Peralta-Yahya has been part of Georgia Tech since 2012. Her diverse research group composed of chemists, biologists, and chemical engineers works in the area of engineering biology, drawing from principles of biochemistry and engineering to build systems for chemical detection and production. Specifically, her group focuses on the development of G protein-coupled receptors for biotechnology and biomedical applications, and the engineering of biological systems for the production of fuels and functionalized plant natural products. Early on, her work was recognized with several awards including a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a DuPont Young Professor Award, a Kavli Fellowship by the US Academy of Science, and an NIH MIRA award. Her group’s key accomplishments are 1) the standardization of GPCR-based sensors in yeast to reduce the cost and accelerate the pace of drug discovery for these receptors, which are the target of over 30% of FDA approved drugs, and 2) the development of advanced biofuels, including pinene, which, when dimerized, has sufficient energy content to power rockets and missiles.  Today, her group is funded to work on these and other cutting edge areas – including how to power a rocket returning from Mars and how to make synthetic cells learn without evolution – by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

Dr. Alexandra Peister is an associate professor in the Biology Department at Morehouse College.

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.
 

My lab, Biohybrid System Laboratory, is interested in elucidating how biological systems coordinate the hierarchical structures and functions of their individual components, in order to produce emergent physical behaviors, and how disrupting this coordination potentiates disease. We seek to design, build, and test a hierarchy of biohybrid systems capable of reproducing the targeted behaviors. Our primary interest is coordinated activation and contraction of tissue- and organ-level cardiac and skeletal muscle systems. To pursue this goal, we focus on the development of biohybrid fabrication methods and measurement systems through the combined application of genetic tools, induced pluripotent stem cells, tissue engineering, microfabrication, electronics, optics, and feedback control. The resulting findings and technical developments will be translated into various applications such as (1) stem cell-based functional assays for personalized disease diagnosis and treatment and (2) new types of biohybrid actuators for creating biological autonomous systems.

Dr. Pardue is a Research Career Scientist at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, and a Professor in Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Pardue received her B.S. in zoology from the University of Wyoming and her doctorate in vision science and biology at the University of Waterloo. Her post-doctorate training in visual electrophysiology was completed with Dr. Neal Peachey at Loyola School of Medicine and Hines VA Hospital in Chicago and focused on biocompatibility of retinal prosthetics. Dr. Pardue moved to Atlanta in 2000 to join the Atlanta VA Medical Center and Emory University Department of Ophthalmology. She moved her academic appointment to Biomedical Engineering in 2015. Her research interests are focused on developing treatments for people with vision loss. To this end, she has developed three research themes within her lab: 1) neuroprotective and restorative treatments for retinal degeneration, 2) early detection and treatment of diabetic retinopathy, and 3) retinal mechanisms of refractive development and myopia. Her research has been continuously supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs, NIH, and private companies (1999-present). She has served on several VA and NIH grant review panels and frequently reviews manuscripts for several journals including Journal of Neuroscience, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Molecular Vision, Vision Research, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, Journal of Neurochemistry and PlosOne.

Anant Paravastu holds bachelors (MIT, 1998) and Ph.D. degrees (UC Berkeley, 2004) in chemical engineering. His Ph.D. research with Jeffrey Reimer focused on the use of lasers to control nuclear spin polarizations in the semiconductor GaAs. From 2004 to 2007, he worked as a postdoc at the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at NIH with Robert Tycko, where he learned to apply nuclear magnetic resonance to structural biology. Paravastu’s early structural biology work focused amyloid fibrils of the Alzheimer’s β-amyloid peptide. He was part of the team and community that showed that amyloid fibril formation is a complex phenomenon, with individual peptides exhibiting multiple aggregation pathways capable of producing multiple distinct aggregated structures. Between 2008 and 2015, Paravastu worked as an assistant professor at Florida State University and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Paravastu started his present position at Georgia Tech in 2015. Paravastu’s laboratory presently focuses on 3 general lines of inquiry: 1) structural analysis of peptides that were rationally designed to assemble into nanostructured materials, 2) nonfibrillar aggregates of the Alzheimer’s β-amyloid peptide, and 3) aggregation due to misfolding of proteins driven away from their natural folds.

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.

Our work centers on understanding how the brain represents information and intention, and using this knowledge to develop high-performance, robust, and practical assistive devices for people with disabilities and neurological disorders. We take a dynamical systems approach to characterizing the activity of large populations of neurons, combined with rigorous systems engineering (signal processing, machine learning, and real-time systems) to advance the performance of brain-machine interfaces and neuromodulatory devices.