Dr. Varenberg’s research area is Tribology – the science and technology of interacting surfaces that allow for game-changing advancements ranging from making fire and inventing wheel in the past, to enabling human joint replacement in the present. Dr. Varenberg’s main focus is on bionic tribology and green tribology, but, to enhance the public’s interest in tribology science, he also seeks to uncover tribology from daily life, with examples of works on safety razors and table tennis paddles.

Vladimir V. Tsukruk is a Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, a founding Director of Microanalysis Center, and founding co-director of DoD BIONIC Center of Excellence.  He received MS degree in physics from the National University of Ukraine, PhD in polymer science and DSc in chemistry from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He carried out his post-doc research at the U. Marburg, Darmstadt TU, and U. Akron.

He serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of ten professional journals and as an Associate Editor at ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. He has co-authored more than 400 refereed articles in archival journals and five books, which have been cited more than 15,500 times with H-index of 60 (WoS).  He has organized ten professional symposia and trained about 70 students currently employed in industry, academia, and national labs.  His research in the field of surfaces, interfaces, directed assembly of synthetic/natural polymers and nanostructures, and bioinspired hybrid nanomaterials has been recognized by The Georgia Tech Outstanding Research Author Award (2015), the Humboldt Lectureship (2011), Humboldt Research Award (2010) and the National Science Foundation Special Creativity Award (2006) among others.

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.

Shu Takayama earned his BS and MS in Agricultural Chemistry at the University of Tokyo. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California studying bio-organic synthesis with Dr. Chi‐Huey Wong. He then worked as a postdoc with Dr. George Whitesides at Harvard University where he focused on applying microfluidics to studying cell and molecular biology.

Takayama began his career at the University of Michigan, where led his lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Macromolecular Science & Engineering for over 17 years. In 2017, the lab moved to Georgia Tech where Shu became the Georgia Research Alliance Price Gilbert Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Takayama’s research interests are diverse and motivated by clinical and biotechnology needs. He is always interested in hearing from stakeholders in these areas who are seeking engineering collaboration.

Dr. Shi joined Georgia Tech in August 2018 as an assistant professor. Prior, he worked as a graduate student researcher at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of California, Berkeley and Materials Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory focusing on the study of acoustic angular momentum and the design and realization of acoustic metamaterials and high-speed acoustic communication. His Ph.D. dissertation (2018) focuses on the development of acoustic metamaterials and the physics of the angular momentum of sound. Prior to his Ph.D. study at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Shi completed his M.S. degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute in Shanghai, China. His M.S. thesis (2013) focuses on the dynamics and vibration of cyclically symmetric rotating mechanical systems.

 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

Felipe trained as a biomedical engineer in his native Colombia before obtaining a PhD from the Biomedical Engineering department of Duke University. At Duke, working in the laboratory of Ashutosh Chilkoti, he focused on the engineering of genetically-encoded, self-assembling protein polymers. An important outcome of this PhD work was the elucidation of sequence rules to program the phase separation behavior of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). Motivated by a newly acquired ability to engineer the phase behavior of IDPs, for his postdoctoral work he turned to their poorly-understood biology. To pursue skin as an outstanding biological system, Felipe joined the group of Elaine Fuchs at Rockefeller University. Felipe’s postdoctoral research led to the discovery that liquid-liquid phase separation drives the process of skin barrier formation. In 2020, he established the Quiroz Lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. Felipe is the recipient of multiple research awards, including a Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

Jay Patel, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopaedics at Emory and a Health Science Specialist at the Atlanta VA. Patel joined the faculty at Emory in September 2020, and his program focuses on the repair and regeneration of musculoskeletal tissues (e.g., cartilage, meniscus), with an emphasis on using micro-scale findings to drive macro-scale therapies. His lab uses a combination of biomechanics, biomaterials, mechano-biology, in vitro systems, and functional in vivo models to motivate, design, develop, and evaluate novel treatments and therapeutics for orthopaedic injuries. He received his Bachelor’s in Bioengineering from Rice University and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Rutgers University. He then pursued his postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, working on a variety of cartilage tissue engineering and mechano-biology projects. Patel has published over 20 manuscripts, has presented at numerous international conference meetings, and won several prestigious awards, including the Excellence in Research Award (2018) from the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine. Moreover, both his graduate and postdoctoral work resulted in pending patent applications, and the formation of startup companies with active small-business funding, demonstrating his ultimate goal of translating these approaches to the clinic.
 

The Panitch lab research has focused on the extracellular matrix (ECM) and how matrix signals affect tissue regeneration, including nerve regeneration, wound healing and angiogenesis, cartilage and vascular. More recently, the lab has focused on the proteoglycan component of the ECM. Proteoglycans are critical components of tissue function. They influence matrix organization, the viscoelastic properties of the matrix, access of enzymes to the matrix and serve as a protective barrier as in the case of the glycocalyx. Proteoglycans are difficult to synthesize because of the complex post translational modifications and the complexity of carbohydrate chemistry. The Panitch laboratory has demonstrated that proteoglycan function can largely be recapitulated by conjugating short, bioactive peptide sequences to GAGs. The peptide sequences direct the GAG to its target and ensure that it is held in place, similarly to how native proteoglycans function. The lab has used proteoglycan mimetic strategies to develop therapeutics to treat osteoarthritis, improve wound healing, and treat diseased blood vessels.