Our work focuses on how the brain decides which action to perform at each moment in time – that is, action selection. We are interested in the cortical and subcortical circuits that mediate this process, and how they go awry in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Specifically, we perform measurements of large-populations of neural activity in freely behaving mice using imaging and physiology, and distill their behavior in real-time using 3D cameras and probabilistic approaches to machine learning. Additionally, we are pursuing new methods to control activity in these circuits using precision closed-loop deep brain stimulation.

Dr. Susan S. Margulies leads the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Engineering in its mission to transform our world for a better tomorrow by driving discovery, inspiring innovation, enriching education, and accelerating access. With an annual budget of nearly $800 million, the NSF’s Engineering Directorate provides over 40 percent of federal funding for fundamental research in engineering at academic institutions, and it distributes more than 1500 awards supporting research and education each year. Projects funded by the Engineering Directorate span frontier research to generate new knowledge, problem-driven research to identify new solutions to societal challenges, and application-driven research to translate discoveries to uses that benefit society.

In partnership with industry and communities across the nation, the NSF’s investments in engineering research and education lead to innovative technologies and sustainable impacts in health, agriculture, clean energy and water, resilient infrastructure, advanced manufacturing and communication systems, and many other areas. NSF support also builds the Nation’s workforce capacity in engineering and supports the diversity and inclusion of engineers at all career stages. Together, the NSF’s investments in engineering research and education enhance prosperity, equity and quality of life for all Americans.

Margulies joined the NSF as the assistant director for the Directorate for Engineering in August 2021 after leading the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. While on detail at the NSF, she is a professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar at Georgia Tech and Emory. She received her B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, her Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training at the Mayo Clinic. She joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 as an assistant professor, rising through the ranks to professor. In 2017 she became the first faculty member tenured in both the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, and she was a department chair in both the college of engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory’s school of medicine. 

Margulies is internationally recognized for pioneering studies spanning the micro-to-macro scales and across species to identify mechanisms underlying brain injuries in children and adolescents and lung injuries associated with mechanical ventilation, leading to improved injury prevention, diagnosis and treatments. She has launched numerous training and mentorship programs for students and faculty, created institute-wide initiatives to enhance diversity and inclusion, and led innovative projects in engineering education. 

Margulies’ transdisciplinary scholarly impact has been recognized by her election as fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and as a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine.  

Sakis Mantalaris is currently Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech & Emory. Prior he was Professor in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. His expertise is in modelling of biological systems and bioprocesses with a focus on mammalian cell culture systems, stem cell bioprocessing, and tissue engineering. He has received several awards: the Junior Moulton Award for best paper by the IChemE (2004), Fellow of AIMBE (2012), an ERC Advanced Investigator Award (2013), and the Donald Medal by the IChemE for his contributions to biochemical engineering (2015).
 

Dr. Lindsey previously developed matrix array transducers, adaptive beamforming strategies, and interventional devices in Stephen Smith’s lab at Duke University, where he received a Ph.D. for his work in 3D transcranial ultrasound.  While at Duke, he was the recipient of a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the Duke Medical Imaging Training Program.  He also completed postdoctoral training in the labs of Paul Dayton and Xiaoning Jiang at the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University in contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging and in the design and fabrication of high frequency, interventional ultrasound transducers.  During this time, he was awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the NIH to develop endoscopic transducers for contrast-specific imaging in pancreatic cancer.  Dr. Lindsey recently joined the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech-Emory, where he leads the Ultrasonic Imaging and Instrumentation Laboratory.  Dr. Lindsey is an active member of the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society, the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine and is a member of the Technical Program Committee for the IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium.  In 2022, Dr. Lindsey received the New Investigator award from the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine. At Georgia Tech, Dr. Lindsey holds a primary appointment in Biomedical Engineering.  He is also a faculty member for the Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program and holds an adjunct appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Lab members have received best paper, best poster, and best student pitch awards from the IEEE UFFC Society. Research activities in the lab are currently funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Michelle C. LaPlaca, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint department between Georgia Tech and Emory University. Dr. LaPlaca earned her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, in 1991 and her M.S.E. (1992) and Ph.D. (1996) in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in the area of neuronal injury biomechanics. Following post-doctoral training in Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania’s Head Injury Center from 1996-98, she joined the faculty at Georgia Tech. Dr. LaPlaca’s research interests are in neurotrauma, specifically: traumatic brain injury, injury biomechanics, cell culture modeling of traumatic injury, neural tissue engineering, and cognitive impairment associated with brain injury and aging. Her research is funded by NIH, NSF, and the Coulter Foundation.

Dr. Wilbur Lam received his B.A. from Rice University in 1995, his M.D. from the Baylor College of Medicine in 1999 and his Ph.D. from the University of California,San Francisco/University of California, Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering in 2008. He completed his Residency in Pediatrics from UCSF in 2002 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley from 2008-2010. Dr. Lam's research involves integrating microtechnology ,development, experimental hematology and oncology and clinical medicine. His interdisciplinary laboratory, comprising clinicians, engineers, and biologists, is dedicated to applying and developing micro/nanotechnologies to study, diagnose, and treat blood disorders, cancer, and childhood diseases. This unique "basement to bench to bedside" approach to biomedical research is enabled by our lab's dual locations at the Emory University School of Medicine and the Georgia Institute of Technology and our affiliations with the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta hospitals.

Dr. Gabe Kwong is a Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine. His research program is conducted at the interface of the life sciences, medicine and engineering where a central focus is understanding how to harness the sophisticated defense mechanisms of immune cells to eradicate disease and provide protective immunity. Kwong has pioneered numerous biomedical technologies and published in leading scientific journals such as Nature Biotechnology and Nature Medicine. His work has been profiled broadly including coverage in The Economist, NPR, BBC, and WGBH-2, Boston 's PBS station. Professor Kwong earned his B.S. in Bioengineering with Highest Honors from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from California Institute of Technology with Professor James R. Heath. He conducted postdoctoral studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Sangeeta N. Bhatia. For his work, Dr. Kwong has been awarded the NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, named a "Future Leader in Cancer Research and Translational Medicine" by the Massachusetts General Hospital, and awarded the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, a distinction given to the 10 most innovative bioengineers in the nation. Dr. Kwong holds seven issued or pending patents in cancer nanotechnology.

Melissa Lambeth Kemp received her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from University of Washington. Dr. Kemp joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2006 after completing postdoctoral training at MIT. Her expertise is in computational modeling of metabolism and signal transduction, as well as developing statistical modeling tools to examine network relationships in high-dimension datasets. One major aspect of her research program linking ROS – the byproducts of aerobic metabolism – to the fundamental way that cells interpret instructions from their environment, their neighbors, and their own genetic blueprint. Specific applications of her diverse work include systems modeling of transient phosphatase oxidation of kinase cascades, patient-specific differences in cytotoxicity to redox-cycled chemotherapeutics and radiation, and the coordination of oxidative metabolism with epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition. Her research program also includes a component of developing high-throughput screening methods for assaying cue-signal-response relationships in cells and analytical tools for single cell gene expression. 

Dr. Kemp currently serves as the Research Director of the multi-site NSF Engineering Research Center “Cell Manufacturing Technologies”. In her former role as Associate Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center “Emergent Behavior of Integrated Cellular Systems”, she spearheaded the multi-site center’s computational activities by developing agent-based models of context-dependent cellular decisions to generate new hypotheses of intercellular communication in pluripotent stem cell differentiation and emergent patterning; this work continues currently in quantifying organizational principles and spatial relationships in iPSC-derived tissues from multi-omics data. Dr. Kemp’s career honors include a Whitaker Graduate Fellowship, Merck/CSBi postdoctoral fellowship, Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, NIH New Innovator Award, and the CSB2 Prize for Innovative Measurement Methods from the Council for Systems Biology in Boston.

Dr. Keilholz has been working in preclinical imaging for more than twenty years, with the goal of using animal models to improve the analysis of human MRI imaging. Her research uses multimodal approaches to extract information about neural dynamics from functional neuroimaging studies.