Initiated in fall 2017, the B.S. in Neuroscience program has graduated its first students. Seven neuroscience majors graduating in May 2019 were among those students who changed their major to neuroscience as soon as the program was announced.

 “The program has grown to more than 200 students in just two years,” says Timothy Cope, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME). As chair of the Undergraduate Neuroscience Curriculum Committee, Cope played a key role in conceptualizing, launching, and implementing the degree program.

“We are confident that our graduates have mastered core principles in the field of neuroscience, been exposed to recent breakthroughs in the field, and acquired general strengths in critical thinking and problem solving,” Cope says.

“Neuroscience is an inherently interdisciplinary program,” David Collard, interim dean of the College of Sciences adds. “The bachelor degree program exemplifies Georgia Tech’s collaborative spirit in both education and research.”

Several graduating students say they shifted to neuroscience because the program better matched their interests than their original major. Many will go on to health-related fields.

The child of Iraqi immigrants, Sarah Abdulhameed was born in Champaign, Illinois, but became a teenager in Alpharetta, Georgia. She shifted to neuroscience because she always “wanted to understand the underlying mechanisms behind cognition, to better understand my patients in the future.” She will begin dental school at the Dental College of Georgia, Augusta University, in July.

The neuroscience program “helped me hack the brain,” Sarah says. “Understanding how the brain works will help me better connect with my patients.” Sarah hopes to apply neuroscience knowledge to help patients break unhealthy dietary and oral habits and build habits that strengthen oral health.

Neel Atawala is from Albany, Georgia. He says the neuroscience major gave him more flexibility than his original major did. While applying to medical schools, Neel will take a gap year working as a medical scribe at Emory University Hospital, in Atlanta.

“My degree has prepared me for a career in medicine by providing me with a very solid foundation in the anatomical and functional principles of neuroscience,” Neel says. That foundation “may give me an advantage when I encounter the unit focusing on the nervous system in medical school.”

Neel is the first neuroscience graduate to complete a research thesis, under the supervision and mentorship of Lewis Wheaton, in the School of Biological Sciences. Neel also served as president of the Georgia Tech Neuroscience Club.

"These graduates are pioneers."

Simran Gidwani had always wanted to become a neurologist. The neuroscience program, she says, was “the perfect fit for me!” Simran, who is from Suwanee, Georgia, will join a clinical research team at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta for a year before entering medical school.

“From the very first introductory classes, my neuroscience classes taught me the value of research, how knowledge gleaned from certain studies contributes to the current state of the field, and how various methods can be used to advance our current knowledge of neuroscience,” Simran says. “By applying neuroscience methods and completing the process of drawing scientific conclusions many times, I have been very well prepared for my future professional plan.” 

Instead of changing majors, Paula Martinez-Feduchi Guijo double majored in biology and neuroscience. She had always wanted to study genetics and neuroscience, she says. “So I was very excited at the opportunity to complete a B.S. in Neuroscience. The research opportunities are unparalleled.”

After graduation, Paula will work as a research specialist in Emory University. Her next career goal is a doctorate in neurogenetics.

The classes for neuroscience majors “have prepared me to work in a laboratory full-time, conducting research using the methods and knowledge I learned in class,“ says Paula, who hails from Barcelona, Spain

Amy Patel graduates after only three years at Georgia Tech. She decided to shift to neuroscience after studying neural development in a Biological Principles class. “I found myself eager to learn about how the control center of the body can affect human anatomy and physiology and what illnesses may arise from complications in regular development,” Amy says. “A B.S. in Neuroscience felt like the right way to gain the exposure I was seeking.”

Born and raised in a Boston suburb, Amy moved with her family to Johns Creek, Georgia, almost 10 years ago. A New England Patriots fan, Amy connected her love for football with her research, which stemmed from her interest in Aaron Hernandez, whose football career abruptly ended when he was convicted for murder. For her undergraduate research thesis, under the supervision of Erin Buckley at BME, she analyzed how closed head impact, as is common in football, can cause metabolic changes in the brain. 

After graduation, Amy will do research at the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, studying degenerative diseases of the musculoskeletal system in a clinical setting. “This project will serve as a great way to interact with neuroscience,” she says, “until we meet again in medical school.”

Asif Sheikh was born in North Dakota but grew up in Tifton, Georgia. “Neuroscience has always been my greatest passion,” he says. “Ever since I attended the February 2015 EXPLORE program at Tech when I first heard about the developing neuroscience major, I knew I had to attend Tech. It was always my intention to switch to neuroscience once I was able.”

Asif will attend Mercer University School of Medicine to pursue a career in neurology, with a focus on neurodegenerative diseases.

“Neuroscience at Tech has helped me get an early look into the complex machinations at work behind the nervous system and cemented this field as something to which I want to dedicate my life,” Asif says. “My course work and my time as an undergraduate researcher in a neuroimaging lab have given me the foundation on which to build my medical career."

Here are B.S. in Neuroscience students who graduated in May 4, 2019:

• Sarah Abdulhameed
• Neel Atawala
• Simran Gidwani
• Paula Martinez-Feduchi Guijo
• Amy Patel
• Zara Rose
• Asif Sheikh

“These graduates are pioneers,” Collard says. “Now we will be interested in monitoring the future accomplishments of this talented group.”

In the war on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it's not so much the antibiotics that are making the enemy stronger as it is how they are prescribed. A new study suggests that doctors can beat antibiotic resistance using those same antibiotics but in a very targeted manner and in combination with other health strategies.

The current broad application of antibiotics helps resistant bacterial strains evolve forward. But using data about bacteria’s specific resistances when prescribing those same drugs more precisely can help put the evolution of resistant strains in reverse, according to researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Duke University, and Harvard University who conducted the study.

One researcher cautioned that time is pressing: New strategies against resistance that leverage antibiotics need to be in place before bacteria resistant to most every known antibiotic become too widespread. That would render antibiotics nearly useless, and it has been widely reported that this could happen by mid-century, making bacterial infections much more lethal.

“Once you get to that pan-resistant state, it’s over,” said Sam Brown, who co-led the study and is an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences. “Timing is, unfortunately, an issue in tackling antibiotic resistance.”

The new study, which was co-led by game theorist David McAdams, a professor of business administration and economics at Duke University, delivers a mathematical model to help clinical and public health researchers devise new concrete prescription strategies and those supporting health strategies. The measures center on the analysis of bacterial strains to determine what drugs they are resistant to, and which not.

Some medical labs already scan human genomes for hereditary predispositions to certain medical conditions. Bacterial genomes are far simpler and much easier to analyze, and though the analytical technology is currently not standard equipment in doctors’ offices or medical labs they routinely work with, the researchers think this could change in a reasonable amount of time. This would enable the study’s approach.

The researchers published their study in the journal PLOS Biology on May 16, 2019. The work was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Simons Foundation, the Human Frontier Science Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundations, and the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund.

Q&A

Here are some questions and answers on how the study’s counterintuitive approach could beat back antibiotic resistance:

Isn’t prescribing antibiotics the problem? How can it fight resistance?

The real problem is the broad application of antibiotics. They treat human infections and farm animals, and in the process are killing off a lot of non-resistant bacteria while bacteria resistant to those drugs survive. The resistant strains can then reproduce and with fewer competitors in their space, then they dominate bacterial communities in the host animals and people.

The resistant bacteria get passed to other hosts and become more prevalent in the world altogether. New prescription strategies would outsmart that evolutionary scenario by exposing through genomic (or other) analysis bacteria’s resistance but also their vulnerabilities.

“Right now, there are rapid tests for the pathogen. If you’ve got strep throat, the clinic swabs the bacteria and does a rapid assay that says yes, that’s streptococcus,” Brown said. “But it won’t tell you if it’s resistant to the drug usually prescribed against it. In the future, diagnostics at the point-of-care could find out what strain you’ve got and if it’s resistant.”

Then clinicians would choose the specific antibiotics that the bacteria are not resistant to, and kill the bacteria, thus also stopping them from spreading the genes behind their resistance to other antibiotics. So, identifying an infector’s resistance hits two birds with one stone.

“It’s great for fighting antibiotic resistance, but it’s also good for patients because we’ll always use the correct antibiotic,” Brown said.

^{[Thinking about grad school? Here's how to apply to Georgia Tech.]}

Are there enough effective antibiotics left to do this with?

Plenty. Antibiotics still work as a rule.

In addition, searching out and destroying resistant bacteria could help refresh existing antibiotics’ effectiveness.

“The idea is prevalent that we will use antibiotics up, and then they’re gone,” Brown said. “It doesn’t have to be that way. This study introduces the concept that antibiotics could become a renewable resource if we act on time.”

As mentioned above, prescription strategies by themselves won’t beat resistance, right?

Correct. Resistance evolution has some tricky complexities.

“A lot of bacteria with the potential to make us sick like E. coli spend most of their time just lurking peacefully in our bodies. These are bystander bacteria, and they are exposed to lots of antibiotics that we take for other things such as sore throats or ear aches,” Brown said. “This frequent exposure is probably the major driver of resistance evolution.”

The antibiotic prescription strategy needs those additional health care measures to win the fight, but those measures are pretty straightforward.

What are those additional measures?

Diagnostics need to apply to bystander bacteria, too. E. coli in the intestine or, for example, Strep pneumoniae living peacefully in nostrils would be checked for resistance, say, during annual checkups.

“If the patient is carrying a resistant strain, you work to beat it back before it can break out,” Brown said. “There could be non-antibiotic treatments that do this like, perhaps, bacteria replacement.”

Bacteria replacement therapy would introduce new bacteria into the patient’s body to outcompete the undesirable antibiotic-resistant bacteria and displace it. Also, people would stay home from school and work for a few days so as not to spread the bad bacteria to other people while their immune systems and possibly alternative therapies, such as bacteriophages or non-antibiotic drugs battle the bad bacteria.

This sounds hopeful, but are there other real-world circumstances to consider?

“The study’s mathematical models are broad simplifications of real life,” Brown said. “They don’t take into account that pathogens spend a lot of time in other antibiotic-exposed environments such as farms. Dealing with that is going to require some more research.”

The study also purposely leaves out "polymicrobial infections," which are infections by multiple kinds of bacteria at the same time. The researchers believe that the study’s models can still be relevant to them.

“We expect the logic of combating drug resistance to still hold in these more complex scenarios, but diagnostics and treatment rules will have to be honed for them specifically,” Brown said.

Also read: Want to beat antibiotic resistance? Rethink that strep throat prescription

These researchers coauthored the study: David McAdams from Duke University, Kristofer Wollein Waldetoft from Georgia Tech, and Christine Tedijanto and Marc Lipsitch from Harvard University. The research was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (grant OADS BAA 2016-N-17812), the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health (grant U54GM088558), the Simons Foundation (grant 396001), the Human Frontier Science Program (grant RGP0011/2014), the Wenner-Gren Foundations, and the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund.

Media contact/writer: Ben Brumfield

(404) 660-1408

ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

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By Mallory Rosten and Maureen Rouhi

You can’t do gymnastics without using your brain. That’s what Elena Shinohara has learned from her dad. It’s true. When she’s performing, her face is serene. But inside her mind, a lot goes on.

“You have the equipment, and you have your body, and then you have to worry about how clean you are.” And then there’s the artistry. On top of the technical skills, Elena also has to move with the music and perform as a character.

When it all comes together, magic happens. “I’m usually not the first one who talks in class,” Elena says, “I like to express myself with my body. With rhythmic, I can express my feelings with the music.”

Elena is a rhythmic gymnast. This type of gymnastics is performed solely on the floor and involves equipment like clubs, balls, and ribbons. Think figure skating, but without the ice.

Elena’s mom, Namie Shinohara, used to be on the Japanese national rhythmic gymnastics team. As a baby, Elena played with rhythmic equipment. “In first grade, my mom told me I could continue just having fun, or I could compete,” Elena says, “And I wanted to compete, I wanted to go to a higher level.”

Her mom explained what she would have to give up – time hanging out with friends, time spent being lazy and sitting on the couch. Any free moment would have to go to training. At seven years old, Elena knew what she wanted. She said yes.

“The highest my mom went up was sixth place, which is where I am right now,” Elena says. “I feel like we’re connected. She could’ve gone to the Olympics, but she didn’t practice enough. So it’s almost like I’m trying to beat my mom.”

Elena has her sights set on the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, where she was born. But Tokyo is a year away, and to get there, Elena must be selected for the World Championships.

Balancing training with schoolwork is a challenge. Elena came to Tech because she always felt at home here. Her father is Minoru “Shino” Shinohara, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences.

Tech is also within driving distance of Suwanee, where the Shinoharas live. Unlike most college students, Elena lives at home so she can train regularly. “We also help her with nutrition and caloric intake,” Shino says. “That’s difficult to do on campus.”

Shino is an expert in applied physiology with a deep understanding of sports science. He and Namie – who is a national rhythmic gymnast coach and international judge – are Elena’s trainers. “We want athletes to use their brains to get better performance,” Shino says.

Shino applies science in coaching Elena. He videotapes Elena’s routines to have a deep look at the movements. “To control your body against gravity, you need to understand the physics and dynamics and then use your neuromuscular system to make it possible.”

Yet what’s most difficult is the mental discipline. “When gymnasts get into competition,” Shino says “their mental state fluctuates. If the mind is not stable, it sends incorrect commands, which create different movements.”

Elena is a biochemistry major, with hopes of becoming a dermatologist. She must use any free moment she has, including the 15 minutes in between classes, to do schoolwork.

“It’s a good balance because when I’m tired of gymnastics, I can do homework. If I’m brain tired of homework, I can work out my body.”

A national competition in July will determine who will represent the U.S. in the World Championships. Before that, Elena participated in two other international competitions in April, in Poland and in Amsterdam. To compete, she missed school for almost the entire month of April, save for four days before finals.

Elena is “beyond mature and prepared,” her faculty advisor, Kimberly Schurmeier says. “If she’s going to miss something, I know weeks in advance. She’s on top of everything and that’s why she’s able to succeed in and outside of class. She’s not the standard student. She has extraordinary talent on top of scholastic aptitude.”

There have been times when Elena wanted to quit.

“I first made it onto the national team in high school, but I wasn’t that good yet. I was like, what’s the point of doing this?” It was her parents who reminded Elena of her potential.  “I made a goal to do better at the next nationals. I started to work for it, and it was fun for me to get better and better.”

Earlier this year, she started to fall behind in competitions and again considered giving up. “I thought it was because I didn’t have time to practice,” she recalls. “But it was all mental. I realized I was doing badly because I kept worrying during competitions. If I’m more confident with my skills, I do better. So now I’m working on my mental state.”

It all goes back to the brain. Elena’s team, coached by her parents, is called The Rhythmic Brains, named, by her dad, of course. For Elena, the sacrifices to be at the top of her sport is all worth it, if only for those moments of dancing on the floor, moving with the music with athletic precision and artistry.

Mallory Rosten is a communications assistant in the College of Sciences. She did all the reporting and part of the writing of this story.

Joseph “Joe” Lachance is one of three College of Sciences junior faculty to win Georgia Tech’s 2019 CTL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. Jointly supported by the Center for Teaching and Learning and BP America, the award recognizes the excellent teaching and educational innovations that junior faculty bring to campus. Lachance is an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a former Class of 1969 Teaching Fellow.

As a teacher, Lachance believes his primary role is to help students learn. To accommodate students’ different learning styles, he integrates lectures with a various activities. These can be discussions of the literature or computer simulations of real data.  Because empirical datasets can be messy and complex, Lachance says, students must apply critical thinking to get meaningful results, “as opposed to just applying techniques by rote”

Two examples demonstrate the innovative spirit Lachance has brought to the teaching of population genetics and other topics in biology.

For the course Mathematical Models in Biology (BIOL 2400), Lachance organized an iterated Hawk-Dove tournament. Each round involved pairs of students choosing to be aggressive (Hawk) or cooperative (Dove). As the tournament progressed, students adapted to the behaviors of their classmates. “Not only was it fun,” Lachance says, “but the evolving strategies that arose were evidence that every student had gained a deep understanding of game theory.”

"[I]t’s my role to do the best I can to facilitate student learning.  Besides, what could be more fun than having a chance to share cutting-edge details about subjects you love?”

For the course Introduction to Evolutionary Biology (BIOL 3600), Lachance hosted an evolution-themed festival, modeled after the annual film festival held by the Society for the Study of Evolution. During the semester, students produced short videos to illustrate concepts of evolutionary biology. On the penultimate class of the semester, Lachance held a film festival featuring the student projects, complete with popcorn, ballots, and a trophy for the top video.

Lachance’s passion for teaching doesn’t go unnoticed. Students note his excitement, enthusiasm, and innovation in class. “His classes have given me and my peers unique opportunities to exercise our creativity with what we are learning,” one student says.

Lachance demonstrates his care for students above and beyond what students expect, this student adds. “He goes out of his way to express his vested interest in his students’ achievements and well-being in the classroom and beyond.”

“It is an honor to be one of this year’s recipients of the CTL/BP Teaching Award,” Lachance says.   “As an instructor, it’s my role to do the best I can to facilitate student learning.  Besides, what could be more fun than having a chance to share cutting-edge details about subjects you love?”

Struck by climbing suicide rates, third-year School of Biological Sciences major Collin Spencer organized the first Intercollegiate Mental Health Conference, which kicked off on Feb. 15, 2019.  "Mental health is one of the most pressing issues for adolescents in the country right now," Spencer says. 

Bulking up to avoid being eaten may have been one reason single-celled organisms joined to form multicellular entities. That’s one of the hypotheses to explain the transition to multicellularity in the early stages of life on Earth. How and why that transition occurred is one of the major questions in the story of how life began and evolved.

Georgia Tech researchers report evidence to support this hypothesis. Watching in real time, they observed how a single-celled alga became a multicellular organism in just 50 weeks after they introduced a predator. The study was published online on Feb. 20, 2019, in Scientific Reports.

“The study showed that small single-celled organisms can evolve to become larger multicellular organisms as a way to avoid being eaten,” says Matt Herron, a senior research scientist in the School of Biological Sciences and the study’s lead author.

“Nearly every living thing has to contend with the possibility of being a meal to others,” Herron says. Complex life forms have evolved various defenses to avoid becoming someone else's dinner – such as camouflage, speed, weapons, and chemical defenses. One way to avoid being eaten is to become too big for the predators. Among microbes, one way to get bigger is to form a group of cells – in other words, to become multicellular.

All multicellular organisms evolved from unicellular ancestors. But because the evolution occurred hundreds of millions of years ago, it’s hard to know how or why it happened. Experimental evolution allows researchers to watch evolutionary change as it occurs in real time in the laboratory.

“We grew some algae with predators and some without predators,” says William Ratcliff, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and study coauthor. “After 50 weeks, we compared the two cultures. We found that some cultures grown with predators had become multicellular, but cultures grown without predators remained unicellular.”

 “This could be a first step toward the kind of complex multicellularity we see in animals, plants, fungi, and seaweeds,” Herron says. “The multicellular algae that evolved in our experiment could be used to explore how they continue to evolve. For example, can these algae evolve a division of labor, with cells becoming specialized to perform different functions?”

Other authors from Georgia Tech are School of Biological Sciences Professor Frank Rosenzweig, postdoctoral researcher Kimberly Chen, technician Joshua Borin, and graduate students Jacob Boswell and Jillian Walker. Other coauthors are Charles Knox and Margarethe Boyd, of the University of Montana, Missoula.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Packard Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Figure Caption
Depiction of algal life cycles after evolution with (B, C, and D) or without (A) predators for 50 weeks. D shows a fully multicellular life cycle, with multicellular clusters releasing multicellular propagules. (Credit: Scientific Reports)

By Brent Verrill, Communications Manager, Brent Byer Institute for Sustainable Systems

Twenty-three Georgia Tech undergraduate students have been selected for the second class of Sustainable Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURF). Among them are Kathryn McCarthy, School of Biological Sciences; Shivan Mittal, School of Physics; and Gigi Pavur, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.  

McCarthy and Mittal are among the 20 new fellows. Pavur is among the three who are returning from the previous year of the program.

The fellows represent all six colleges at Georgia Tech and were selected from a highly qualified and competitive field of students.

• William Abdallah, Industrial Engineering
• Joseph Buehler, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
• Leo Chen (returning), Computer Science
• Anielle Duritza, Environmental Engineering
• Kian Halim (returning), Computational Media
• Kyte Harvey, Mechanical Engineering
• Connor Hawley, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Chloe Kiernicki, Architecture
• Elizabeth Krakovski, Public Policy
• Micah Landwermeyer, Materials Science and Engineering
• Matthew Lim, Computer Engineering
• Farouk Marhaba, Computer Science
• Kat Matthews, Business
• Kathryn McCarthy, Biological Sciences
• Shivan Mittal, Physics
• Christi Nakajima, Public Policy
• Gigi Pavur (returning), Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
• Leah Claire Nofsinger, Materials Science and Engineering
• Ashlyn Sasser, Industrial Design
• Alexandra Schultz, Chemical Engineering
• Ranal Apeksha Tudawe, Mechanical Engineering
• Jeniveve Vaia, Material Science and Engineering
• Eliya Olivia Wagner, Environmental Engineering

The research fellows, who are paid, are developing prototypes of interactive building-monitoring systems that convey the unique elements, qualities, and performance of the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, which is under construction. The systems will also monitor the behaviors that the buiding engenders among its occupants and visitors.

Through SURF, the students will learn about sustainability, systems thinking, and how to apply these principles to the Georgia Tech Living Building. Their work is facilitated by Michael Chang, deputy director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

As a building coordinator for the School of Biological Sciences, Lyubomir “Lyubo” Lichev takes care of the facility, but more importantly, he takes care of people.

Every workday is different, he said, but each begins at 7 a.m. with a walk through the Cherry Emerson Building to ensure everything is in place from the previous night and ready for the new day.

“Building Coordinator 1 is a very diverse job,” Lichev said. “I handle small things like issuing keys to lab members and putting fuel into the vehicles, to bigger projects like taking inventory of equipment and handling the disposal of old equipment.”

He said he likes helping professors fill their day-to-day needs in the lab, and it’s a rewarding feeling to know that he made someone’s day brighter. He also likes interacting with new people as he does his work.

“The School of Biological Sciences is a big school, so I meet new faces every day,” said Lichev, who is also an industrial and systems engineering Tech student. “It makes an interesting conversation when I meet classmates outside the classroom while working.”

Lichev grew up in Bulgaria and earned a bachelor’s degree in manufacturing engineering from the Technical University of Sofia in 2008. He moved to the United States 10 years ago at age 22, leaving his entire family in Bulgaria. Only three of his classes from Bulgaria were transferable to the U.S., so he effectively had to start college again. In 2017, he earned an associate’s degree in engineering from Georgia State University – Perimeter College. He’s currently a part-time Tech student in his third year.

“The industrial engineering degree I’m pursuing at Tech is a natural follow-up to the manufacturing degree I earned in Bulgaria,” he said. “To me, the industrial engineering degree here shows how a business runs and how we can make it run better. It is very versatile and is the right one for me. I want to see it through.”

Lichev said that after graduating he would like to keep working at Georgia Tech, perhaps as an in-house consultant who examines a unit and identifies ways to help it work more efficiently.

“I know I’m a few years from graduation, and things change,” he said, “but I can see myself retiring from the Institute.”

Lichev said he enjoys being an employee and a student, and he encourages others to do the same through the Tuition Assistance Program.

“I would like to see more of my colleagues take classes,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be at Georgia Tech. As long as the school is in the University System of Georgia, they can access the benefits.”

Away from Work

Lichev’s job, classes, and homework leave him with little time for hobbies.

“When I’m not working or doing schoolwork, the thing I enjoy best is sleep. I know a lot of Tech students can relate to that,” he said. “After graduation, I will develop some hobbies. For now, sleep is my best friend.”

He keeps in touch with his family in Bulgaria through weekly video chats. He said that because of the seven-hour time difference, finding a good time for everyone to talk can be tricky.

His most recent trip to Bulgaria was Christmas 2018. Before then, he hadn’t been there since 2014 when he made a surprise visit on his father’s 50th birthday. 

“I’m not going to wait another four years before I go back,” he said. “If I can, I’ll go back this year.”

Promising research toward what could become the first simple and accurate test for the early detection of ovarian cancer could be validated – and expanded – thanks to a significant grant from the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

If validated, the general technique for the work could also have a variety of other applications. “In my dream world, a single blood test could be used to screen for multiple diseases,” said John McDonald, the leader of the research and a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Ovarian cancer is especially dangerous because women often don’t show symptoms until the disease is in an advanced stage and difficult to treat. In contrast, when caught early “about 94 percent of patients live longer than five years after diagnosis,” according to the American Cancer Society. 

The problem is that there is no good test for detecting the disease at an early stage. 

About seven years ago McDonald and colleagues decided to see if they could change that by merging the disparate disciplines of biology, analytical chemistry and computer science. “Bringing the computer into it was novel at the time,” said McDonald, who is also director of Georgia Tech’s Integrated Cancer Research Center.

His Georgia Tech collaborators on the initial work were Professor Facundo Fernández, the Vasser Woolley Foundation Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry, and Alex Gray, an assistant professor of computer science (Gray has since left Georgia Tech to become VP for Artificial Intelligence Science at IBM). They were joined by clinical consultant Dr. Benedict Benigno, a gynecological oncologist and CEO of the Ovarian Cancer Institute in Atlanta.

Promising Results

The researchers initially analyzed blood samples from 49 healthy women and 46 with early-stage ovarian cancer. They specifically focused on metabolites in those samples. Metabolites are molecules like fatty acids that our cells produce through enzymatic reactions.  

In the molecular equivalent of finding needles in a haystack, they proceeded to analyze some 40,000 metabolites to see if there were any associated with the cancer patients that differed from those in samples from the healthy women. These could be biomarkers for the disease; molecules to screen for in an annual test.

Through a variety of techniques, the team first pared down the original thousands of metabolites to a collection of 255 candidate biomarkers. They then applied machine learning to that set, asking the computer to find any metabolites that were over- or under-expressed in the cancer samples. 

“That’s what machine learning is all about,” McDonald said. “The computer is simply looking for correlations in very large data sets, then it comes back to you with what it has found.”

In 2015 the team reported in the journal Scientific Reports the discovery of 16 metabolites that could distinguish women with ovarian cancer from those without the disease with 100 percent accuracy. “Basically we modeled the face of cancer at the metabolic level,” McDonald said. 

Moving Forward

With the new $100,000 grant, the researchers hope to validate their earlier work with samples from some 1,000 women, as compared to the roughly 100 they originally studied. The new study will also include samples from a much more diverse set of women (the original samples were from Caucasian women).

They also aim to expand the work to look for biomarkers associated with different types of ovarian cancer. “We want to be able to distinguish between a Type II cancer with high malignant potential – one that’s highly likely to spread outside the ovary – and a Type I with low malignant potential. A cancer with high malignant potential you’d want to treat right away, while a cancer with low malignant potential might not require immediate surgery,” McDonald said.

In conclusion, McDonald said, “it’s exciting because the initial results look like [our approach] might work.”

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Media Relations Assistance: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Elizabeth Thomson

The annual Clough Art Crawl, a juried, multi-media exhibition of student art inspired by the connection between artistic expression and the world of science, opens Thursday, March 14 and features the exhibition of visual art, literary pieces, and performance pieces.

More than 150 works by Georgia Tech graduate and undergraduate students will be on display at Clough Commons starting at 4 pm, and then the evening continues at 6 pm at the Ferst Center for the Arts with performances by student groups including GT Salsa Club, Taal Tadka, Infinite Harmony and more, with a light reception.

As an added bonus, the opening night at the Ferst Center will feature demonstrations by four innovative Georgia Tech student project teams as they prepare to take part in the 2019 ACCelerate: ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival in Washington, DC this April.

The visual, digital, structural, and literary art works will be exhibited through July at Clough Commons and feature works of art that are inspired by the connection between artistic expression and the world of science.  In addition to the artwork created independently by students, included in this year’s Art Crawl are artworks developed as part of three programmatic initiatives at Tech:

• International Year of the Periodic Table: In conjunction with the Georgia Tech College of Sciences and the year-long celebration of the International Year of the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements, a special section of the CAC will be devoted to art inspired by the periodic table or a chemical element.
• S.A.W.: Science.Art.Wonder is a Georgia Tech student organization that develops art projects based on research currently conducted at Tech and at Emory University. S.A.W. recruits artists (Tech students, faculty, or staff) to create art based on a paired research lab's work.
• Creative Curricular Initiatives: Creative Curricular Initiatives is a program of the Georgia Tech Office of the Arts dedicated to the idea that nurturing students' artistic sensibilities and exposing students to artistic process is essential to developing creativity and innovation. The Art Crawl will include works from three projects that received CCI funding: 1)  “Interpretations of Sustainable Business” is a collaborative art project under the direction of Dr. Jennifer Lux, writer and editor for the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business. Created by 23 Georgia Tech faculty, staff, students, and alumni., each piece in the 4’ x 5’ artwork relates to environmental sustainability or social dimensions of sustainability; 2) “Like Picasso and Einstein: lines, forms and dimensions” is a gallery exhibition that takes you to the intersection of art and science through student artwork from the Georgia Tech course CEE 8813. A graduate class developed by Dr. Francesco Fedele, this course introduced students to the geometry of space and manifolds, and how these concepts influenced modern arts and sciences; 3) “Shape Machine” is an exhibition of modular printed mylar pieces created by the students of Shape Grammars, the ARCH 4508 class developed by Dr. Athanassios Economou. Students explored fundamentals of spatial and visual composition through a new interactive software, Shape Machine, developed at the Shape Computation Lab at the School of Architecture.

After review by a jury of faculty and staff, winners will receive prizes in each of the categories of visual, digital, structural, literary and performance art; the College of Sciences will also present awards for the top submissions in the special section on the periodic table. Those who view the exhibit at Clough can also vote on a People’s Choice Award. Winners will be announced on March 25. 

The annual Art Crawl now runs in the Spring and Fall semesters.  Each Art Crawl will have a new theme to inspire student artists and to shape the exhibition.  The next Art Crawl will be open for submissions in early fall 2019.

The Clough Art Crawl is coordinated by the Georgia Tech Office of the Arts in partnership with the Georgia Tech Library. For more information please contact info@arts.gatech.edu.