Sigma Xi Georgia Tech Chapter MACHELLE PARDUE

Gold Fellow, Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology MANU PLATT

Professional Impact Award for Diversity, AIMBE Medalist, Australian Society of Medical Research

EVA DYER

JAMES RAINS

Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, McKnight Foundation

Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award, Georgia Tech

TODD FERNANDEZ

Golden Helix Community Award, Georgia Bio

Undergraduate Educator Award, Georgia Tech

ANNABELLE SINGER

RUDY GLEASON

Jannett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award, Society for Neuroscience

Steven A. Denning Award for Global Engagement, Georgia Tech KARMELLA HAYNES

Women of COLOR Innovator in STEM Award 1,000 Inspiring Black Scientists in America, Cell Mentor/Cell Press MARTIN JACOBSON

Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award, Georgia Tech

Derek Denny-Brown Young Neurological Scholars Award, American Neurological Association JAMES STUBBS

Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award, Georgia Tech EBERHARD VOIT

Sustained Research Award, Sigma Xi Georgia Tech Chapter MAY DONGMEI WANG

YONGGANG KE

Emerging Leaders, Georgia Tech

Young Investigator Award, Journal of the American Chemical Society

AJIT YOGANATHAN

GABE KWONG

Fellow, American Society of Mechanical Engineers

Donald S. Coffey Lecture, Society for Basic Urologic Research TEDMED Hive Innovator (for Glympse Bio)

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Faculty

Our Faculty KYLE ALLISON Assistant Professor Ph.D., Boston University

ROBERT BUTERA Vice President for Research Operations (Georgia Tech) & Professor Ph.D., Rice University

LAKSHMI “PRASAD” DASI Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies & Rozelle Vanda Wesley Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

COSTAS ARVANITIS Assistant Professor Ph.D., University College London

LESLIE CHAN Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of Washington

MICHAEL DAVIS Professor Ph.D., Emory University

JULIA BABENSEE Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Toronto

YUE CHEN Assistant Professor Ph.D., Vanderbilt University

JAYDEV DESAI Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Distinguished Faculty Fellow & Professor Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

PAUL BENKESER Senior Associate Chair & Professor Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

GARI CLIFFORD Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics (Emory) & Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Oxford

ERIK DREADEN Assistant Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

MARK BORODOVSKY Regents Professor Ph.D., Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

TIMOTHY COPE Professor Ph.D., Duke University

EVA DYER Assistant Professor Ph.D., Rice University

EDWARD BOTCHWEY Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

AHMET COSKUN Bernie Marcus Early Career Professor & Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles

STANISLAV EMELIANOV Joseph M. Pettit Chair & Professor Ph.D., Moscow State University and Institute for Mathematical Problems in Biology

ERIN BUCKLEY Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

JAMES DAHLMAN McCamish Foundation Early Career Professor & Associate Professor Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Harvard Medical School

C. ROSS ETHIER Professor Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Faculty

MING-FAI FONG Assistant Professor Ph.D., Emory University

HANJOONG JO Associate Chair for Emory, Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair & Professor Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University

JOE LE DOUX Executive Director of Training and Learning & Professor Ph.D., Rutgers University

DAVID FRAKES Associate Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

YONGGANG KE Assistant Professor Ph.D., Arizona State University

BROOKS LINDSEY Assistant Professor Ph.D., Duke University

RUDY GLEASON Associate Professor Ph.D., Texas A&M University

SHELLA KEILHOLZ Interim Associate Chair for Faculty Development & Professor Ph.D., University of Virginia

SAKIS MANTALARIS Professor Ph.D., University of Rochester

BILAL HAIDER Assistant Professor Ph.D., Yale University

CHARLIE KEMP Associate Professor Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

SUSAN MARGULIES Outgoing Wallace H. Coulter Department Chair & Professor Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

FRANK HAMMOND Assistant Professor Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University

MELISSA KEMP Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Professor Ph.D., University of Washington

CASSIE MITCHELL Assistant Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

KARMELLA HAYNES Assistant Professor Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis

GABE KWONG Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow & Associate Professor Ph.D., California Institute of Technology

DAVID MYERS Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

SCOTT HOLLISTER Patsy and Alan Dorris Chair in Pediatric Technology & Professor Ph.D., University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

WILBUR LAM Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley M.D., Baylor College of Medicine

T. RICHARD NICHOLS Professor Ph.D., Harvard University

SHU JIA Assistant Professor Ph.D., Princeton University

MICHELLE LAPLACA Professor Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

JOHN OSHINSKI Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

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Faculty

CHETHAN PANDARINATH Assistant Professor Ph.D., Cornell University

PHILIP SANTANGELO Professor Ph.D., University of California, Davis

JOHNNA TEMENOFF Associate Chair for Translational Research & Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Professor Ph.D., Rice University

MACHELLE PARDUE Interim Wallace H. Coulter Department Chair & Professor Ph.D., University of Waterloo

ANIRUDDH SARKAR Bernie Marcus Early Career Professor & Assistant Professor Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

LENA TING McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair & Professor Ph.D., Stanford University

SUNG JIN PARK Assistant Professor Ph.D., Stanford University

VAHID SERPOOSHAN Assistant Professor Ph.D., McGill University

DENIS TSYGANKOV Assistant Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

Assoc. Chair for Graduate Studies, Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow & Professor Ph.D., Emory University & Georgia Institute of Technology

ANNABELLE SINGER McCamish Foundation Early Career Professor & Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco

EBERHARD VOIT David D. Flanagan Chair & Professor Ph.D., University of Cologne

PENG QIU Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow & Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park

ANKUR SINGH Woodruff Faculty Fellow & Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin

MAY DONGMEI WANG Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow & Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

FELIPE QUIROZ Assistant Professor Ph.D., Duke University

GARRETT STANLEY McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair & Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

YOUNAN XIA Brock Family Chair & Professor Ph.D., Harvard University

FRANCISCO ROBLES Assistant Professor Ph.D., Duke University

SHUICHI TAKAYAMA Price Gilbert Jr. Chair in Regenerative Engineering and Medicine & Professor Ph.D., Scripps Research Institute

CHENG ZHU Executive Director for International Programs, J. Erskine Love Endowed Chair & Regents Professor Ph.D., Columbia University

KRISHNENDU ROY Robert A. Milton Chair & Professor Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University

W. ROBERT TAYLOR Professor Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University M.D., Harvard Medical School

MANU PLATT

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Advisory Board

Advisory Board RAFAEL V. ANDINO Vice President, Engineering & Manufacturing Clearside Biomedical, Inc. ME 1988 (Georgia Tech) CALEB APPLETON Venture Capitalist Innovation Endeavors BME 2015 SYLVIA BARTLEY, PH.D. Senior Global Director Medtronic Foundation VIVEK BHATT, PH.D. Senior Vice President, Product and Engineering United Healthcare KELLY BOLDEN, M.D., FACS Medical Director Cultura Plastic Surgery RYAN DAVIS Senior Strategic Account Manager Neocis, Inc. BME 2005 VIRGINIA L. GIDDINGS, PH.D. Advanced Technology Exploration Edwards Lifesciences ELIZABETH HARRISON Chief Executive Officer MetaSystems Group, Inc. HEATHER HAYES, PH.D. Senior Applications Scientist Axion BioSystems Ph.D. BioE (BME) 2010 CHRISTOPHER HERMANN, M.D., PH.D. Chief Executive Officer and Founder Clean Hands – Safe Hands BME 2006, Ph.D. BME 2011, MSME 2011 (Georgia Tech) MICHELLE JARRARD Chief Executive Officer BioCircuit Technologies ISyE 1989 (Georgia Tech)

SHAWNA KHOURI Manager, Virtual Health Tulsa Innovation Labs BME 2012, MSBME 2014 ROBERT F. KIRSCH, PH.D. Allen H. and Constance T. Ford Professor Chairman, Department of Biomedical Engineering Case Western Reserve University CHRIS LEE, PH.D. Chairman & CEO Huxley Medical Ph.D. BME 2012 XAVIER LEFEBVRE, PH.D. Global Vice President Medtronic Core Clinical Solutions Medtronic Technical Fellow Ph.D. ChBE 1992 (Georgia Tech) BRAD MILLER Vice President, Market Development & Head of Clinical Care Carecubes NBB 2001 (Emory) ANGELA GILL NELMS Advisory Board Chair BME 2007 ANN SATERBAK, PH.D. Professor of the Practice Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University KATE TAYLOR, PH.D. Global Innovation Program Manager Global Technology Boston Scientific SUE VAN Emeritus Member President & CEO Wallace H. Coulter Foundation

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