Matt is a former Tar Heel from UNC Chapel Hill. His training is in mass spectrometry-based proteomics and G protein signaling. He has been investigating PTMs since 2001. He is also a co-director of the Systems Mass Spectrometry Core (SYMS-C) facility at Georgia Tech.

I am an engineer and neuroscientist focused on how the brain and body cooperate to allow us to move. Fundamental abilities like standing and walking appear effortless until we–or someone we love–loses that ability. Movement is impacted in a wide range of diseases because it involves almost all parts of the brain and body, and their interactions with the environment. How we move is also highly individualized, changing across our lifetimes as a function of our experiences, and adapting in different situations. As such, assessing and treating movement impairments remains highly challenging. My approach is to dissect the complexities of how we move in health and disease by bridging what may seem to be disparate fields across engineering, neuroscience, and physiology. Our current application areas are Parkinson’s disease, stroke, aging and cerebral palsy, and we are interested in extending our work toward mild cognitive impairment and concussion.

My lab uses robotics, computation, and artificial intelligence to identify new physiological principles of sensing and moving that are enabling researchers to personalize rehabilitation and medicine. Primarily, we study people in the lab, studying brain and muscle activity in relationship to the body’s biomechanics in standing and walking. We use and develop robotic devices for assessing and assisting human movement, while interpreting brain and muscle activity to personalize the interactions. Our novel computer simulations of muscle, neurons, and joints establish a virtual platform for predicting how movements change in disease and improve with interventions. Recently, we have demonstrated the critical role of cognitive function motor impairment that may increase fall risk, suggesting that how we move and how we think may be closely related. Current projects include developing physiologically-inspired controllers to enable exoskeletons to enhance user balance, identifing individual differences that predict response to gait rehabilitation in stroke survivors, and developing more precise and physiologically-based methods to interpret clinical motor test outcomes.

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. 

Dr. W. Robert “Bob” Taylor holds joint appointments in the Department of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He is a professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, the Marcus Chair in Vascular Medicine, executive vice chair of the Department of Medicine, and the director of the Division of Cardiology. 

He serves as principal investigator for a five-year, $51 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Emory-led Georgia CTSA, which includes partners from Georgia Tech, Morehouse, and the University of Georgia, focuses on transforming the quality and value of clinical research and translating research results into better outcomes for patients.

Dr. Taylor received his M.D., cum laude, from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. in Physiology from The Johns Hopkins University. After completing his Internal Medicine Training at Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Hospital in 1988, he came to the Emory University School of Medicine for subspecialty training in Cardiovascular Disease. 

Dr. Taylor's research interests are focused in the area of vascular biology with an emphasis on vascular biomechanics, inflammation, and regenerative medicine. He is also the Emory PI for the NIH-funded Georgia CTSA. Studies carried out by his group include both laboratory-based studies and translational work in humans.

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.