Our interests lie in the adhesion and signaling molecules of the immune system as well as those involved in platelet adhesion and aggregation. We are primarily focused on early cell surface interaction kinetics and their primary signaling responses, as these are critical in determining how a cell will ultimately respond upon contact with another cell. The majority of our work ranges from single molecule interaction studies using atomic force microscopy, molecular dynamics simulations, or biomembrane force probe assays to single cell studies using micropipette adhesions assays, fluorescence imaging techniques, or real-time confocal microscopy. These assays focus on the mechanics and kinetics of receptor-ligand binding and their downstream signaling effects within cells. T cell receptors, selectins, integrins, and their respective ligands are some of the cell surface molecules currently under investigation in our lab. Understanding the initial interaction between molecules such as these and their subsequent early signaling processes is crucial to elucidating the response mechanisms of these physiological systems. Ultimately, our research strives to help better understand the mechanisms within these systems for possible medical applications in autoimmunity, allergy, transplant rejection, and thrombotic disorders. 

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).

Research in the Wu lab is mainly focused on mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics. They are developing innovative methods to globally identify and quantify proteins and their post-translational modifications (PTMs), including glycosylation and phosphorylation, and applying them for biomedical research. Protein PTMs plays essential roles in biological systems, and aberrant protein expression and modification are directly related to various human diseases, including cystic fibrosis, cancer and infectious diseases. Novel analytical methods will profoundly advance our understanding of protein function, which will lead to the identification of proteins or modified proteins as effective drug targets and the discovery of biomarkers for early disease detection.

Eberhard Voit’s research interests are in the area of complex biomedical systems. Work in his lab focuses on genomic, metabolic, and signaling systems with applications reaching from microbial and plant systems to human diseases. Voit has authored or co-authored about two hundred fifty scientific articles and book chapters as well as several books. Voit is an elected a fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

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.

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.

Saurabh Sinha received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2002, and after post-doctoral work at the Rockefeller University with Eric Siggia, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2005, where he held the positions of Founder Professor in Computer Science and Director of Computational Genomics in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology until 2022. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 2022, as Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Engineering, with joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering. Sinha’s research is in the area of bioinformatics, with a focus on regulatory genomics and systems biology. Sinha is an NSF CAREER award recipient and has been funded by NIH, NSF and USDA. He co-directed an NIH BD2K Center of Excellence and was a thrust lead in the NSF AI Institute at UIUC. He led the educational program of the Mayo Clinic-University of Illinois Alliance, and co-led data science education for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Sinha has served as Program co-Chair of the annual RECOMB Regulatory and Systems Genomics conference and served on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Computational Biology (2018-2021). He was a recipient of the University Scholar award of the University of Illinois, and selected as a Fellow of the AIMBE in 2018.