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Welcome to the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. Learn about graduate and undergraduate programs, our research, upcoming events and news — and dive into a new magazine by the College of Sciences.

Recent News


Sonali Kaluri, Seth Kinoshita, and Medina McCowin have been selected as walk-on recipients of the prestigious Stamps President's Scholarship, recognizing their exceptional academic accomplishments, leadership, and dedication to service.



The annual Student and Alumni Leadership Dinner highlighted the importance of alumni-student connections, with BrandSafway receiving the first-ever Internship Employer of the Year award for its outstanding internship program.



The newly redesigned course, APPH 1040: Scientific Foundations of Health, expands the Institute’s First-Year Wellness Experience and provides students with practical wellness tools and strategies for college life and beyond.



Researchers combine deep learning with advanced sequencing techniques to predict how antibodies interact with antigens.


Upcoming Events

Nov
22
2024
Come join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab every Friday for Fossil Fridays! Become a fossil hunter and help discover how vertebrate communities have changed through time.
Dec
06
2024
Come join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab every Friday for Fossil Fridays! Become a fossil hunter and help discover how vertebrate communities have changed through time.

Experts in the News

DNA samples from one of the world’s largest and oldest plants — a quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) in Utah called Pando — have helped researchers to determine its age and revealed clues about its evolutionary history.“It’s kind of shocking to me that there hasn’t been a lot of genetic interest in Pando already, given how cool it is,” says study co-author William Ratcliff, an associate professor in the  School of Biological Sciences.By inputting Pando’s genetic data into a theoretical model that plots an organism’s evolutionary lineage, the researchers estimated Pando’s age. They put this at between 16,000 and 80,000 years. “It makes the Roman Empire seem like just a young, recent thing,” says Ratcliff.(This also appeared at Newsweek and NewScientist.)

Nature | 2024-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Last week, Michael Wong and Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science welcomed a diverse group of nearly 100 scientists, from microbiology to neuroscience, for a workshop on how complexity emerges and evolves. It was also a referendum on their audacious proposal, which, Wong said in a talk, is “an explanatory framework for the evolution of physical systems writ large, including, but not limited to, biology.”It’s an appealing idea, says Loren Williams, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry who studies the origin of life and attended the workshop. “To me it seems very clear that there is evolution outside of biology.” Take the polypeptide backbone, the chain of molecules that forms the spine of all amino acids, he says. “[Biological] evolution doesn’t touch that, right? It’s the same in everything alive. It always has been. But it’s a product of evolution, I’m convinced.” It’s just that the evolution happened before life began, he says. And so when Hazen and his co-authors proposed their overarching theory, he says, “that just resonated with me.”

Science | 2024-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Spark: College of Sciences at Georgia Tech

 

Spotlight on Research Centers

  • CMDI Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection The Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI) is an interdisciplinary collaboration at Georgia Tech seeking to understand the ecology, interactions and evolution of microbes. We are focused on the understanding microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions that are relevant to human health, ecosystem dynamics and sustainability.
  • CSSB Center for the Study of Systems Biology Recognized by most experts in the field as the future of biology, Systems Biology seeks to understand how complex living systems interact with each other so that we can diagnose and treat disorders such as cancer.
  • ACE Aquatic Chemical Ecology Center At Georgia Tech we have organized a diverse group of ecologists, chemists, sensory biologists, engineers, and quantitative modelers, to focus on chemical cues that many organisms use for to make basic survival decisions.
  • CBID Center for Biologically Inspired Design CBID is an interdisciplinary center for research and development of design solutions that occur in biological processes.
  • CIG Center for Integrative Genomics The Center for Integrative Genomics at Georgia Tech is a virtual affiliation of researchers interested in the application of genome-wide research strategies to diverse biological themes.
  • ICRC Integrated Cancer Research Center The mission of the ICRC is to facilitate integration of the diversity of technological, computational, scientific and medical expertise at Georgia Tech and partner institutions in a coordinated effort to develop improved cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.
  • NanoMAD Center for NanoMAD Our mission is to develop new technologies for detecting, monitoring and controlling self-assembled macromolecular complexes at various levels, including their pathogenic consequences, biological roles and evolutionary origins.

 

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