As second-year transfer students in fall 2020, Grace Ahn and Simone Anderson arrived at Georgia Tech under atypical — mostly virtual — circumstances. After both finished freshman year at another university, Ahn and Anderson began their studies at Georgia Tech while navigating online classes, joining new club meetings over Zoom, and taking part in Tech’s signature weekly campus Covid-19 testing program.
Despite the pandemic upending the traditional learning environment, Anderson and Ahn have each carved out a unique place and college experience on campus.
Both Ahn and Anderson were admitted to Georgia Tech via the Transfer Pathway Program, an initiative through which groups of students are guaranteed acceptance to Tech after completing a full year at another university and fulfilling various requirements related to grades and class credit.
Among these transfer pathway initiatives are the recently announced Atlanta Public Schools (APS) Pathway Program, and the Arts & Sciences Pathway, which provides an opportunity for those not offered first-year admission to Georgia Tech within the College of Design, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and College of Sciences, to apply as transfer students.
“I wanted to come to Tech and learn from great professors and get to collaborate with some of the greatest minds,” shares Ahn on her decision to join the Transfer Pathway Program.
After spending her first year at the University of Georgia, Ahn transferred to Georgia Tech to study biology. Since then she’s joined various organizations including Stamps Health Services Ambassadors, Student Hospital Connections, and the Transfer Student Association, where she currently serves as treasurer. She also works in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, where she connects with potential students and parents via phone and email to give advice and share her perspective as a transfer student.
Like Ahn, Anderson is on the executive board of the Transfer Student Association, where she serves as secretary. She transferred to Georgia Tech from Georgia College & State University, and also studies biology. She is a member of Doctors without Borders and the Student Government Association, where she serves on the elections committee.
Ahn and Anderson both credit the Transfer Student Association as a rich opportunity to meet and connect with students who are experiencing a similar transition — and to help people acclimate to Georgia Tech through sharing advice and friendship.
“I looked [the organization] up on Engage because I didn’t know many people coming to Tech and I wanted to meet more people, especially transfer students who are in the same place as me,” says Ahn. “That’s how I got involved. Everything’s virtual so far — we haven’t had anything in person, but it’s still a great way to connect to other people. We do game nights, scavenger hunts — stuff like that.”
Anderson says she stumbled across the Transfer Student Association social page while scrolling through Instagram, and credits the organization with helping her build the firm foundation for her own community at Georgia Tech.
Adjusting to second-year studies in Atlanta
Ahn and Anderson also share that there was a learning curve for getting used to studying at Tech.
“I feel like back as a first year, I was kind of hand-held, a little bit into like, ‘this is how college works,’” notes Anderson. “You know — you have to get up every morning for classes, your parents aren’t going to wake you up, and so forth. It's very much, ‘here’s how this works — go to it,’ in your first year in college.”
With a large adjustment to an entirely different campus and community, Anderson says it took time to get used to life at Georgia Tech.
“The tradition and culture of Georgia Tech is very different from my previous school,” she adds. One life hack she’s learned along the way? Take a walk and explore Tech’s dining halls. “I went to Willage (West Village Dining Commons) for the first time the other day.”
Ahn adds that the learning atmosphere at Georgia Tech, especially working in a virtual environment, was also an adjustment.
“I had a sense of how colleges work. But the classes were definitely harder and academically challenging — because it's Tech.” At her old university, Ahn noticed that fewer students were as intently and purely focused on academics than at Tech, “so that was kind of different” from her first-year experience.
Ahn and Anderson credit their professors for fruitful learning experiences in their inaugural year at Tech, and are grateful and excited for the engagement opportunities available around campus.
“In my evolution class, my professor will have these websites that have little games and simulations that correspond to the topic we're learning,” says Anderson. “It has several benefits for me. One, he will play them digitally for us, and it helps me understand the content better. And two, it's better than just looking at lecture slides all the time.”
If you’re interested in transferring to Georgia Tech
As far as advice and tips for students considering transferring to campus?.
“Have clear goals — that this is what [you] want,” says Anderson. “If transferring is something you want to do, focus on it. And you know that — but there should be a balance between focusing on transferring to Tech and maintaining a social life. When I was transferring, I was very single-minded on getting here. And there's a balance, so you can enjoy your time at your current institution and still be very focused.”
Ahn also encourages prospective students to gear up and “prepare academically, because it's probably harder here than it is at your previous institution. I have no regrets coming here — I would tell [you] to do the same thing. Even though it’s challenging, I think it's totally worth it.”
Now, with their second year of college and first year on campus in the rear view, Ahn and Anderson stand ready to help share their transfer path to Tech with interested students, and dive into adventures as biology third-years together — and as fellow Yellow Jackets.
While Yassin Watson and his sister were the first in their family to attend college, he says that throughout his childhood, his parents strongly emphasized the importance of education. Because of their support and encouragement, Watson shares that he decided to set his sights high to find a college that would challenge him academically while fostering his personal growth.
Growing up in Atlanta, Watson was familiar with the academic rigor of Georgia Tech and the driven nature and focus of the students who typically attend the Institute. He confides that, despite his preparation, during the first semester of his freshman year, “I was academically challenged beyond comparison to anything I experienced prior.”
The challenge did not intimidate Watson — it invigorated him. It also led him to appreciate and love Georgia Tech’s “incredibly diverse community of students from different countries, majors, and life experiences,” he adds.
And over the six years he has spent at Georgia Tech since then, Watson has kept busy. He’s graduating this May with degrees in biology and industrial engineering, along with minors in social justice and physiology. On campus, he serves as president of the Georgia Tech chapter of Beta Beta Beta (Tri-Beta), and is involved in GT Veggie Jackets, the GT-e Distance Running Team (which he co-founded), and the GT Healthy Jacket program.
He has also focused on service, particularly in his senior year. “The pressure of the pandemic pushed me to ask myself what I can do in a virtual capacity to continue my service as a steward of my community,” he shares. As a result, last summer Watson contributed pro bono research with industrial engineering to help with creating resource allocation modeling tools to facilitate a safe return to campus in fall 2020.
Over the course of the past school year, he also teamed up with the executive board as president of the Georgia Tech Biology Honor Society to “work diligently to navigate challenges in revamping our digital infrastructure — to increase student engagement and ensure a successful series of event programming.”
In his tenure at Tech, Watson has also completed several semesters of wide-ranging research across the School of Biological Sciences, Stewart School of Industrial Engineering, and Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Watson graduates as an aspiring physician-astronaut “carving my own path to advance the intersections between medicine, engineering, and space exploration.” That journey will keep him in Tech’s orbit for a few more years — Watson plans to stay at Georgia Tech to pursue his master's in health systems and a certificate in astrobiology before applying to medical school.
Watson recently joined us virtually for a Q&A on his time as a student and what’s next:
So, how have your initial expectations of Georgia Tech compared to your actual experience?
As a native Atlantan, I’ve spent my whole life near Georgia Tech. Throughout my grade school years, teachers never hesitated to sing the praises of our world-renowned institution — in its ability to attract some of the brightest minds on the planet. Additionally, my parents always emphasized the importance of education in improving the quality of life for others and for myself, so Tech was on my radar long before my enrollment.
After graduating high school and finally starting my journey here, I considered a handful of different career options but didn’t have the slightest idea of what would actually take place over the next few years. Like most, I heard many, many stories about Tech’s rigor, and after my first semester, I rapidly became acquainted with it … it was also during my first semester here that I began to realize how truly diverse, unique, and inspirational our community is.
Every single person I’ve met at Tech is incredibly gifted at something — whether or not that gift is directly related to our school’s reputation as a trailblazer of technology. Just as many athletes, musicians, chefs, and poets study for finals in the CULC (Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons), [so] do future policymakers, engineers, scientists, and activists. And with each new team I joined over the subsequent semesters since my first, I witnessed, time and time again, that a single Yellow Jacket can wholly embody many of these identities.
If there is one initial idea that I had about Tech that was flipped on its head after my actual experience here, it is the realization that we are not a monolithic group of students solely concerned with academic achievement.
Our hard work in the books translates to what we are passionate about outside the classroom walls, and it has been a blessing to be welcomed into such a highly motivated community of multi-talented students while navigating the oftentimes rocky transition of blossoming into young adulthood.
What is the most important thing you've learned at Georgia Tech?
This past pandemic year has given us all a sobering reminder that life tends to be more enjoyable in the company of others. So if there is any nugget of wisdom to single out as the most important thing I’ve learned while at Tech, it is the need for us to have community in anything we do.
The mutual exchange of support between myself and the groups I’ve been a part of during my time here have laid the foundation for unbreakable friendships and professional relationships that I cherish deeply.
Whether in classes, clubs, internships, or research, the process of collaborating with others to reach a shared goal has consistently proven challenging — yet ultimately fulfilling. As they say: if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together!
What is your greatest achievement at Georgia Tech?
My greatest achievement at Tech has been my involvement in research on Alzheimer’s disease. I could speak endlessly to the extraordinary demands of formulating and testing research questions, but what makes this so personally significant to me is that my team’s work will contribute — even the slightest bit — to [fewer] families being severely impacted by the vicious effects of the disease.
My dad had Alzheimer’s disease throughout my childhood until his passing a couple years before I started college. Reginald Watson was one of the kindest, smartest, and hardest working people I’ve ever known and is one of my greatest role models in life. Although he died when I was just coming of age, many experiences I’ve had in the years since have brought me emotional closure in his absence.
But it was the countless mornings, evenings, and nights I spent in the Pathology Dynamics Laboratory on Atlantic Drive that have served as one of the most cathartic outlets for mourning. I cannot thank my research mentor and principal investigator, Dr. Cassie Mitchell, or any of my beloved teammates enough for allowing me to work with them on something that means so much to me — and millions of other families worldwide.
Which professors or classes made a big impact on you?
Far, far too many to list them all here. Different professors helped me at different times of my journey for the different needs I had at each different stage! For my first four and a half years at Tech, I was solely studying industrial engineering and social justice, so I received priceless guidance and mentorship in my career, academics, and personal life from countless faculty in the College of Engineering and Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
In the past year and a half, amongst faculty in the College of Sciences, Dr. Shana Kerr’s introductory biology class made me absolutely certain that I wanted to stick with the subject when I was just minoring in it at the time. Her enthusiasm for life sciences is impossible to miss!
Dr. Kerr then warmly welcomed me under her academic advisement when I made the jump to pursue a full biology major soon after taking Dr. Adam Decker’s human anatomy class and lab. His unparalleled passion for understanding the most intricate details of the human body at every scale was one of the largest motivators for me to commit my career to medicine.
Similarly, Dr. Benjamin Holton’s survey of medicine class presented the special opportunity to perform case studies, conduct medical ethics debates, dissect hearts, and engage in many other invaluable experiences regarding the field of healthcare — all while in a small group setting. Dr. Holton was serving as the director of Stamps Health Services when I took his class, and it was surreal to get his first-hand account of the unfolding pandemic as it rapidly affected our global and local community, especially since we had just gone over a case study on the 1918 influenza pandemic just a few weeks prior.
Coincidentally, Dr. Holton was one of the first people I came face-to-face with in our first semester back on campus this school year as he kindly evaluated me after I broke my shoulder while skateboarding. (Holton continues to serve as senior director of Stamps Student Health Services, and continues to help advise and lead Georgia Tech’s Covid-19 response and recovery efforts, including campus testing and vaccination clinics.)
Moreover, Dr. Colin Harrison was the professor of both of my introductory biology lab classes, and has served as the advisor and principal investigator for my senior research thesis on biology laboratory education. His work in diversity, equity, and inclusion in science motivates me to use my platform for similar initiatives throughout my career.
Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention Dr. Emily Weigel. She was my professor for ecology lab, behavioral biology, and organismal biology — and has repeatedly gone far above and beyond her teaching duties to truly look out for and care for her students in every single class I’ve had with her. Dr. Weigel seamlessly blends a variety of instructional strategies that combine inquiry — collaboration when needed — innovative assignments, and overall a ton of fun! She is a professor who is truly able to see students for who they are and what makes them unique, all while managing to motivate them to learn the material. And I can’t help but geek out when we chat about birds and mushrooms.
Georgia Tech and our College of Sciences is very lucky to have such compassionate, intelligent, and creative faculty in the School of Biological Sciences, and I am just as lucky to have been their pupil.
One more question: What’s your advice for fellow students?
Build community in your friendships, organizational involvements, and professional relationships with faculty, and you will have a solid support network to help you explore all that Georgia Tech has to offer, even when times get very difficult. And always acknowledge and thank the tireless efforts of our staff who work so hard to keep our community clean and safe!
Jessica Kilpatrick chose to attend Georgia Tech because she knew that “it would prepare me for my future and get me to the next step.” Now graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and minor in health and medical sciences from the Institute, with plans to attend the Emory University Physician Assistant Program in the fall, Kilpatrick says she feels confident that her time at Georgia Tech has prepared her for the next phase of her life.
Kilpatrick shares that on campus as an undergrad, she found a healthy balance between academics, career preparation, and social time. She kept focus on her classes — while making time to play volleyball and spend time with her friends, boyfriend, and nieces.
She also worked as a student assistant trainer and currently serves in the coveted role as head student athletic trainer for Georgia Tech Football, which she notes as her favorite activity so far at Georgia Tech. “Being able to work with a team I grew up cheering for has been surreal, and I am sad that my Saturdays on Grant Field have come to a close.”
As she prepares for the semesters and new adventures ahead, Kilpatrick plans to celebrate her graduation by attending this spring’s Commencement ceremony with her family. “I am most looking forward to getting my degree and completing one of the hardest things I have ever done,” she adds.
Kilpatrick recently joined us virtually for a Q&A on her time as a student and what’s next:
So, how have your initial expectations of Georgia Tech compared to your actual experience?
Before coming to Georgia Tech, I was worried about the rigor and difficulty of classes. I thought that there would not be much time to do things that I enjoy, but I was wrong. I found that, to do well and maintain my mental health, I had to go out and enjoy things. It has been those moments with friends that have really grounded me, and kept me at a level needed to succeed at Georgia Tech.
What is the most important thing you've learned at Georgia Tech?
The most important thing I have learned while at Georgia Tech is that academics are not everything. It is important to join clubs, stay active, and do things you enjoy. During my first year, I found a group of friends who loved to play volleyball, so twice a week we would go out and play.
This not only would give me a break from my work, but it would also lower my stress and allow me to be more attentive once I started studying again. It is important to find people who share similar interests as you and help you relax, but also encourage you to focus on school when needed.
What is your proudest achievement at Georgia Tech?
My job with the football team is my proudest achievement. In the spring of my first year, I started working as a student athletic trainer with the team. Since then, I have transitioned into the role of head student (athletic trainer), obtained over 2,000 hours of experience, and earned over $20,000 in scholarships.
While working alongside some talented athletes has been amazing, I am even more blessed for the training I have received from the athletic training staff, and the connections I have made that will further advance my medical career.
Which professors or class made a big impact on you?
Dr. Meghan Babcock has by far been my most influential professor, and she has served as my academic advisor for the past two years. Every time I stepped into her classroom or office, or even saw her around campus, she spoke to me by name and asked how things were going. For a professor to care that much for her students was amazing, and it was comforting to know that I could go to her if I ever needed help. Because of her attentiveness and care, she will always be someone I remember.
As far as classes go, Chemistry 1212 had the biggest impact on me. Throughout high school, I made all A’s, but I knew that at Georgia Tech, that was likely going to end, and I was prepared for it. During the fall of my second year, Chem 1212 broke my perfect record. And the grade? 89. Although I knew my perfect record would eventually end, it was still a humbling experience and again proved to me that academics are not everything. You do not have to be perfect to be successful.
What is your most vivid memory at Georgia Tech?
During my first semester, I ended up with pneumonia and was having some bad reactions. But it was a hell week, and I would not let little ole pneumonia stop me. Well, it ended up stopping me anyways. I was in a study session for a calculus test that was coming up, and my throat was swelling up on me. I had to rush out of the study session, walk 20 minutes to my dorm, and finally get to the hospital.
While it was happening, I could not help but see the humor in the situation. I did not listen to my body telling me it needed to rest, so it made the decision for me. At this point I was not fully sold on the idea that "school isn’t everything," but that experience definitely pushed me to start realizing that my health is important too.
What is one piece of advice would you offer a current student?
Don't let academics get in the way of forming friendships. There is definitely a balance, and schoolwork should not be neglected — but you will regret not spending time with your friends when given the chance. Go to sporting events, go to SCPC (Student Center Programs Council) events, take advantage of your time on campus, because those are the memories you will keep.
Where are you headed after graduation?
I am very excited to say that I will be heading to Emory University to join their Physician Assistant Program. My job with the Georgia Tech Football team, balance of life and school, and help from professors like Dr. Babcock all helped me get to this point — and I definitely owe Georgia Tech big time for how it has set me up for success.
Scientists have long thought that there was a direct connection between the rise in atmospheric oxygen, which started with the Great Oxygenation Event 2.5 billion years ago, and the rise of large, complex multicellular organisms.
That theory, the “Oxygen Control Hypothesis,” suggests that the size of these early multicellular organisms was limited by the depth to which oxygen could diffuse into their bodies. The hypothesis makes a simple prediction that has been highly influential within both evolutionary biology and geosciences: Greater atmospheric oxygen should always increase the size to which multicellular organisms can grow.
It’s a hypothesis that’s proven difficult to test in a lab. Yet a team of Georgia Tech researchers found a way — using directed evolution, synthetic biology, and mathematical modeling — all brought to bear on a simple multicellular lifeform called a ‘snowflake yeast’. The results? Significant new information on the correlations between oxygenation of the early Earth and the rise of large multicellular organisms — and it’s all about exactly how much O2 was available to some of our earliest multicellular ancestors.
“The positive effect of oxygen on the evolution of multicellularity is entirely dose-dependent — our planet's first oxygenation would have strongly constrained, not promoted, the evolution of multicellular life,” explains G. Ozan Bozdag, research scientist in the School of Biological Sciences and the study’s lead author. “The positive effect of oxygen on multicellular size may only be realized when it reaches high levels.”
“Oxygen suppression of macroscopic multicellularity” is published in the May 14, 2021 edition of the journal Nature Communications. Bozdag’s co-authors on the paper include Georgia Tech researchers Will Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Chris Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; Rozenn Pineau, Ph.D. student in the School of Biological Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS); along with Eric Libby, assistant professor at Umea University in Sweden and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
Directing yeast to evolve in record time
“We show that the effect of oxygen is more complex than previously imagined. The early rise in global oxygen should in fact strongly constrain the evolution of macroscopic multicellularity, rather than selecting for larger and more complex organisms,” notes Ratcliff.
“People have long believed that the oxygenation of Earth's surface was helpful — some going so far as to say it is a precondition — for the evolution of large, complex multicellular organisms,” he adds. “But nobody has ever tested this directly, because we haven't had a model system that is both able to undergo lots of generations of evolution quickly, and able to grow over the full range of oxygen conditions,” from anaerobic conditions up to modern levels.
The researchers were able to do that, however, with snowflake yeast, simple multicellular organisms capable of rapid evolutionary change. By varying their growth environment, they evolved snowflake yeast for over 800 generations in the lab with selection for larger size.
The results surprised Bozdag. “I was astonished to see that multicellular yeast doubled their size very rapidly when they could not use oxygen, while populations that evolved in the moderately oxygenated environment showed no size increase at all,” he says. “This effect is robust — even over much longer timescales.”
Size — and oxygen levels — matter for multicellular growth
In the team’s research, “large size easily evolved either when our yeast had no oxygen or plenty of it, but not when oxygen was present at low levels,” Ratcliff says. “We did a lot more work to show that this is actually a totally predictable and understandable outcome of the fact that oxygen, when limiting, acts as a resource — if cells can access it, they get a big metabolic benefit. When oxygen is scarce, it can't diffuse very far into organisms, so there is an evolutionary incentive for multicellular organisms to be small — allowing most of their cells access to oxygen — a constraint that is not there when oxygen simply isn't present, or when there's enough of it around to diffuse more deeply into tissues.”
Ratcliff says not only does his group’s work challenge the Oxygen Control Hypothesis, it also helps science understand why so little apparent evolutionary innovation was happening in the world of multicellular organisms in the billion years after the Great Oxygenation Event. Ratcliff explains that geologists call this period the “Boring Billion” in Earth’s history — also known as the Dullest Time in Earth's History, and Earth's Middle Ages — a period when oxygen was present in the atmosphere, but at low levels, and multicellular organisms stayed relatively small and simple.
Bozdag adds another insight into the unique nature of the study. “Previous work examined the interplay between oxygen and multicellular size mainly through the physical principles of gas diffusion,” he says. “While that reasoning is essential, we also need an inclusive consideration of principles of Darwinian evolution when studying the origin of complex multicellular life on our planet.” Finally being able to advance organisms through many generations of evolution helped the researchers accomplish just that, Bozdag adds.
This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant no. DEB-1845363 to W.C.R, NSF grant no. IOS-1656549 to W.C.R., NSF grant no. IOS-1656849 to E.L., and a Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering to W.C.R. C.T.R. and W.C.R. acknowledge funding from the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
Earth’s average surface temperature has risen approximately 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s — most of that rise in the past 40 years, according to NASA. That’s due in large part to the increase of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, caused by human activity. This has led oceans to warm, ice sheets to melt, and sea levels to rise faster — and it has accelerated the frequency of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes.
When it comes to facing these challenges, “It’s all hands — and all solutions — on deck,” says Susan Lozier, dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech and president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). "While we as scientists continue to embrace discovery science, we need to more fully embrace solution space."
Georgia Tech faculty across a number of disciplines are working on projects in ocean science and engineering aimed at identifying, projecting, mitigating, and even reversing the effects of climate change. Many of these researchers are doing so in conjunction with Georgia Tech’s Ocean Science and Engineering (OSE) program and its founding director, Emanuele “Manu” Di Lorenzo, professor of ocean and climate dynamics.
Though the OSE program is relatively new — accepting its first students in 2017 — it has attracted attention for its ability to coordinate and integrate the ocean systems work being done at Georgia Tech and beyond to solve significant problems. “There is a new cohort of people who are needed — problem-solvers of Earth climate, and this involves the ocean,” Di Lorenzo says. “Our hope is that through the OSE program, we will provide students with the tools and the knowledge and resources to be active players as new ocean leaders. This goes beyond them being researchers.”
In 2014, when Adam Decker started teaching the anatomy lab and lecture course BIOS 3753 in the School of Biological Sciences, he and his students relied on printed anatomy diagrams and plastic models of organs to understand the human body. Decker knew that many of his pre-health students would soon be on their way to medical schools elsewhere — and he worried that these undergrad classes would pale in comparison to what they’d later encounter as graduate students with more hands-on experiences.
“It just didn’t get the punch across like I wanted — for having the students know what a heart feels like in their hands, what a lung feels like,” says Decker, a senior academic professional in Biological Sciences at Tech. “Pieces of plastic are fine, and they serve a purpose — but it’s not the real deal like they would see in grad school.”
Student evaluations of his course would occasionally echo those same sentiments. Why couldn’t neuroscience students study an actual human brain to better understand how it works?
Those evaluations led Decker to explore how he could bring human cadaveric specimens and organs to Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus for his students to study. The feedback from students now learning anatomy from those specimens is clear — Decker’s lab and course are among some of the fastest growing classes in the School, with students from a variety of disciplines showing interest — such as a biomedical engineering major who wants to design heart valves and is looking for hands-on experience, and an aspiring physician-astronaut “carving my own path to advance the intersections between medicine, engineering, and space exploration” as a dual major in biology and industrial engineering, with dual minors in social justice and physiology.
A related special topics course in pathology started by Decker could soon be a permanent addition to the School of Biological Sciences curriculum, with a growing base of young alumni who share that they’re now deciding on specialties in medical school based on their experiences in his classes.
“We are so lucky to have Adam as an instructor at Georgia Tech,” says Michael (Mike) Goodisman, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “Adam has great reviews from the students in his classes. They can see how passionate he is about understanding human form and function. These are very difficult classes — but the students love them. And Adam is always trying to provide the most contemporary and exciting class experience possible.”
“This was the first time these specimens have been brought to campus,” Decker says. “The human side of our biology curriculum is really growing here. I’m just grateful to have had a part in that, developing courses and helping satisfy that need. It’s an exciting time to be in pre-health here.”
Adopting a new approach to anatomy
Creating these immersive courses took time, Decker says. His path to bringing cadaveric specimens to Georgia Tech involved two years of advocacy— phone calls, meetings, and negotiations with groups split across Georgia Tech and Emory University School of Medicine, along with teaming up with fellow School of Biological Sciences professors who supported the collaborative effort for campus.
Back in 2018, Decker signed up to teach with Georgia Tech’s Pacific Study Abroad Program, through which students travel to New Zealand and Australia for courses and cultural experiences. Decker was leading the Scientific Foundations of Health (APPH/BIOL1040) class there, and says the trip helped him decide to look at adding cadaver classes and labs to curriculum offerings back at Tech’s Atlanta campus.
On the south island of New Zealand, he explains, the University of Otago in Dunedin has a medical school with a popular Anatomy Museum, “where you could go in and they have all the prosections (specimens that demonstrate anatomic structure for students), all the cadaver organs, sections of tissues and bones, and anything you could think of related to the human body,” he says, “and it was open to the public.”
After peppering the curator with questions about the process of obtaining and hosting specimens, “I started thinking that there’s no reason we can’t do this back home. We don’t have a medical school — but Emory is right down the road.”
When he returned to Atlanta, Decker connected with colleagues at Emory University to see how cadaveric-based curricula might be made available at Georgia Tech, launching a multi-year effort with detailed requirements, and logistics — and a unique philanthropic program.
A team from Emory inspected the anatomy lab space on Tech’s campus, in a recently renovated building where courses and labs were planned. The group inquired about security arrangements, and laid down detailed rules and logistics for things like storage temperature, transportation, and appropriate humidity levels for specimens.
Regarding that last stipulation: Decker also happens to be a licensed embalmer in the state of Georgia. “I’m the guy who can keep the specimens preserved, and where they need to be, as far as preservation goes, and not pose a public health risk to the community. Emory liked that.”
The university also offered to help through a very unique philanthropic initiative — the Emory Body Donation Program. Decker explains that some of the cadaveric specimens that Emory and Tech’s future doctors, nurses, researchers, and founders study are thanks to generous individuals — often alumni — who, as the program notes, “wish to be useful to the living after death. We all cannot endow a hospital or establish a clinic, but each of us has the opportunity to make one valuable gift to medical science - the gift of his or her body after death.”
“This was something new for the school, I know,” Decker shares. “But the semesters were rolling by and students were missing the opportunity — because we were hung up” with finalizing paperwork and agreements across Emory and Tech.
So Decker reached out to his colleague Mike Goodisman, who made some calls and arranged a phone conference with both universities. The remaining questions and legal considerations were soon resolved, and Decker was invited to Emory to conduct dissections for the cadavers and specimens he would bring back to Georgia Tech.
“They left me with twenty cadavers. I was able to get multiple hearts and lungs, entire gastrointestinal tracts, brains, and a spinal cord,” he explains. “It took me seven hours to get the brain and spinal cord in one section — that specimen has proven valuable to the neuroscience majors. They want to see everything in one piece. These are really unique things that get the students excited.”
Student reaction, and respect for the specimens
Studying human hearts allows students to trace blood flow, something they could begin to learn from plastic models, but “it’s nothing like holding the real thing, and being able to trace the actual blood flow. It’s an amazing experience they get to have with this.”
That experience has prompted some graduates of Decker’s classes to even change their medical school plans. “Now they’re telling me they want to go into cardiology. They’re choosing a specialty because of this — and that’s the best experience, when you get them excited about something and they want to devote themselves to it.”
That energy is reflected in class attendance. The first human anatomy class Decker taught in 2014 had 66 students. In fall 2020, even with Covid-19, he had close to 295 students. “This is an upper elective 3000-level course. It’s almost unheard of to have almost 300 students.”
His senior-level human pathology course kicked off in 2019 as a special topic elective with 33 students. Decker is now running it for the second time, and has enrolled nearly 100 students.
“Dr. Decker has really done a great service to the students of Georgia Tech in bringing this course to life, so to speak,” says Young-Hui Chang, professor and associate chair for Faculty Development in the School of Biological Sciences. “He has worked incredibly hard to get us to the point where we can offer a unique cadaver-based human anatomy course to our undergraduate students. In particular, the students who have ambitions for a variety of health-related careers really benefit from this unique experience of learning from real human anatomy — and to learn it under the guidance of a truly gifted anatomist and teacher in Adam Decker.”
As to how students react to seeing specimens for the first time? “They’re usually very silent. Everybody is sitting down, nobody was talking. There’s almost a reverence you feel — as there should be. I tell them that this person loved somebody, lost somebody, went to school. You need to hold these specimens and have that reverence for them. These were people, and they’ve given the gift of themselves to help you learn.”
New technology applied to an ancient practice
Decker adds that anatomy is “pretty old school,” pointing out that dissections and naming of the body’s structures occurred in the 1500s. “Anatomy is a very old science, but it’s actually the basis of all health care. It’s the first course medical students take before they become doctors or nurses. You have to know what’s normal anatomy before you know what’s abnormal.”
Decker also wants to complement his anatomy and pathology courses by adding some new technology to traditional offerings. For instance, a California-based company, Anatomage, makes what it calls a virtual dissection table — essentially a typical human cadaver in digital form. A seven-foot-long “operating table” is basically a large flat screen with an image of a cadaver. By touching the screen, students can “cut away” tissue. Body parts are annotated, “so everything is labeled. It’s amazing. That’s where a lot of this is headed.”
Decker says Stanford University School of Medicine is now using the tables, and he’s put in a budget request in hopes of adding two of these tables to Tech’s campus.
In the meantime, he hopes to optimize storage and specifications so that students can work more directly with the specimens. Decker knows that his students would be ready to take on the challenge. “My anatomy class is not a typical undergrad course. It’s more of ‘one foot in medical school content, one foot in undergrad.’ It’s pretty intense, but I feel confident they will do well — and they always do.”
This story first appeared in the Georgia Tech Bioinformatics News Center.
The Bioinformatics Interdisciplinary Graduate Program is proud to announce Devika Singh as our winner for the inaugural “Mark Borodovsky Prize in the College of Sciences” for the Top Bioinformatics PhD student, 2021. The Borodovsky Prize is intended to recognize outstanding academic merit at Georgia Tech.
Devika works with professor Soojin Yi, in the Comparative Genomics and Epigenomics Lab at Georgia Tech. Devika completed both her bachelor’s (Biology) degree and her master’s (Bioinformatics) degrees at Georgia Tech. She worked for one year at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before returning to Georgia Tech to pursue her doctoral studies in 2017.
Devika’s doctoral work integrates large “-omics” datasets to study broad questions around the organization and evolution of non-coding regulatory regions, particularly enhancers, in the human genome. This work includes investigating the underlying architecture of enhancer-gene regulatory networks utilizing multi-tissue, whole-genome chromatin state maps (Results published in MBE). Indicative of the breadth of research in the Yi lab, Devika also worked on projects which analyzed DNA methylation signatures in non-human primates and non-model organisms. In collaboration with researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Australia Museum, she generated and explored the first tissue- and sex-inclusive, whole-genome “DNA methylome atlas” for the modern koala.
So far in her studies, Devika has published eight papers, including five first-author papers. In addition, Devika gave a poster presentation at a CDC conference in 2017. She also received a travel award to present her work at the Allied Genetics Conference earlier this year. Although the meeting was canceled at the last minute due to the pandemic, the fact that Devika was granted a travel award and invited for a presentation speaks for the strength of her work.
Yi notes, “Devika and I have several projects in the pipeline, and I expect she will have at least two additional papers as the lead author from her PhD studies. She is one of the best students I have worked with during my 16 years as a faculty member at Georgia Tech.”
The Borodovsky Prize nominations were reviewed by an interdisciplinary committee of faculty members, including Joe Lachance (College of Sciences), Peng Qiu (College of Engineering), and Xiuwei Zhang (College of Computing). According to the committee, “Devika Singh exhibited an impressive ability to both analyze complex bioinformatics datasets and frame her research within a larger biological context. Despite the pandemic, she was able to publish three high-profile first author papers in 2021. Topics covered in these papers ranged from the evolution of regulatory DNA in humans to epigenetics in koalas.”
Congratulations to Devika!
This story first appeared in the Georgia Tech News Center.
Located on the rooftops of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons and The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, the Urban Honey Bee Project is a unique interdisciplinary undergraduate research program focused on the impact of urban habitats on honey bees.
May 20 has been designated by the United Nations as World Bee Day, aimed at raising awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face, and their contribution to sustainable development.
Many of Georgia Tech’s research projects focus on improving the human condition and nurturing the well-being of human communities, but the Urban Honey Bee project is all about improving conditions for these beneficial social insects.
The director of the Urban Honey Bee Project is Jennifer Leavey, a principal academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences and the College of Sciences.
“The project allows Georgia Tech students to apply what they are learning in science, engineering, and computing courses to the study of urban pollinators. This could lead to improvements in urban food production or a better understanding of urban ecosystems,” Leavey says.
Not only does it provide honey to students, but the Urban Honey Bee Project has also been tagging bees with RFID chips, which are scanned by readers installed at hive entrances. This allows tracking of the honey bees so they know which bees are coming and going.
“Kind of like mini BuzzCards.”
The group is interested in the mating behavior of bees in urban areas. Genetic diversity among male bees in honey bee mating areas can lead to stronger, healthier honey bee colonies.
“We tag male bees with RFID chips, which allows us to know how old they are when they start taking mating flights, and how weather, pollution, nutrition, and pesticide exposures affect their behavior. We can also correlate this behavior with genetic markers,” Leavey explains.
This work was inspired by Julia Mahood, an Atlanta-area master beekeeper and founder of the citizen science project mapmydca.com. She is identifying honey bee mating areas (also known as drone congregation areas) using mechanical drones.
Many wild flowering plant species along with food crops in our ecosystem depend on pollinators and it is crucial to learn as much as we can about honey bees, and all pollinators, to safeguard their future and ours.
To learn more about the Urban Honey Bee Project visit bees.gatech.edu.
This story first appeared in Georgia Tech Research Horizons.
Chronic skin itching drives more people to the dermatologist than any other condition. In fact, the latest science literature finds that 7% of U.S. adults, and between 10 and 20% of people in developed countries, suffer from dermatitis, a common skin inflammatory condition that causes itching.
“Itch is a significant clinical problem, often caused by underlying medical conditions in the skin, liver, or kidney. Due to our limited understanding of itch mechanisms, we don’t have effective treatment for the majority of patients,” said Liang Han, an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Biological Sciences who is also a researcher in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
Until recently, neuroscientists considered the mechanisms of skin itch the same. But Han and her research team recently uncovered differences in itch in non-hairy versus hairy areas of the skin, opening new areas for research. Their research, published April 13 in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), could open new, more effective treatments for patients suffering from persistent skin itching.
Itch Origins More Than Skin Deep
According to researchers, there are two different types of stimuli from the nervous system that trigger the itch sensation through sensory nerves in the skin: chemical and mechanical. In their study, Han and her team identified a specific neuron population that controls itching in ‘glabrous’ skin -- the smoother, tougher skin that’s found on the palms of hands and feet soles.
Itching in those areas poses greater difficulty for sufferers and is surprisingly common. In the U.S., there are an estimated 200,000 cases a year of dyshidrosis, a skin condition causing itchy blisters to develop only on the palm and soles. Another chronic skin condition, palmoplantar pustulosis (a type of psoriasis that causes inflamed, scaly skin and intense itch on the palms and soles), affects as many as 1.6 million people in the U.S. each year.
“That’s actually one of the most debilitating places (to get an itch),” said first author Haley R. Steele, a graduate student in the School of Biological Sciences. “If your hands are itchy, it’s hard to grasp things, and if it’s your feet, it can be hard to walk. If there’s an itch on your arm, you can still type. You’ll be distracted, but you’ll be OK. But if it’s your hands and feet, it’s harder to do everyday things.”
Ability to Block, Activate Itch-causing Neurons in Lab Mice
Since many biological mechanisms underlying itch — such as receptors and nerve pathways — are similar in mice and people, most itch studies rely on mice testing. Using mice in their lab, Georgia Tech researchers were able to activate or block these neurons.
The research shows, for the first time, “the actual neurons that send itch are different populations. Neurons that are in hairy skin that do not sense itch in glabrous skins are one population, and another senses itch in glabrous skins.”
Why has an explanation so far eluded science? “I think one reason is because most of the people in the field kind of assumed it was the same mechanism that’s controlling the sensation. It’s technically challenging. It’s more difficult than working on hairy skin,” Han said.
To overcome this technical hurdle, the team used a new investigative procedure, or assay, modeled after human allergic contact dermatitis, Steele said.
The previous method would have involved injecting itch-causing chemicals into mice skin, but most of a mouse’s skin is covered with hair. The team had to focus on the smooth glabrous skin on tiny mice hands and feet. Using genetically modified mice also helped identify the right sensory neurons responsible for glabrous skin itches.
“We activated a particular set of neurons that causes itch, and we saw that biting behavior again modeled,” said Steele, referring to how mice usually deal with itchy skin.
One set of study mice was given a chemical to specifically kill an entire line of neurons. Focusing on three previously known neuron mechanisms related to itch sensation found in hairy skin, they found that two of the neurons, MrgprA3+ and MrgprD+, did not play important roles in non-hairy skin itch, but the third neuron, MrgprC11+, did. Removing it reduced both acute and chronic itching in the soles and palms of test mice.
Potential to Drive New Treatments for Chronic Itch
Han’s team hopes that the research leads to treatments that will turn off those itch-inducing neurons, perhaps by blocking them in human skin.
“To date, most treatments for skin itch do not discriminate between hairy and glabrous skin except for potential medication potency due to the increased skin thickness in glabrous skin,” observed Ron Feldman, assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology in the Emory University School of Medicine. Georgia Tech’s findings “provide a rationale for developing therapies targeting chronic itching of the hands and feet that, if left untreated, can greatly affect patient quality of life,” he concluded.
What’s next for Han and her team? “We would like to investigate how these neurons transmit information to the spinal cord and brain,” said Han, who also wants to investigate the mechanisms of chronic itch conditions that mainly affect glabrous skin such as cholestatic itch, or itch due to reduced or blocked bile flow often seen in liver and biliary system diseases.
“I joined this lab because I love working with Liang Han,” added Steele, who selected glabrous skin itch research for her Ph.D. “because it was the most technically challenging and had the greatest potential for being really interesting and significant to the field.”
This work was supported by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NS087088 and HL141269) and the Pfizer Aspire Dermatology Award to Liang Han.
CITATION: H. Steele, et al., “MrgprC11+ sensory neurons mediate glabrous skin itch.” (PNAS, 2021) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2022874118
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The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.
As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.
Additional Media Contact: Tracey Reeves (tracey.reeves@gatech.edu)
Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent
Researchers are already hard at work trying to find fast scientific solutions to the national opioid public health crisis, which the Department of Health and Human Services says was responsible for two out of three drug overdose deaths in 2018.
Two School of Biological Sciences researchers have joined the effort to find answers to the crisis. Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor, Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair, and GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology; and Hongyi Zhou, Senior Research Scientist in the school, are on a team that recently captured top honors in a recent National Institutes of Health-sponsored competition to find novel, outside-the-box approaches to the opioid problem.
Their plan, “Development of a Comprehensive Integrated Platform for Translational Innovation in Pain, Opioid Abuse Disorder and Overdose” — which will use artificial intelligence, data and molecular analysis, cloud computing, and predictive algorithms in the search for new drugs — was one of five winning applications in a November 2020 competition. The results were announced April 26.
Skolnick and Zhou have now won two stages of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) ASPIRE Challenge, part of the NIH’s HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-Term) program. (ASPIRE stands for A Specialized Platform for Innovative Research Exploration.)
Skolnick’s group includes Andre Ghetti with ANABIOS Corporation, and Nicole Jung with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
“We’re extremely grateful,” Skolnick says. “We’re very excited about this. The problem of opioid addiction and chronic pain is a real plague in America and for most of the world, and there aren’t a lot of real, good answers, so this is motivating us to get people to think of novel solutions. We really appreciate the chance to put this team together.”
Rapidly translating scientific advances into immediate help for patients
NCATS defines translational science as “the process of turning observations in the laboratory, clinic, and community, into interventions that improve the health of individuals and the public — from diagnostics and therapeutics, to medical procedures and behavioral changes.”
The 2018 NCATS ASPIRE Challenge involved design competition in four component areas: integrated chemistry database, electronic synthetic chemistry portal; predictive algorithms, and biological assays (strength/potency tests.) Skolnick and Zhou were also part of a winning team in that stage.
Skolnick calls his group’s predictive algorithms “our unfair competitive advantage” — data programs that can predict in advance the probability of a drug’s success. “In principle you could screen every molecule under the sun if you had infinite resources. You could test everything, but that’s very expensive and time-consuming. We can go through this list and prioritize them and say, this one has an 80 percent probability it will work.”
Skolnick’s group added Ghetti and June for the 2020 ASPIRE Reduction-to-Practice Challenge. “The goal of this Challenge is to combine the best solutions and develop a working platform that integrates the four component areas. The Reduction-to-Practice Challenge consists of three stages: planning; prototype development and milestone delivery; and prototype delivery, independent validation, and testing,” notes the NCATS website.
Skolnick says his team’s application is designed to be accessed digitally as part of a cloud service. It will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to investigate molecules that could be turned into new drugs, as well as explore undiscovered uses for existing drugs.
“Andre’s company is going to do the testing of the molecules, and Nicole Jung will organize all the data and store it so we can have a platform that is used not just by us, but by the (scientific) community,” Skolnick explains. “We’re looking for novel mechanisms for drugs that relieve pain and treat addiction. The goal is to do this at high throughput, rather than one at a time. This is really designed to test the ideas at scale. You can get it to people a lot quicker.”
Skolnick hopes to have a robust working platform built within a year. Given the extent of the opioid crisis in the U.S. alone, the faster new non-addictive pain management drugs can be found and tested, the better, he adds.
“The need is critical. It’s one of these horrible societal problems that really require novel solutions, which means you want to understand all the mechanisms of pain, but do we understand the gears you want to turn to alleviate it?”
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