Metalloproteins constitute one of the largest classes of proteins in the proteome and are involved in virtually every metabolic and signaling pathway of consequence to human health and disease. Broadly speaking, the Reddi laboratory is interested in determining the cellular, molecular, and chemical mechanisms by which metalloproteins are activated by cells, and once activated, how they communicate with other biomolecules to promote normal metabolism and physiology, placing an emphasis on systems relevant to cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and infectious diseases. Current projects in the lab are focused on elucidating heme trafficking pathways and the role of Cu/Zn Superoxide Dismutase (SOD1) in redox signaling. Prospective students will get broad training in disciplines that span modern biochemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, biophysics, chemical biology, molecular genetics, and cell biology.      

Arijit Raychowdhury is currently an Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he joined in January, 2013. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University (2007) and his B.E. in Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering from Jadavpur University, India (2001). His industry experience includes five years as a Staff Scientist in the Circuits Research Lab, Intel Corporation, and a year as an Analog Circuit Designer with Texas Instruments Inc. His research interests include low power digital and mixed-signal circuit design, design of power converters, sensors and exploring interactions of circuits with device technologies. Raychowdhury holds more than 25 U.S. and international patents and has published over 80 articles in journals and refereed conferences. He serves on the Technical Program Committees of DAC, ICCAD, VLSI Conference, and ISQED and has been a guest associate-editor for JETC. He has also taught many short courses and invited tutorials at multiple conferences, workshops and universities. He is the winner of the Intel Labs Technical Contribution Award, 2011; Dimitris N. Chorafas Award for outstanding doctoral research, 2007; the Best Thesis Award, College of Engineering, Purdue University, 2007; Best Paper Awards at the International Symposium on Low Power Electronic Design (ISLPED) 2012, 2006; IEEE Nanotechnology Conference, 2003; SRC Technical Excellence Award, 2005; Intel Foundation Fellowship, 2006; NASA INAC Fellowship, 2004; M.P. Birla Smarak Kosh (SOUTH POINT) Award for Higher Studies, 2002; and the Meissner Fellowship 2002. Raychowdhury is a Senior Member of the IEEE

I am an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the evolution of complex life. My Ph.D. training focused on the evolutionary stability of cooperation in the legume-rhizorium symbiosis. Here I developed new experimental methods to study how among-organism genetic conflict arises and can be mitigated. A similar evolutionary tension lies at the heart of all key events in the origin of complex life, termed the ‘Major Transitions in Evolution’: namely, how do new organisms arise and evolve to be more complex without succumbing to within-organism conflict? Studying the early evolution of multicellular organisms has been particularly difficult because these transitions occurred deep in the past, and transitional forms have largely lost to extinction. As a postdoc, I circumvented this constraint by creating a new approach to study the evolution of multicellularity: we evolved it de novo. Since founding my own research group at Georgia Tech in 2014, I have combined this approach with mathematical modeling and synthetic biology to examine how simple clumps of cells evolve into multicellular organisms. Our research has shown how classical constraints in the origin of multicellularity — e.g., the origin of life cycles, multicellular development, cellular differentiation, and cellular interdependence — can be solved by Darwinian evolution. At home, I raise two kids on a hobby farm (really just a big garden) with bees, chickens, rabbits, goats, a dog, and lots of edible plants.

Devesh Ranjan was named the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and took over the role on January 1, 2022. He previously served as the Associate Chair for Research, and Ring Family Chair in the Woodruff School. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and serves as a co-director of the $100M Department of Defense-funded University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH). At Georgia Tech, Ranjan has held several leadership positions including chairing ME’s Fluid Mechanics Research Area Group (2017 - 2018), serving as ME’s Associate Chair for Research (2019-present), and as co-chair of the “Hypersonics as a System” task-force, and serving as Interim Vice-President for Interdisciplinary Research (Feb 2021-June 2021). 

Ranjan joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2014. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a director’s research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2008) and Morris E. Foster Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at Texas A&M University (2009-2014). He earned a bachelor's degree from the NIT-Trichy (India) in 2003, and master's and Ph.D. degrees from the UW-Madison in 2005 and 2007 respectively, all in mechanical engineering. 

Ranjan’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary area of power conversion, complex fluid flows involving shock and hydrodynamic instabilities, and the turbulent mixing of materials in extreme conditions, such as supersonic and hypersonic flows. Ranjan is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and has received numerous awards for his scientific contributions, including the DOE-Early Career Award (first GT recipient), the NSF CAREER Award, and the US AFOSR Young Investigator award. He was also named the J. Erskine Love Jr. Faculty Fellow in 2015. He was invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2016 US Frontiers in Engineering Symposium. For his educational efforts and mentorship activity, he has received CATERPILLAR Teaching Excellence Award from College of Engineering at Texas A&M, as well as 2013 TAMU ASME Professor Mentorship Award from TAMU student chapter of the ASME. At Georgia Tech, Ranjan served as a Provost’s Teaching and Learning Fellow (PTLF) from 2018-2020, and was named 2021 Governor’s Teaching Fellow. He was also named Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Fellow for 2020-21. 

Ranjan is currently part of a 10-member Technical Screening Committee of the NAE’s COVID-19 Call for Engineering Action taskforce, an initiative to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Shock Waves and was a former Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering.

Since joining the faculty in 2012, James Rains has taught two of Tech’s most critical classes for creating the next generation of biomedical engineers. “Intro to Biomedical Engineering Design” and the “Biomedical Engineering Capstone” courses are bookends on the student experience in the BME program, which has consistently ranked among the best in the nation. Meanwhile, Rains helps give students more real-world healthcare problems from clinicians and medical companies than any other BME department in the world. He constantly strives to find the best and most diverse projects for his students, including in 2018, a new collaboration with the world-renowned Mayo Clinic. His BME student teams consistently win top honors in innovation competitions and mentors and coaches Create-X student startups. For all of his tremendous efforts, he was named the 2019 Undergraduate Educator of the Year by Tech’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

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.

Peng Qiu is a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory University School of Medicine. 

His research interests are in the areas of bioinformatics and computational biology, focusing on machine learning, data integration, statistical signal processing, control systems and optimization. 

In particular, he is interested in developing machine learning methods to advance single-cell data science, with applications in characterizing cellular heterogeneity, identifying cancer biomarkers, understanding disease progression, reconstructing gene regulatory networks, etc.

H. Jerry Qi is a professor and the Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his bachelor degrees (dual degree), master and Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) and a ScD degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston, MA, USA). After one year postdoc at MIT, he joined University of Colorado Boulder as an assistant professor in 2004, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2010. He joined Georgia Tech in 2014 as an associate professor with tenure and was promoted to a full professor in 2016. Qi is a recipient of NSF CAREER award (2007). He is a member of Board of Directors for the Society of Engineering Science. In 2015, he was elected to an ASME Fellow. The research in Qi's group is in the general area of soft active materials, with a focus on 1) 3D printing of soft active materials to enable 4D printing methods; and 2) recycling of thermosetting polymers. The material systems include: shape memory polymers, light activated polymers, vitrimers. On 3D printing, they developed a wide spectrum of 3D printing capability, including: multIMaTerial inkjet 3D printing, digit light process (DLP) 3D printing, direct ink write (DIW) 3D printing, and fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing. These printers allow his group to develop new 3D printing materials to meet the different challenging requirements. For thermosetting polymer recycling, his group developed methods that allow 100% recycling carbon fiber reinforced composites and electronic packaging materials. Although his group develops different novel applications, his work also relies on the understanding and modeling of material structure and properties under environmental stimuli, such as temperature, light, etc, and during material processing, such as 3D printing. Constitutive model developments are typically based on the observations from experiments and are then integrated with finite element through user material subroutines so that these models can be used to solve complicated 3D multiphysics problems involving nonlinear mechanics. A notable example is their recent pioneer work on 4D printing, where soft active materials is integrated with 3D printing to enable shape change (or time in shape forming process). Recently, his developed a state-of-the-art hybrid 3D printing station, which allows his group to integrate different polymers and conduct inks into one system. Currently, his group is working on using this printing station for a variety of applications, including printed 3D electronics, printed soft robots, etc.

The research focus of Boris Prilutsky's laboratory is Neural Control and Biomechanics of Movement. They study how the nervous system controls hundreds of muscles and kinematic degrees of freedom of the body to produce purposeful motor behaviors and how the neural control of motor behaviors is affected by neural and musculoskeletal injuries.

Professor Mark R. Prausnitz is a Regents' Professor and the Love Family Professor in Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering in the School of Chemical & Bimolecular Engineering. He received his B.S. in 1988 from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in 1994 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Prausnitz and his colleagues carry out research on biophysical methods of drug delivery, which employ microneedles, ultrasound, lasers, electric fields, heat, convective forces and other physical means to control the transport of drugs, proteins, genes and vaccines into and within the body. A major area of focus involves the use of microneedle patches to apply vaccines to the skin in a painless, minimally invasive manner. In collaboration with Emory University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other organizations, Professor Prausnitz's group is advancing microneedles from device design and fabrication through pharmaceutical formulation and pre-clinical animal studies through studies in human subjects. In addition to developing a self-administered influenza vaccine using microneedles, Professor Prausnitz is translating microneedle technology especially to make vaccination in developing countries more effective. The Prausnitz group has also developed hollow microneedles for injection into the skin and into the eye in collaboration with Emory University. In the skin, research focuses on insulin administration to human diabetic patients to increase onset of action by targeting insulin delivery to the skin. In the eye, hollow microneedles enable precise targeting of injection to the suprachoroidal space and other intraocular tissues for minimally invasive delivery to treat macular degeneration and other retinal diseases. Professor Prausnitz and colleagues also study novel mechanisms to deliver proteins, DNA and other molecules into cells. Cavitation bubble activity generated by ultrasound and by laser-excitation of carbon nanoparticles breaks open a small section of the cell membrane and thereby enables entry of molecules, which is useful for gene-based therapies and targeted drug delivery. In addition to research activities, Professor Prausnitz teaches an introductory course on engineering calculations, as well as two advanced courses on pharmaceuticals and technical communication, both of which he developed. He also serves the broader scientific and business communities as a frequent consultant, advisory board member and expert witness.

Faces of Research - Profile Article