Young-Hui Chang is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences, Associate Dean of Faculty for College of Sciences, and director of research in the Georgia Tech Comparative Neuromechanics Lab where he studies the neuromechanics of movement in humans and other animals. Chang’s aim is to understand fundamental principles by which we control our movements as we move through our physical environment. This requires knowledge of the neural control of movement, the biomechanics of our musculoskeletal system, and the physics of our environmental interactions. The team also studies how our body adapts to acute and chronic changes. This involves processes of motor learning that are involved in everything from clinical rehabilitation to elite sports performance.

Dr. Brewster's clinical practice is focused on general vascular surgery and peripheral arterial disease, and his affiliations include Emory University Hospital and serving as section chief of vascular surgery at the Atlanta VA Healthcare System.

As a surgeon-scientist, his joint affiliations with the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the Wallace Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech/Emory have given him access to an exceptional pool of collaborators, and he has received a steady stream of various federal, foundation, and industry grants.

Dr. Brewster's laboratory focuses on investigations of the biomechanical mechanisms that contribute to pathologic vessel remodeling in peripheral vascular disease, develops regenerative strategies for use in ischemic tissue, and works to improve the function of patients who succumb to major amputation.

The Blazeck Lab tackles challenges at the interface of immunology, engineering, and metabolism to improve human health. We utilize our expertise in cellular and protein engineering to control biological function and to develop novel therapies to fight disease.

Synthetic Immune Systems

Our immune system uses very complex processes to make exquisitely specific receptors that recognize disease causing agents, and much of our ability to fight diseases is contingent upon the development of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors. Many questions remain unanswered about these immune receptors. For instance, at a population level, can we characterize the millions of receptors each person makes? And then further determine which of these millions of receptors is most important towards recognizing and targeting a pathogen? And can we control the generation of immune receptors to have desired properties? We are striving to answer these questions by harnessing our immune system’s power in a synthetic setting to improve understanding and treatment options for numerous diseases, while developing applications for vaccine design, personalized medicine, and enzyme engineering.

Engineering Cellular Therapies

Immunotherapies are treatments designed to modulate the immune response that have shown astounding clinical potential, yet there are no current treatments with guaranteed success. We are working to engineer cellular systems with controllable, enhanced, and non-native functions that improve their impact and capability. By developing high throughput technologies to interrogate immune function, we hope to translate our findings into improvements in the next generation of cellular therapeutics. 

Developing Proteins that Fight Cancer and Control Metabolism

It is widely accepted that cancer cells have a significantly altered genomic and metabolic makeup relative to normal cells, but how can we best target these differences? By combining our expertise in metabolism and therapeutic protein engineering, are working to engineer proteins to directly target and fight cancer. For instance, certain enzymes can control the metabolic environment around tumors to inhibit their growth or to stimulate a native anti-cancer immune response. We utilize directed evolution approaches to optimize protein function and efficacy.

Saad Bhamla studies biomechanics across species to engineer knowledge and tools that inspire curiosity.

Saad Bhamla is an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at Georgia Tech. A self-proclaimed "tinkerer," his lab is a trove of discoveries and inventions that span biology, physics and engineering. His current projects include studying the hydrodynamics of insect urine, worm blob locomotion and ultra-low-cost devices for global health. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Economist, CNN, Wired, NPR, the Wall Street Journal and more.

Saad is a prolific inventor and his most notable inventions includes a 20-cent paper centrifuge, a 23-cent electroporator, and the 96-cent hearing aid. Saad's work is recognised by numerous awards including a NIH R35 Outstanding Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, CTL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and INDEX: Design to Improve Life Award. Saad is also a National Geographic Explorer and a TED speaker. Newsweek recognized Saad as 1 of 10 Innovators disrupting healthcare.

Saad is a co-founder of Piezo Therapeutics.

Outside of the lab, Saad loves to go hiking with his partner and two dogs (Ollie and Bella).

Dr. Aidun joined the Woodruff School as a Professor in 2003 after completion of a two-year period as program director at the National Science Foundation. He began at Tech in 1988 as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology. Prior, he was a research Scientist at Battelle Research Laboratories, Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and Senior Research Consultant at the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Center at Cornell. 

Dr. Aidun's research is at the intersection between fundamentals of the physics of complex fluids/thermal transport and applications to engineering and biotransport. He has a diverse research portfolio in fluid mechanics, bioengineering, renewable bioproducts and decarbonization of industrial processes. 

A major focus has been to understand the physics of blood cell transport and interaction with glycoproteins (e.g., vWF) with applications to cardiovascular diseases.

Vinny is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech with joint appointments at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Biological Sciences.

A majority of antibiotics and drugs that we use in the clinic are derived or inspired from small organic molecules called Natural Products that are produced by living organisms such as bacteria and plants. Natural Products are at the forefront of fighting the global epidemic of antibiotic resistant pathogens, and keeping the inventory of clinically applicable pharmaceuticals stocked up. Some Natural Products are also potent human toxins and pollutants, and we need to understand how these toxins are produced to minimize our and the environmental exposure to them.

We as biochemists ask some simple questions- how and why are Natural Products produced in Nature, what we can learn from Natural Product biosynthetic processes, and how we can exploit Nature's synthetic capabilities for interesting applications?

Broadly, we are interested in questions involving (meta)genomics, biochemistry, structural and mechanistic enzymology, mass spectrometry, analytical chemistry, and how natural product chemistry dictates biology.