Georgia Tech’s motto of Progress and Service is emulated by its student body, and several students graduating this December have shown a passion for service while studying at Tech.
Joshua Jarrell is among the students walking this week who have given back to their communities in significant ways. He exemplifies service to country.
Jarrell enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate in Fall 2012. He began his service journey during his senior year of high school when he enlisted in the Army Reserves as a construction engineer. After completing undergraduate work at Auburn University, he transferred to the Alabama National Guard to become a medic.
Jarrell, who is earning a Ph.D. in applied physiology, has balanced military service with his studies. In 2015, he had to withdraw from Tech when his Guard unit was mobilized and deployed in northern Iraq.
“During my deployment, I helped train soldiers in combat medicine to support them in their fight against ISIS,” he said.
“Too often veterans just accept the first decent position they’re offered and then struggle to move up in the company or to another field.”
While at Tech, Jarrell joined the Georgia Tech chapter of Student Veterans of America. He enjoyed spending time with the group of veterans and sponsor, David Ross.
“It was nice to sit back and relax in the company of other veterans amid the stresses of graduate work,” he said. Overall, Jarrell had found the community at Tech to be supportive of his service. “When I came back from my deployment, my lab mates and advisor extended themselves in many ways to get me caught up in our field and help get my research going again.”
In the future, Jarrell hopes to develop a program to encourage veterans to pursue higher education before their next career transition.
“Too often veterans just accept the first decent position they’re offered and then struggle to move up in the company or to another field," he explained. "Getting that next degree will set up a veteran for extended success in the civilian world.”
Editor's Note: This article was excerpted from a story published by Georgia Tech News Center on Dec. 14, 2017.
Genetic mutation may drive evolution, but not all by itself. Physics can be a powerful co-pilot, sometimes even setting the course.
In a new study, physicists and evolutionary biologists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown how physical stress may have significantly advanced the evolutionary path from single-cell to multicellular organisms. In experiments with clusters of yeast cells called snowflake yeast, forces in the clusters’ physical structures pushed the snowflakes to evolve.
“The evolution of multicellularity is as much a matter of physics as it is biology,” said biologist Will Ratcliff, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences.
The bigger they are…
Like the first ancestors of multicellular organisms, in this study the snowflake yeast found itself in a conundrum: As it got bigger, physical stresses tore it into smaller pieces. So, how to sustain the growth needed to evolve into a complex multicellular organism?
In the lab, those shear forces played right into evolution’s hands, laying down a track to direct yeast evolution toward bigger, tougher snowflakes.
“In just eight weeks, the snowflake yeast evolved larger, more robust bodies by figuring out soft matter physics that took humans hundreds of years to learn,” said Peter Yunker, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics. He and Ratcliff collaborated on the research that documented the evolution and measured the physical properties of mutated snowflake yeast.
They published their results on November 27, 2017, in the journal Nature Physics. The work was funded by the NASA Exobiology program, the National Science Foundation, and a Packard Foundation Fellowship to Ratcliff.
Questions and answers
Here are some questions and answers to illuminate the study and its significance.
But first, some background: Baker’s yeast, which was used in these experiments, is usually a single-cell organism. Yeast cells with a well-known mutation stick together in groups called snowflakes.
That was not the focus of the experiments, but the yeast snowflakes were the starting point in this study on the evolution of multicellularity.
Why is this study significant?
Such a cell cluster like a yeast snowflake is not a well-integrated multicellular organism yet. To make it to even simple multicellularity like that of some algae is a very long evolutionary haul.
“It’s a journey of a thousand steps,” Ratcliff said. “The key change is for this group of cells not to evolve as a gang of single cells but as one multicellular individual.”
In this work, the researchers showed how snowflake yeast took first steps in that direction by evolving more resilient multicellular bodies that sustained growth. The process was mainly driven by physical forces, as the simple snowflakes did not have complex inner biological workings that were capable of being the main drivers.
“This is an amazing example of multicellular adaptation around physical constraints well before the evolution of a cellular developmental program,” Yunker said.
How does this evolution via physical stress work?
“Yeast snowflakes grew by adding cells end to end to form branches kind of like those of a bush,” Yunker said. “But the branches crowded each other, and the stresses that result made some break off.”
The breakage chopped down the size of individual yeast snowflakes, but after multiple generations, the snowflakes evolved to reduce the crowding of branches by elongating its individual cells.
As a result, the overall snowflakes were less stressed and could grow larger and more robust.
In addition, Georgia Tech researchers discovered that physics made the snowflakes basically have babies. Specifically, the pieces that broke off became propagules that grew into snowflakes of their own.
This reproduction was created by physical force and not by a biological program. Ratcliff published a separate study about the reproduction aspect on October 23, 2017, in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
“Physics does a lot for multicellularity,” Ratcliff said. “It also gives it a lifecycle.” Lifecycle refers to birth, growth, reproduction, and death.
“A consensus is forming that for something to really evolve to multicellularity, very early on, a multicellular lifecycle has to develop.”
Also READ: Evolution, What was the Primordial Stew?
How did the experiments select for these specific adaptations?
Ratcliff and Yunker streamlined evolution in the lab by creating a consistent selection regime for the yeast snowflakes to evolve in. In this case, they selected for snowflakes that were best at sinking.
The snowflakes that sank better were heavier, because they grew larger than others in the manner described above, giving them more mass. “The clusters that evolved to grow bigger were therefore also heavier,” Ratcliff said.
This experimental selection setup befitted natural evolution, which also had to select for size to arrive at complex multicellular bodies, which are much, much larger than single cells.
Mutation of branches is genetic. Is physics really so important here?
That’s correct: Random genetic mutations resulted in the better, longer branches in some yeast snowflakes giving them a cumulative weight advantage.
But the propagation of the superior snowflake mutations was the result of physical stresses not breaking the snowflakes until they had grown larger.
The pieces that eventually did break off, due purely to physical force, were the propagules. Some of them carried mutations forward that made the new snowflakes even better at sinking.
And that was a critical step in the multicellular evolution.
How was stress corroborated as the cause of snowflakes splitting apart?
The researchers put the material properties of the snowflakes to the test under an atomic force microscope. “We squished the clusters and measured how much force and energy you needed to break them,” Yunker said.
“The physical measurement indicated closely the size the clusters would attain before they broke off a branch due to stress,” Ratcliff said.
Also READ: 'Cavemen' had better mental health genes?
Coauthors of this study were Shane Jacobeen, Jennifer Pentz, Elyes Graba, and Colin G. Brandys of Georgia Tech. The research was funded by the NASA Exobiology program (grant #NNX15AR33G), the National Science Foundation (grant #IOS-1656549), and a Packard Foundation Fellowship. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of those sponsors.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has named three researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology as fellows for 2017 for their contributions to the advancement of science.
Baratunde Cola, Mary Frank Fox, and Joshua Weitz, who are members of AAAS, were elected by their peers to receive the honor and join hundreds of their contemporaries who became fellows this year. “This year 396 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications,” the AAAS wrote in its announcement of this year’s fellows.
All three Georgia Tech fellows saw the AAAS Fellowship as encouragement to continue serving science and humanity.
The three have excelled in research in the following fields, according to AAAS: Cola in nanoscale engineering, Fox in the participation and performance of women and men in science, and Weitz in virus dynamics in populations and in ecosystems. Here are summaries of the researchers’ achievements and interests.
Baratunda Cola may be best known for engineering the first-ever optical rectenna. A rectenna, or rectifying antenna, turns electromagnetic waves into direct current electricity, and Cola’s invention was the first known to work with sunlight instead of radio waves, making it an innovation in efficient solar energy generation.
Cola, who is an associate professor in The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, is currently focused on the transfer of heat, and the conversion of energy in nanostructures, particularly those based on carbon nanotubes. He holds three carbon nanotube related patents and is interested in making his innovations producible on a large scale for practical use.
“I was honored that AAAS chose to recognize my contributions to science over the years,” Cola said. “The fellowship gives a bigger platform to my work so it can reach more people and be useful to them.”
Cola’s vision transcends arbitrary confines of a research field. “I think of myself less as being a mechanical engineer and more as a person concerned with the advancement and well-being of people, and I appreciate the power of science to positively affect lives through practical applications.”
In April, Cola received the highest honor awarded by the National Science Foundation to up-and-coming scientists and engineers. Like the AAAS Fellowship, the Alan T. Waterman award also recognized Cola’s achievements in transforming light and heat into electricity on the nanoscale, and it added $1 million in funding to his research.
Cola also serves as CEO of Carbice Corporation, a Georgia Tech spinoff company that has developed a heat-conducting tape that helps prevent electronic devices from overheating.
Mary Frank Fox is known for her research on women and men in scientific organizations and occupations. She is nationally recognized as a leader on issues of diversity, equity, and equity in science, and her work has had a significant influence on science and technology policy.
Fox, who is an ADVANCE Professor at the School of Public Policy in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, is particularly interested in how social and organizational settings, in which scientists are educated and work, influence their performance. She holds multiple board of director positions in societies connected to science and technology policy.
“I’m deeply honored by the AAAS award,” Fox said. “I value that it recognizes my years of research on women and men in sciences and the policy implications for equity.”
Fox sees the award as recognition that her work advances science and is aligned with AAAS’s commitments. “I’m one of the founders of this area of science, and I value this award recognizing this research that advances science,” Fox said.
Joshua Weitz uses models to predict the effects of viruses on populations and on ecosystems, but his work encompasses many complex biological systems. His group combines methods from physics, math, computational biology, and bioinformatics to develop in-depth analytical models of biological dynamics to understand experimental and environmental data.
In the field of virology, he applies this approach to the molecular workings of viruses, their spread through a population and their evolution into new strains. His work is theoretical, but he uses his detailed computational methods to collaborate with experimentalists. Weitz is a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences, Courtesy Professor of Physics and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences.
“When AAAS first informed me, I was honored and humbled. And I was proud of my group and its collective effort in the last 10 years at Georgia Tech to study viral ecology,” Weitz said.
“The mission of the AAAS is ever more important in these times, and being a fellow gives us a greater responsibility to communicate our research beyond the scientific community, to let the public know how it serves society’s betterment by improving public health and environmental health.”
The American Association for the Advancement of Science lays claim to the distinction of being “the world’s largest general scientific society.” AAAS was founded in 1848 and publishes the journal Science as well as many other prestigious research periodicals. The AAAS Fellowship began in 1874.
Advances in technology have driven the evolution of genome analysis and collaborative research forward at a rapid rate. This is particularly evident within the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioeciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where the Genome Analysis Core has added a powerful new tool that allows researchers to look deeper into the gene expression analysis on a single cell level.
“Since we launched in 2012, the core has evolved quite a bit,” says Dalia Arafat-Gulick, who manages the lab of Petit Institute researcher Greg Gibson (professor in the School of Biological Sciences) and the Genome Analysis Core (contained within the Gibson lab space), in the Krone Engineered Biosystems Building. “The usage and diversity of equipment has definitely increased since then, and so have the services we provide.”
It all started with the Fluidigm Biomark quantitative real-time PCR (polymerase chain reaction). PCR, sometimes called “molecular photocopying,” is a fast technique to amplify small segments of DNA. The PCR technique was invented more than 30 years ago and it has transformed the study of DNA – mapping in the Human Genome Project.
PCR can be inexpensive if you’re only looking at a few genes, according to Gibson. “The costs can add up quickly,” he says. “But the Fluidigm platform brings the costs down further.”
This makes it possible, for example, to monitor the expression of 96 genes in 96 samples for around $1,000 (or 10 cents per reaction), “with high accuracy,” Gibson adds.
The latest transformative tool in Georgia Tech’s Genome Analysis Core is the ddSEQ, part of the single-cell sequencing system co-developed by Illumina and Bio-Rad. The Marcus Foundation collaborated with the Petit Institute in providing funding support, as Georgia Tech last April became the first research institution in the Southeast to deploy the ddSEQ.
“The ddSEQ is essentially a sample preparation platform,” explains Steve Woodard, director of core facilities for the Petit Institute. “You’re preparing samples to go downstream for sequencing in the Molecular Evolution Core or the High-Throughput DNA Sequencing Core. Just another example of how our core facilities are integrated.”
The process typically begins upstream in the Cellular Analysis and Cytometry Core, where researchers will utilize flow cytometry to isolate specific cell populations. Then the ddSEQ separates those cells into a sub-nanoliter oil based droplets on a disposable cartridge, in under five minutes, “which gives you a fast turnaround for each cell captured,” Arafat-Gulick says.
Each cartridge can accommodate up to four samples, which allows each sample to be processed simultaneously. Cell lysis, reverse transcription, and bar-coding occur inside the individual droplets, which allow researchers to amplify several thousand transcripts in each cell.
“The next step is to actually get them sequenced,” Arafat-Gulick says. “That’s where the downstream cores [High Throughput and Molecular Evolution] come in. They have the equipment that allows us to ultimately analyze the gene expression levels of these cells.”
In this way, researchers can peek inside hundreds – or even thousands – of cells, seeing how much diversity in the mixture there is, or monitoring how individual cells are responding to treatments, all for around $10 a cell. The technology also exists to sequence the DNA, and measure methylation states of genes, “which is transforming genomic analysis,” Gibson says.
“The next step is to actually get them sequenced,” Arafat-Gulick says. “That’s where the downstream cores [High Throughput and Molecular Evolution] come in. They have the equipment that allows us to ultimately analyze the gene expression levels of these cells.”
A number of Petit Institute researchers, including Krish Roy, Ed Botchwey, and Gibson, are working in the single-cell arena now, utilizing the equipment, techniques, and services available through the Genome Analysis Core.
“It’s a quantitative way to look at RNA sequencing on a single cellular level,” Arafat-Gulick says. “Principal investigators really want to see what’s happening on a cell to cell basis, and this new technology makes this accessible, at a much faster rate than before.”
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The Petit Institute's state-of-the-art research facilities, known as "Core Facilities," serve as a shared resource for the bioengineering and bioscience community. Consultation, training, and technical support is available for a variety of research projects. Users have access to over 100 pieces of lab equipment totaling over $24 million.
Learn more about the Petit Institute’s core facilities and how they can support your research projects.
CONTACT:
Jerry Grillo
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Minda Monteagudo noticed a lack of spaces and programming for women of color on campus. So she applied for a Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship to explore ways to meet the need.
Inspired by the example of African-American musician Daryl Davis, Conan Zhao hopes to use his diversity fellowship to explore the use of music in breaking barriers among people.
Monteagudo and Zhao are among six members of the College of Sciences community to be named 2018 Diversity and Inclusion Fellows. The program brings together faculty, staff, and students who individually and collectively advance their action, research, or teaching objectives while enhancing the culture of inclusive excellence at Tech.
Altogether the 2018 fellows from the College of Sciences are:
- Jennifer Glass, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS)
- Minda Monteagudo, Ph.D. student working under the guidance of EAS Professor Jean Lynch-Stieglitz
- Raneem Rizvi, a School of Biological Sciences (BioSci) major
- Skyler Tordoya Henckell, a School of Psychology major
- Emily Weigel, an academic professional in BioSci
- Conan Zhao, a research assistant in the lab of BioSci Assistant Professor Sam Brown
The 2018 fellows were announced on Nov. 15 at a poster session showcasing the projects of the program’s inaugural 2017 cohort.
Among the 2017 fellows were three from the College of Sciences:
- Jennifer Beveridge, a Ph.D. candidate supervised by School of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Chem/Biochem) Professor and Chair M.G. Finn
- Calvin Runnels, a third-year biochemistry major who conducts research with Chem/Biochem Professor Loren Williams
- Hussein Sayani, a former Ph.D. student of EAS Professor Kim Cobb, now a postdoctoral researcher in Boston University
The 2017 fellows’ projects inspired and encouraged the second cohort and the audience.
Beveridge partnered with Santanu Dey, associate professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, to study the attrition of students admitted to Ph.D. programs at Georgia Tech during the period 2002-2012. According to Dey, who presented the project at the poster session, their big take-away is how little is known about the churn of Ph.D. students at Tech compared with undergrads.
Despite the limited data, the study showed clear differences in rates of Ph.D. completion between men and women and among racial groups. The gaps varied across Georgia Tech schools. The hope, Dey said, is to discover the practices of the schools with high rates of Ph.D. graduation across the board so that they can be shared with other units that are not doing so well.
Meanwhile, Sayani teamed up with Jerrold Mobley, public services associate in the Georgia Tech library, and Michelle Gaines, a former postdoctoral researcher in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and now an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Spelman College. Their project, called Culture Xchange, focuses on person-to-person engagement as a means to tear down barriers, said Mobley, who discussed the work at the Nov. 15 poster session.
With the help of 10 volunteers, they are testing the idea. Through structured discussions, collaborative exercises, and paired excursions, participants share not-so-obvious aspects of their daily lives with each other. The hypothesis, Mobley said, is that “anyone who has the opportunity to engage in real one-on-one interactions with any person of any cultural identity, race, creed, etc., has no choice but to respect who that person is and eliminate any biases that they might have had before.”
“Inclusive excellence is a core value of the College of Sciences,” said College of Sciences Dean and Sutherland Chair Paul M. Goldbart. “I am delighted to see so many members of our college community answering the call for grassroots initiatives to promote and strengthen this core value.”
Scholar, educator, award-winning book author, interdisciplinary innovator, and shaper of future scientists, Joshua S. Weitz wears many hats at Georgia Tech, but his influence reaches far beyond. For his contributions to the field of viral ecology, Joshua Weitz has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Weitz’s research focuses on the interactions between viruses and their microbial hosts, that is, the viral infections of microbial life. Weitz is motivated by seemingly simple questions: What happens to a microbe when it is infected by a virus? Does the infected cell live, die, or change? How do infections of single cells translate into system-wide consequences?
These areas are “of utmost importance” because of the role microbes play in humans and across our planet, says Mark E. Hay, Regents Professor and Harry and Linda Teasley Chair in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. “Yet understanding the role of viruses that infect microbes is at its infancy. Joshua has been identifying the big questions and providing deep insights into how viruses modulate human and environmental health.”
Weitz received his Ph.D. in Physics from MIT and continues to combine mathematical theory and data-driven models to understand complex living systems. His work has led to new quantitative principles underlying the abundances of environmental viruses, the networks of microbes that viruses can infect, and mechanisms by which viral infections change ecosystem functioning.
Recent work from the Weitz group has shed light on ways that phage – viruses that exclusively infect bacteria – can be used therapeutically. Phage therapy – the use of bacteria-killing viruses to treat bacterial infections – was proposed nearly a century ago, but the mechanisms underlying its efficacy remain unresolved. Earlier this year, Weitz and collaborators combined mathematical models and experiments with immunomodulated mice to show that phage do not act alone. In fact, the immune cells of the host act synergistically with phage to eradicate infections.
A productive researcher, Weitz has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed articles, including more than 80 articles since joining Georgia Tech in January 2007. He also wrote an award-winning monograph: Quantitative Viral Ecology: Dynamics of Viruses and Their Microbial Hosts. Published in December 2015 by Princeton University Press, it is “the book” on viral ecology, Hay says. The book was selected by the Royal Society of Biology as the winner of the 2016 Postgraduate Textbook Prize.
In education, Weitz has made an indelible mark by conceptualizing and implementing Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS), which accepted its first group of Ph.D. students in the Fall 2016 semester. As Georgia Tech’s third interdisciplinary Ph.D. focusing on life sciences – after Bioengineering and Bioinformatics – QBioS continues a tradition of fostering innovative, interdisciplinary research, and education.
Weitz has mentored dozens of students and scientists. At Georgia Tech, he has served as primary supervisor for eight Ph.D. theses in biology, bioinformatics, and physics. Eight of Weitz’s former postdoctoral researchers have moved to tenure-track faculty positions in biology, mathematics, and engineering departments.
Weitz fosters new interfaces between the physical sciences, mathematics, computational sciences, and the life sciences through his leadership role in workshops, working groups, and international collaborations. He cochaired an international working group on ocean viral dynamics at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis from 2012 to 2014, chaired a 2015 rapid-response modeling workshop on Ebola virus disease held at Georgia Tech, and is currently a Simons Foundation Investigator as part of the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology.
“He is one of our most obvious interdisciplinary innovators,” Hay says of Weitz. “With his creative ideas, breadth of interdisciplinary vision, and rigorous approach to science, he makes contributions beyond his years.”
In the Ford Environmental Science and Technology Building, the office of Martha Grover is three doors from that of Jennifer Glass. Both are Georgia Tech scientists doing research related to astrobiology – life in the cosmos – but until last year they hardly talked to each other as researchers with common interests.
“We are all so busy,” says Grover, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, a scientific collaborator at the NSF/NASA Center for Chemical Evolution (CCE), and a member of the Center for Space Technology and Research (C-STAR).
Now, Grover, Glass, and others at Tech are members of a growing community that’s coalescing astrobiology activities across campus. In a public debut of sorts, six members of Georgia Tech Astrobiology, as the community calls itself, participated in the 2017 Dragon Con, the premier pop-culture convention on science fiction and fantasy. They wowed the audience, not by fiction or fantasy or over-the-top costumes, but by progress in answering fundamental questions – How did life begin? Where else could life exist? – happening right next door from the meeting venue, at Georgia Tech.
The growing visibility of researchers interested in astrobiology is helping Georgia Tech emerge as a powerhouse in the field. At minimum, says Kenneth Knoespel, a historian of science and professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, “it affirms the importance of this community at Georgia Tech and the importance of astrobiology as a new configuration of disciplines that brings together the natural and human sciences.”
TEEMING WITH TALENT
“Georgia Tech is clearly recognized as a hub for astrobiology and maybe the one that’s growing the most quickly,” says Edward Goolish, the deputy director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI), one of the six elements of the NASA Astrobiology Program. People at Georgia Tech, Goolish adds, “have been generous with their time and have contributed in important ways when NASA has reached out to the science community for input.”
The community includes physicists, chemists, biologists, Earth and planetary scientists, and engineers, as well as historians of science and writers. The scientists are figuring out how life emerged and evolved to the biosphere we know, inventing instruments to detect life outside Earth, and searching for other habitable places in the universe. The science historians and writers are witnessing science in the making and perhaps gathering fodder for the next volume of science fiction.
Broadly defined, astrobiology is the study of life in the cosmos. Its central questions are “What is the origin of life?” and “Does life exist beyond Earth?” Humans have asked these questions since time immemorial. That they are still around attests to the difficulty of discovering and assembling the pieces of a formidable puzzle: the emergence of a biosphere on a planet.
How formidable? According to Eric Smith, a theoretician in the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s team at Georgia Tech (NAI-GT), understanding the nature of the transition from a planet without a biosphere to one with a biosphere should be central to origins-of-life inquiries. However, he says, “a lot of the language to enable that understanding doesn’t exist yet.”
THREE PILLARS
At Georgia Tech, research teams are working across the breadth of questions central to astrobiology. Their activities are exemplified by three specialized research groups: CCE, NAI-GT, and C-STAR.
CCE is building a community in origin-of-life research, said its director, Nicholas V. Hud, at a symposium organized by Georgia Tech Astrobiology last month. In finding answers, CCE takes two approaches, Hud explained. “Bottom up,” it starts with geology and chemistry and understanding the formation of the first polymers of life, which is a major focus of Hud’s. “Top down,” it starts with biology, genetics, and looking back in time at persistent, conserved molecular motifs, as exemplified by the work of Loren Williams on ribosomes.
Like digging a tunnel underground from opposite ends and meeting somewhere in between, the two approaches are converging on the coevolution of the biopolymers of life. Chemistry and biology are telling us the same thing, say Hud and Williams, both professors in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry (SoCB) and members of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB).
At NAI-GT, “we start at the level of the cell,” says Frank Rosenzweig, the School of Biological Sciences (SoBS) professor who leads the NASA group. “Once you have all this biochemistry wrapped in a cell, what happens then? How do they become associated as multicellular organisms? How do they engage in biochemistries that change the environment? We need to understand the interaction between the evolution of life and the evolution of its abiotic surrounding to have a chance of recognizing life elsewhere.
“Although life on Earth manifests in different forms, all are governed by laws of growth, inheritance, and variability,” says Rosenzweig, also a member of IBB. NAI-GT aims to “illuminate and interpret these laws via laboratory-based evolution experiments with microbial populations.” An example is the exploration of the origin of multicellularity by experimentally evolving yeast, as described in the September symposium by Will Ratcliff, an assistant professor in SoBS.
For C-STAR-affiliated faculty, habitability is one key question. What events and conditions in the abiotic sphere yield environments that support life? The NASA-supported work of Jennifer Glass and Chris Reinhard, in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), exemplify the search for answers in this realm.
What signals should we monitor in search of life elsewhere in the universe? What tools do we need to probe for signs of life from the comfort of Earth? What hazards should we prepare for if humans were to go to other worlds?
In EAS, C-STAR members and planetary scientists Carol Paty, Britney Schmidt, and James Wray are co-investigators of NASA-funded projects to answer these questions. So is C-STAR member Paul Steffes, in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as C-STAR Director Thomas Orlando and C-STAR member Amanda Stockton, in SoCB.
WHAT’S NEXT
With the talent on campus, Georgia Tech is becoming well known in the field of astrobiology. At the 2017 Astrobiology Scientific Conference, in Mesa, Ariz., last April, the Georgia Tech “posse” numbered about 30 faculty and students. Last summer, attendees of AbGradCon (Astrobiology Graduate Conference) 2017 selected Georgia Tech to host the 2018 event. This popular meeting for students is funded primarily by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
The astrobiology community at Georgia Tech is “healthy,” Smith says. “The people in strategic positions have good priorities in the sophistication and intellectual integrity they are trying to support.”
The community – now 85 strong and growing – is raring to make its presence felt. It has an ambitious schedule for the 2017-18 school year, spearheaded by the September symposium.
Led by Grover as principal investigator, and with contributions from Glass, Knoespel, Paty, Reinhard, Rosenzweig, Schmidt, Williams, and others – Rebecca Burnett, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts; Glenn Lightsey, School of Aerospace Engineering and C-STAR; and Christopher Parsons, CCE – their proposal for seven projects received funding from the Georgia Tech Strategic Plan Advisory Group (SPAG) and the Colleges of Engineering, Liberal Arts, and Sciences.
The projects aim to showcase the quality and variety of astrobiology projects at Tech, highlight the social impact of these projects, and strengthen the sense of community among faculty and students. The goals will be achieved through formal gatherings, educational innovations, and public outreach.
“As I see it, the point of research universities is to tackle the really important, really deep, and really challenging questions – the ones at the edge of, or even beyond, our reach; the ones that present not just the possibility but the likelihood of failure,” said College of Sciences Dean and Sutherland Chair Paul M. Goldbart at the September symposium. “It’s our duty as administrators to do everything we can to support this kind of truly adventurous research.”
What the astrobiology community is doing not only is exciting, Goldbart said. But also, “it could hardly fit better with the dreams of the College of Sciences and of Georgia Tech.”
Georgia Tech Researchers Working Toward the Goals of NASA’s Astrobiology Program
Planetary Science and Technology Through Analog Research (P-STAR)
Jennifer Glass, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Britney Schmidt, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Amanda Stockton, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Planetary Instrument Concepts for the Advancement of Solar System Observations (PICASSO)
Amanda Stockton
Exobiology: Early Evolution of Life and the Biosphere
Frank Rosenzweig, School of Biological Sciences
Exobiology: Evolution of Advanced Life
William Ratcliff, School of Biological Sciences
Exobiology: Prebiotic Evolution
Loren Williams, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Exobiology: Methane and Iron Metabolisms in Ancient Oceans
Jennifer Glass
School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Faculty Affiliated with NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI)
Jennifer Glass, Chris Reinhard, and Yuanzhi Tang, with University of California, Riverside, team
James Wray, with SETI Institute team
NAI Team at Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences
Kim Chen
Phillip Gerrish
Matt Herron
Teresa Jonsson
Kennda Lynch
Frank Rosenzweig
William Ratcliff
Eric Smith
Pedram Samani
Tim Whelan
NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellows
Bradley Burcar, with Nicholas Hud
Peter Conlin, with William Ratcliff
Moran Frenkel-Pinter, with Loren Williams
Kazumi Ozaki, with Chris Reinhard
Nicholas Speller, with Amanda Stockton
2018 AbGradCon Organizers
Marcus Bray Justin Lawrence
Bradley Burcar Adriana Lozoya
Anthony Burnetti Kennda Lynch
Heather Chilton Santiago Mestre Fos
Chase Chivers Marshall Seaton
Dedra Eichstedt Micah Schaible
Zachary Duca Elizabeth Spiers
Jennifer Farrar Scot Sutton
Nicholas Kovacs Nadia Szeinbaum
George Tan, Conference Chair
Note: This list is not meant to be comprehensive; it represents information that was available as of October 2017.
This list was updated on Nov. 21, 2017, to include all members of the NAI Team at Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences.
PHOTO CAPTIONS
Georgia Tech at AbSciCon 2017. This photo shows only some of the Georgia Tech researchers who attended. From left: Cesar Menor-Salvan, Nick Hud, Justin Lawrence, Jacob Buffo, Frank Rosenzweig, Amanda Stockton, Britney Schmidt, Kennda Lynch, Gavin Mendez, George Tan, Jennifer Glass, Zachary Duca, Nadia Szeinbaum, Aaron McKee, Chloe Stanton, and Marcus Bray (Courtesy of Jennifer Glass)
Georgia Tech Astrobiology at 2017 Dragon Con. From left: Amanda Stockton, Loren Williams, Kenneth Knoespel, Lisa Yaszek, Chris Reinhard, and Britney Schmidt (Photo by Renay San Miguel)
Organizers and Speakers: “Life in the Cosmos.”
Top, from left: Rebecca Burnett, Carol Paty, Kennda Lynch, Jennifer Glass, Martha Grover, Gongjie Li, and Amanda Stockton
Bottom, from left: Thomas Orlando, Paul Steffes, Frank Rosenzweig, Nicholas Hud, Loren Williams, and William Ratcliff (Photos by Maureen Rouhi)
The College of Sciences feted new colleagues joining in the 2017-18 academic year at a summer dinner on Sept. 6. Dean and Sutherland Chair Paul M. Goldbart and Jenny Singleton, associate chair and professor in the School of Psychology, hosted the celebration, which also recognized recipients of 2017 College of Sciences awards.
“It is invigorating to start the school year by warmly welcoming new colleagues into our scholarly community and celebrating our outstanding teachers, researchers, and mentors,” Goldbart said.
One program director, one professor of practice, eight assistant professors, two associate professors, and three professors joined the college in the 2017-18 academic year. Three of them – Felix Herrmann, Gregory Sawicki, and Carlos Silva – have joint appointments in other Georgia Tech units.
The Schools of Biological Sciences and of Chemistry and Biochemistry welcomed the most number of new colleagues in the 2017-18 academic year – four each.
The Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) recruited Casey Bethel, Georgia’s 2017 Teacher of the Year, to coordinate campus communications.
The following individuals joined the college in the 2017-18 academic year:
- Vinayak Agarwal, assistant professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
- Casey Bethel, program director, CEISMC
- Thackery Brown, assistant professor, School of Psychology
- Stephen Diggle, associate professor, School of Biological Sciences
- Albert Fathi, professor of practice, School of Mathematics
- Neha Garg, assistant professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
- Zachary Handlos, academic professional, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
- Felix Herrmann, professor, joint appointment, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and School of Computational Science and Engineering.
- Wenjing Liao, assistant professor, School of Mathematics
- Jesse McDaniel, assistant professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
- D. Zeb Rocklin, assistant professor, School of Physics
- Gregory Sawicki, associate professor, joint appointment, School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Biological Sciences
- Carlos Silva, professor, joint appointment, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Physics
- Alberto Stolfi, assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences
- Marvin Whiteley, professor and Bennie H. & Nelson D. Abell Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Molecular and Cellular Biology, School of Biological Sciences
Also celebrated as new colleagues were Rachel Kuske and Jenny McGuire. Kuske is a professor in and the chair of the School of Mathematics. She joined the College of Sciences on Jan. 3, 2017. McGuire previously held the position of Research Scientist II in the School of Biological Sciences. She is now assistant professor, tenure track, with joint appointment in the Schools of Biological Sciences and of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
Also at the 2017 summer dinner, nine faculty members were named recipients of 2017 faculty awards.
School of Mathematics Professors John Etnyre and Ronghua Pan, with School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Associate Professor Raquel Lieberman, received the 2017 College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Awards. They were recognized for sharing their experience, providing advice and encouragement, and helping the next generation of faculty succeed.
The college selected School of Physics Professor and Chair Pablo Laguna for the 2017 Ralph and Jewel Gretzinger Moving Forward School Award. The award praises leadership of a school chair or senior faculty member who has played a pivotal role in diversifying faculty, creating a family-friendly work environment, or providing a supportive environment for junior faculty. Laguna was commended for driving equity and inclusion and for mentoring of groups underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The award is supported by an endowment fund from School of Mathematics alumnus Ralph Gretzinger.
School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Assistant Professors Chris Reinhard and Britney Schmidt received the 2017 Eric R. Immel Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching. The award salutes exemplary teaching of a foundational class by junior faculty. In particular, Reinhard and Schmidt were commended for “their imaginative and effective redevelopment” of EAS 1601, How to Build a Habitable Planet. Their work has inspired teaching assistants, excited students, and raised enrolment. The award is supported by an endowment fund from School of Mathematics alumnus Charles Crawford.
School of Physics Assistant Professor James “JC” Gumbart, School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor Brian Hammer, and School of Mathematics Associate Professor Anton Leykin were recognized with 2017 Cullen-Peck Fellowship Awards. The awards recognize innovative research led by faculty who are at the associate professor or advanced assistant professor level. They are made possible by a gift from School of Mathematics and School of Industrial and Systems Engineering alumni Frank Cullen and Libby Peck. The awards applaud outstanding research in computational biophysics (Gumbart), in the biology of competition and cooperation in bacterial systems (Hammer), and in applied and computational algebraic geometry (Leykin).
“We are proud to have so many exceptional faculty members,” Goldbart said. “I am especially grateful for the generosity of our thoughtful alumni, whose gifts enable our colleagues to achieve the highest level of success in their teaching, research, and service.”
There is a genomic revolution happening across the planet, as researchers apply genome science and related technologies to advance the understanding of health and disease in different populations, identifying those who are at risk due to genetic and/or environmental factors for developing specific diseases.
It’s a scattered and somewhat inconsistent revolution, however, as some regions with adequate resources set the pace for discovery, while others are left virtually stranded. Such is the case on the African continent, where many countries are being left behind, a situation that has the potential of widening global and ethnic inequalities in health and economic well-being.
Fortunately, though, a collection of individuals and institutions, including the Georgia Institute of Technology, are responding to the challenge and working to bridge the genomic divide. It’s the kind of bridge-building that King Jordan, a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, has grown accustomed to. His lab, and the Bioinformatics Graduate Program that Jordan directs, have been deeply engaged in biotechnology capacity-building efforts in Latin America for close to a decade.
“We’re leveraging bioinformatics and genomics technologies to facilitate public health and to stimulate economic development overseas,” says Jordan, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, who cites the Georgia Tech strategic vision plan laid out in 2010, specifically goal number four, which involves expanding Tech’s global footprint and influence.
“That is done in two ways,” says Jordan. “One is by bringing the world to Georgia Tech and training more globally-engaged students. The other way is to project Georgia Tech’s reach out to the world, and we’re doing both.”
And now it’s happening in Africa, with the recent announcement that Jordan and one of his former grad students, Daudi Jjingo, have been awarded a five-year, $1.3 million grant as part of the NIH’s Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative. H3Africa aims to elucidate Africa’s human genetic diversity (the highest on the planet) and thus one with a high potential of revealing more varied ways in which the human genome interacts with diseases and other environmental pertubations.
The plan is to use the award to support two trajectories, according to Jjingo, who earned his PhD as a Fulbright fellow in Jordan’s research team at Georgia Tech in 2013 and returned to his home country, Uganda, where he is a faculty researcher at Makerere University in Kampala.
“First we want to focus on building a computing and physical infrastructure, and secondly, we want to actually start a bioinformatics program,” says Jjingo. “The idea is to build a sustainable bioinformatics program.”
There is a lot of clinical research happening now in Africa, Uganda in particular, Jjingo says, and researchers currently lack the bioinformatics resources to adequately analyze all of that data.
“So the vision is, at the end of five years we’ll have this program established, well-staffed, with students graduating,” Jjingo says. “Having talented students who graduate creates the infrastructure – it builds the right recipe to build a research center, which means we can move beyond academia and provide bioinformatics consulting services for industry and others.” Their bioinformatics consulting efforts will be modeled after the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory (ABiL), a public-private partnership between the Jordan lab at Georgia Tech and the company IHRC Inc., which provides bioinformatics analysis services and training to industry and non-profit clients.
The program in Uganda will begin, Jjingo says, “with about five Masters students and a couple of PhD students, and the plan is that one of them will spend a year at Georgia Tech – from my own experience, I know the huge value you can get by spending a short time there, learning from a mature research environment and ecosystem. And Georgia Tech personnel will come here to Uganda, to conduct short seminars, and so forth. So we’re talking about an exchange of human resources.”
Jordan adds, “one thing we know that is implicit in the notion of mentoring a grad student is the idea of collaborative research. So when you have a graduate student that serves as the fulcrum between two institutions, it provides a great opportunity build bridges. My hope is that those students will engage in collaborative research that will allow for deeper connections between Georgia Tech and Makerere University.”
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Sand-swimming lizards, slithering robotic snakes, dusk-flying moths and running roaches all have one thing in common: They're increasingly being studied by physicists interested in understanding the shared strategies these creatures have developed to overcome the challenges of moving though their environments.
By analyzing the rules governing the locomotion of these creatures, "physics of living systems" researchers are learning how animals successfully negotiate unstable surfaces like wet sand, maintain rapid motion on flat surfaces using the advantageous mechanics of their bodies, and fly in ways that would never work for modern aircraft. The knowledge these researchers develop could be useful to the designers of robots and flying vehicles of all kinds.
“Locomotion is a very natural access point for understanding how biological systems interact with the world,” said Simon Sponberg, an assistant professor in the School of Physics and School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “When they move, animals change the environment around them so they can push off from it and move through it in different ways. This capability is a defining feature of animals.”
Sponberg has spent his career bridging the gap between physics and organismal biology – the study of complex creatures. His work includes studying how hawk moths slow their nervous systems to maintain vision during low-light conditions, and how muscle is a versatile material able to change function from a brake to a motor or spring.
He recently published a feature article, the cover story for the September issue of the American Institute of Physics magazine Physics Today, on the role of physics in animal locomotion. The article was not intended as a review of the entire field, but rather to show how organismal physics – integrating complex physiological systems, the mechanics and the surrounding environment into a whole animal – has inspired his career.
“The intersection of physics and organismal biology is a very exciting one right now,” said Sponberg, who is also a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech said. “The assembly and interaction of multiple natural components manifests new behaviors and dynamics. The collection of these natural components manifests different patterns than the individual parts, and that’s fascinating.”
Supported by new initiatives at such organizations as the Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory and the National Science Foundation – which are embracing these frontiers – Georgia Tech scientists are learning the equations that dictate how snakes move, understanding how the hair spacing on the bodies of bees help them stay clean, and using X-ray equipment to see how an unusual African lizard “swims” through dry sand.
“It’s a really exciting time to be working at the intersection of evolutionary organismal biology that is realized in these living systems that have come about through the process of evolution, composed of seemingly very complex systems,” he said. “Biological systems are inescapably complex, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t simple patterns of behavior that we can understand. We now have the modern tools, approaches and theory that we need to be able to extract physical patterns from biological systems.”
In his article, Sponberg makes predictions about the research that will be needed for the physics of living systems to advance as a field:
- How feedback transforms physiological dynamics,
- How aggregations of living components, from humans to ants to molecular motors, arise at multiple scales, and
- How robo-physical models of these complex systems can lead to new discoveries and advance engineering.
Engineered systems use feedback about the effects of their actions to adjust their future activities, and animals do the same to control their movement. Scientists can manipulate this feedback to understand how complex systems are put together and use the feedback to design experiments rather than just analyzing what is there.
“We use feedback all the time to move through our environment, and feedback is a really special thing that fundamentally affects how dynamics occur,” said Sponberg. “But using feedback to design experiments is really sort of new.”
For example, in the study of how hawk moths track flowers during low-light conditions, he and his colleagues used feedback dynamics to isolate how the moth’s brain adjusts its processing in dim light. The moths can still accurately track flower movements that occur less than two times per second – which matches the frequency at which the flowers sway in the wind.
Animals are composed of many systems operating at multiple time scales simultaneously – brain neurons, nerves and the individual fibers of muscles with molecular motors. These muscle fibers are arranged in an active crystalline lattice such that X-rays fired through them create a regular diffraction pattern. Understanding these multiscale living assemblages provides new insights into how animals manage complex actions.
Finally, Sponberg notes in his article that robots are playing a larger and larger role in the physics laboratory as functional models that can examine principles of movement by interacting with the real world. In the laboratory of Georgia Tech Associate Professor Dan Goldman – one of Sponberg’s colleagues – robotic snakes, turtles, crabs and other creatures help scientists understand what they’re observing in the natural world.
“Moving physical models – robots – can be very powerful tools for understanding these complex systems,” Sponberg said. “They can allow us to do experiments on robots that we couldn’t do on animals to see how they interact with complex environments. We can see what physics in these systems is essential to their behaviors.”
Sponberg was inspired to study the interaction of organismal biology and physics by the remarkable diversity of animal movement and by nonlinear dynamics, a field made popular when he was a young student by the 1987 best-selling book Chaos: Making a New Science, authored by former New York Times reporter James Gleick. Sponberg hopes today’s students – readers of Physics Today – will also be inspired.
“I voted on this with my career choice, so I think this is a very exciting areas of science,” he added.
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