Chunhui Xu, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and a member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute. 

Research in Dr. Xu's laboratory is focused on human cardiomyocytes derived from human pluripotent stem cells, which hold promise for cardiac cell therapy, disease modeling, drug discovery, and the study of developmental biology. They are also collaborating with investigators at Georgia Tech, Emory University, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, to explore the application of nanotechnology and tissue engineering in stem cell research.

Dr. Whiteley received his B.S. degree in Zoology in 1995 from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Iowa in 2001. His doctoral research involved quorum sensing and biofilm formation in the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University in 2002, Dr. Whiteley accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma/Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. In 2006, Dr. Whiteley moved to the University of Texas at Austin where he was promoted to Professor of Molecular Biosciences and Director of the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease. In 2017, he accepted the Bennie H. & Nelson D. Abell Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Georgia Institute of Technology. He also serves as Associate Director of the CF-Air Center at Emory Medical School. Dr. Whiteley has garnered numerous awards for his work including the Merck Irving S. Sigal Memorial Award for national research excellence, the Burroughs Wellcome Investigators in Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease award, recognition as a Kavli fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the Dean’s teaching excellence award from UT-Austin, and election to the American Academy of Microbiology.

Peter Thule's research interests lie in the development of insulin gene therapy as a treatment for diabetes mellitus and investigations into hepatocellular effects of ectopic insulin production. His group's animal model utilizes a metabolically regulated, hepatic specific gene promoter to drive expression of an insulin transgene in the livers of diabetic rats. Administration of viral vectors containing these promoters coupled to a human insulin cDNA, normalizes blood sugars in diabetic rodents.

Susan Napier Thomas holds the Woodruff Professorship and is a Professor (full) with tenure of Mechanical Engineering in the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she holds adjunct appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Biological Science and is a member of the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. Prior to this appointment, she was a Whitaker postdoctoral scholar at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (one of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology) and received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering with an emphasis in Bioengineering cum laude from the University of California Los Angeles and her Ph.D. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Department as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow from The Johns Hopkins University. For her contributions to the emerging field of immunoengineering, she has been honored with the 2022 Award for Young Investigator from Elsevier's journal Biomaterials for "outstanding contributions to the field" of biomaterials science, the 2018 Young Investigator Award from the Society for Biomaterials for "outstanding achievements in the field of biomaterials research" and the 2013 Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society "in recognition of high level of originality and ingenuity in a scientific work in biomedical engineering." Her interdisciplinary research program is supported by multiple awards on which she serves as PI from the National Cancer Institute, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, amongst others.

Todd Sulchek is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech where he conducts fundamental and applied research in the field of biophysics. His research program focuses on the mechanical and adhesive properties of cell and biological systems and the development of microsystems to aid in their study. His research employs tools, including, MEMS, microfluidics, imaging, and patterning to understand or enable biological systems. His interests include cancer diagnostics, stem cell biomanufacturing, novel therapeutics, and ultracheap engineering tools. He is a member of the interdisciplinary Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Dr. Sulchek also holds program faculty positions in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering and has a courtesy appointment in the School of Biology. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in Applied Physics under Calvin Quate and received a bachelors in math and physics from Johns Hopkins. He was a postdoc and staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He joined Georgia Tech in 2008 as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, the Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty award, and the 2012 Petit Institute Above and Beyond Award. To date he has published 42 journal papers and has filed or been issued 7 patents. Prof. Sulchek is a strong supporter of undergraduate research, and he participates in a variety of undergraduate education activities including the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and includes over 8 undergraduate authors in the past year.

Mark Styczynski is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), doing research at the interface of synthetic and systems biology as applied to metabolic systems. His synthetic biology work focuses on the development of low-cost, minimal-equipment biosensors for the diagnosis of nutritional deficiencies in the developing world. His systems biology work uses computational and experimental methods to characterize metabolic dynamics and regulation using metabolomics data. He has received young investigator awards from the NSF, DARPA, and ORAU. He has won multiple department-and institute-level teaching awards at Georgia Tech. He founded and was the first president of the Metabolomics Association of North America (MANA), and is a Council Member in the Engineering BiologyResearch Consortium.

Francesca Storici was born in Trieste, Italy. She graduated in Biology from the University of Trieste. Her Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics was conferred by the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), in Trieste in 1998, and she conducted research at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in Trieste. From 1999 to 2007 she was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics under the guidance of Dr. Michael A. Resnick at the National Institute of Environmental and Health Sciences (NIEHS, NIH) in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, USA. In 2007 she was a Research Assistant Professor at the Gene Therapy Center of the University on North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Dr. R. Jude Samulski. Francesca joined the faculty of the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech in 2007 and received the title of Distinguished Cancer Scientist of the Georgia Research Alliance. She is currently a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. Her research is on genome stability, DNA repair and gene targeting.

Philip Santangelo is a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory University School of Medicine. He is a member of the Cancer Immunology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute. 

Dr. Santangelo obtained his Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of California at Davis. He completed his postdoctoral training at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California and at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia. He also holds an MS in Engineering from Purdue University. 

The overarching theme of the Santangelo lab is the spatial biology of RNA viruses and RNA regulation. Spatial biology is the study of biology in three dimensions — and the Santangelo lab develops advanced imaging tools to achieve this goal. The lab focuses their tools on the spatial biology of HIV/SIV and human respiratory synctial virus (leading cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia in babies) and the aberrant regulation of messenger RNA during inflammation, viral infections and cancer pathogenesis. They have developed both single molecule methods and whole body imaging methods in order to work towards our goals.

 In August 2023, Krishnendu Roy joined Vanderbilt University as the Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Dean of Engineering and a University Distinguished Professor in Biomedical Engineering, and Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology, with a secondary appointment in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Previously, Roy served as Robert A. Milton Endowed Chair for the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also the former Director of the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), Center for ImmunoEngineering at Georgia Tech, and Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing. 

His overall research interests are in developing novel concepts for stem cell engineering as well as polymer controlled delivery of biological factors, especially for nucleic acid therapeutics (DNA, SiRNA and oligos) and immunoengineering. Currently, his group is involved in the following major areas of research; (a) Developing novel concepts to produce biodegradable surface functionalized micro-and nanoparticles for targeted and sustained delivery of nucleic acids, proteins, peptides and other immune modulators. In particular he is interested in developing multi-agent vaccine delivery systems for cancer and infectious diseases as well as immunotherapies for autoimmune diseases. (b) Creating spatio-temporally patterned polymer scaffolds for directed compartmental differentiation of stem cells into multiple lineages. (c) Engineering an artificial thymic niche for directed differentiation of stem cells into functional, antigen- specific T cells. (e) The development of novel nanoimprinting techniques to generate shape specific, environmentally triggered drug nanocarriers.

Faces of Research - Profile Article