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.

Xia is the Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, with joint appointments in School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Professor Xia received his Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from Harvard University (with Professor George M. Whitesides) in 1996, his M.S. degree in Inorganic Chemistry from University of Pennsylvania (with the late Professor Alan G. MacDiarmid, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 2000) in 1993, and his B.S. degree in Chemical Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1987. He came to the United States of America in 1991. Xia has received a number of prestigious awards, including the 2013 Nano Today Award, the ACS National Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2013), Fred Kavli Distinguished Lecture in Nanoscience at the MRS Spring Meeting (2013), AIMBE Fellow (2011), MRS Fellow (2009 ), NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2006), ACS Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award (2005), Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar (2002), David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2000), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2000), NSF Early Career Development Award (2000), ACS Victor K. LaMer Award (1999), and Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award (1997). Xia has been an Associate Editor of Nano Letters since 2002, and has served on the Advisory Boards of Particle & Particle Systems Characterization (2013-), Chemical Physics Letters (2013-), Chemistry: A European Journal (2013-), Chinese Journal of Chemistry (2013-), Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2011-), Advanced Healthcare Materials (2011-, inaugural chairman of the advisory board), Accounts of Chemical Research (2010-), Cancer Nanotechnology (2010-), Chemistry: An Asian Journal (2010-), Journal of Biomedical Optics (2010-), Nano Research (2009-), Science of Advanced Materials (2009-), Nano Today (2006-), Chemistry of Materials (2005-2007), Langmuir (2005-2010, 2013-2015), International Journal of Nanotechnology (2004-), and Advanced Functional Materials (2001-). He has also served as a Guest Editor of special issues for Advanced Materials (six times), Advanced Functional Materials (one time), MRS Bulletin (one time), and Accounts of Chemical Research (one time).

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.

Dr. Johnna S. Temenoff is the Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Professor at the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech/Emory University. She is also currently the Director of the NSF Engineering Research Center in Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT) and the Director of the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing (MC3M). Scientifically, Dr. Temenoff is interested in scaling culture of therapeutic cells and tailoring the molecular interactions between glycosaminoglycans and proteins/cells for use in regenerative medicine applications.  Her laboratory focuses primarily on promoting repair after injuries to the tissues of the shoulder, including cartilage, tendon, and muscle.

Dr. Temenoff has been honored with several prestigious awards, such as the NSF CAREER Award, Arthritis Foundation Investigator Award, and Society for Biomaterials (SFB) Clemson Award for Contributions to the Literature, and was named to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE), as a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), as a Fellow of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE) and as a Fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering, International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering (IUSBSE).  She has co-authored a highly successful introductory textbook - Biomaterials: The Intersection of Biology and Materials Science, by J.S. Temenoff and A.G. Mikos (now in a 2nd edition), for which Dr. Temenoff and Dr. Mikos were awarded the American Society for Engineering Education’s Meriam/Wiley Distinguished Author Award for best new engineering textbook. 

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.