| Page 41 | School of Biological Sciences | Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA | Georgia Institute of Technology

This story by Jason Maderer first appeared on Georgia Tech Research Horizons.

David Hu, professor of fluid mechanics in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, holds a joint appointment in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.

New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that elephants dilate their nostrils in order to create more space in their trunks, allowing them to store up to 5.5 liters of water. They can also suck up three liters per second — a speed 30 times faster than a human sneeze (150 meters per second/330 mph).

The Georgia Tech College of Engineering study sought to better understand the physics of how elephants use their trunks to move and manipulate air, water, food and other objects. They also sought to learn if the mechanics could inspire the creation of more efficient robots that use air motion to hold and move things.

While octopus use jets of water to move and archer fish shoot water above the surface to catch insects, the Georgia Tech researchers found that elephants are the only animals able to use suction on land and underwater.

The paper, “Suction feeding by elephants,” is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

“An elephant eats about 400 pounds of food a day, but very little is known about how they use their trunks to pick up lightweight food and water for 18 hours, every day,” said Georgia Tech mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Andrew Schulz, who led the study. “It turns out their trunks act like suitcases, capable of expanding when necessary.”

Schulz and the Georgia Tech team worked with veterinarians at Zoo Atlanta, studying elephants as they ate various foods. For large rutabaga cubes, for example, the animal grabbed and collected them. It sucked up smaller cubes and made a loud vacuuming sound, or the sound of a person slurping noodles, before transferring the vegetables to its mouth.

To learn more about suction, the researchers gave elephants a tortilla chip and measured the applied force. Sometimes the animal pressed down on the chip and breathed in, suspending the chip on the tip of trunk without breaking it. It was similar to a person inhaling a piece of paper onto their mouth. Other times the elephant applied suction from a distance, drawing the chip to the edge of its trunk.

“An elephant uses its trunk like a Swiss Army Knife,” said David Hu, Schulz’s advisor and a professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “It can detect scents and grab things. Other times it blows objects away like a leaf blower or sniffs them in like a vacuum.”

By watching elephants inhale liquid from an aquarium, the team was able to time the durations and measure volume. In just 1.5 seconds, the trunk sucked up 3.7 liters, the equivalent of 20 toilets flushing simultaneously.

An ultrasonic probe was used to take trunk wall measurements and see how the trunk’s inner muscles work. By contracting those muscles, the animal dilates its nostrils up to 30 percent. This decreases the thickness of the walls and expands nasal volume by 64 percent.

“At first it didn’t make sense: an elephant’s nasal passage is relatively small and it was inhaling more water than it should,” said Schulz. “It wasn’t until we saw the ultrasonographic images and watched the nostrils expand that we realized how they did it. Air makes the walls open, and the animal can store far more water than we originally estimated.”

Based on the pressures applied, Schulz and the team suggest that elephants inhale at speeds that are comparable to Japan’s 300-mph bullet trains.

Schulz said these unique characteristics have applications in soft robotics and conservation efforts.

“By investigating the mechanics and physics behind trunk muscle movements, we can apply the physical mechanisms — combinations of suction and grasping — to find new ways to build robots,” Schulz said. “In the meantime, the African elephant is now listed as endangered because of poaching and loss of habitat. Its trunk makes it a unique species to study. By learning more about them, we can learn how to better conserve elephants in the wild.”

The work was supported by the US Army Research Laboratory and the US Army Research Oﬃce 294 Mechanical Sciences Division, Complex Dynamics and Systems Program, under contract number 295 W911NF-12-R-0011. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the sponsoring agency.

Two interdisciplinary research teams have been awarded 2021 Petit Institute Seed Grants.

The program annually selects sets of researchers from the Petit Institute as co-principal investigators, providing early-stage funding opportunities that serve as a catalyst for bio-related breakthroughs.

The teams and their projects are:

Shu Jia (assistant professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University) and Alberto Stolfi (assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences) are working on a project called, “Super-Resolution Scanning Micros- copy for Studying Neuronal Cell Biology in vivo,” a new collaboration linking novel biological discovery and imaging technology. This project will transform existing imaging infrastructure, laying a critical intellectual foundation for broader science, engineering, and technology advances.

Costas Arvanitis (assistant professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University) and Liang Han (assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences) submitted a project called, “Ultrasonic actuation of mechanosensitive ion channels.” This interdisciplinary team will explore new ways to balance and control sound and vibration and study how it interacts with cell membrane proteins. Their long-term goal is to advance research in the field of neurosciences through the discovery of new tools for noninvasive, focal, and at depth manipulation of brain activity.

The Petit Institute Seed Grants provide year-one funding of $50,000 with equivalent year-two funding contingent on submission of an NIH R21/R01 or similar collaborative grant proposal within 12 to 24 months of the year-one start date (July 1, 2021).

The inaugural class of seven Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) Scholars was recently selected for a 2-year program of working, studying, and training as an interdisciplinary sustainability research team. Launching in the Fall of 2021 with funding provided by a generous gift from Brook and Shawn Byers and guidance from a Faculty Advisory Board, the BBISS GRA Scholars will receive supplemental training in sustainability, team science, and leadership. They will apply their skills and talents, working directly with their peers, faculty, and external partners on a long-term, large team, sustainability relevant Vertically Integrated Project. They will participate in the organization and hosting of a seminar series in which they will invite and meet global leaders in sustainability, and they will have additional opportunities to develop professional networks, to publish, to draft proposals, to acquire knowledge, and to develop other skills critical to their professional success and relevant to their intellectual interests.

The first class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Graduate Research Assistant Scholars are:

Bettina Arkhurst - Ph.D. student, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering
Katherine Duchesneau - Ph.D. student, School of Biological Sciences
Marjorie Hall - Ph.D. student in History of Technology, School of History and Sociology, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
Meaghan McSorley - Ph.D. student, School of City and Regional Planning, College of Design
Udita Ringania - Ph.D. student, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Ioanna Maria Spyrou - Ph.D. student, School of Economics, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
Yilun 'Elon' Zha - Ph.D. student, School of Architecture, College of Design, and Master of Science candidate in statistics, Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College of Engineering

The Faculty Advisory Board for the BBISS GRA Scholars is composed of the faculty who submitted the students' nominations. Nominations for Classes II and III of the BBISS GRA Scholars program will open in Spring 2022 and Spring 2023. It is expected that 6 to 8 scholars will be selected for each year’s group.

The Faculty Advisory Board for the inaugural class are:

Updates and outcomes will be posted to the BBISS website as the project progresses. Additional information is available at https://sustainable.gatech.edu/bbiss_gra_scholars.

For the past six years, multidisciplinary researchers from across the world have been probing northern Minnesota peat bogs in an unprecedented, long-range study of climate change supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. They set out to answer complex questions, including one big one – will future warming somehow release 10,000 years of accumulated carbon from peatlands that store a large portion of earth’s terrestrial carbon?

So the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) partnered with the USDA Forest Service to develop a one-of-its-kind field lab in the Marcel Experimental Forest, where below and above ground heating elements are gradually warming the bog in greenhouse-like enclosures big enough to include trees. The enclosures are roofless so that rain and snow can get in.

It’s called the SPRUCE (Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments) experiment, and it was designed as a window into what would happen to peat bogs in a warmer world. A recent study, headed by Georgia Institute of Technology microbiologist Joel Kostka and published June 14 in the journal PNAS, provides a sobering outlook.

“The real concern and one of the major conclusions of this paper is that the ecosystem we’re studying is becoming more methanogenic,” said Kostka, professor and associate chair of research in the School of Biological Sciences, who holds a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and focuses on microbial ecology. “In other words, the warmed bog is enhancing the rate of methane production faster than that for carbon dioxide. This is what we think is going to happen in a warming world, based on our results.”

Testy Little Process

Methanogens are microbes that produce methane, a harmful greenhouse gas that traps up to 30 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Warming the peatland, the researchers found, basically creates a methane production line.

“This occurs because the plant community changes in response to warmer temperatures – mosses decrease and vascular plants increase,” said the paper’s lead author, Rachel Wilson, a researcher with Florida State University’s Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science, where she works in the lab of professor Jeff Chanton, co-author and co-principal investigator of the study.

The process forms a complete cycle: Vascular plants – shrubs and grass-like plants – produce more simple sugars, which are broken down by fermentative bacteria, and the breakdown products then fuel methane-producing microbes use to produce more methane.

While peatlands comprise just 3 percent of the Earth’s landmass, they store about one-third of the planet’s soil carbon. The thinking goes, as global temperatures rise, microbes could break into the carbon bank and the resulting decomposition of the ancient, combustible plant biomass would lead to increased levels of carbon dioxide and methane being released into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.

“Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,” said Wilson. “Warming the climate stimulates methane production, which will contribute to more warming in a positive feedback loop.”

It’s a scenario that Chanton called, “a critical ecosystem shift. Peat soils that have been stable for thousands of years are giving up the ghost, so to speak. It’s a testy little process.”

Delayed Response

That unpleasant outcome is being delayed somewhat by the extreme conditions found in many peat bogs around the world, including at the SPRUCE experiment site.

“Although most peatlands are in northern regions undergoing some of the most rapid warming on the planet, we’re talking about generally cold, acidic soils where there’s no oxygen,” Kostka noted. “Methanogens grow really slowly under these extreme conditions. We do see their activity increasing with warming, but they’re not yet growing that fast.”

He has a good idea of what could happen, though. Several years ago, Kostka took soil samples from the Minnesota site and tested them in his lab at Georgia Tech, exaggerating the temperature to a much greater degree than would be possible in a large-scale experiment like SPRUCE.

Raising the temperature by 20 degrees Celsius, about twice the temperature range used in the field experiment, “we saw huge increases in methane and large changes in the microbes that break down soil carbon into greenhouse gases,” he said.

It's a sped-up version of what they’re seeing in the field where the research team, Kostka explained, “and it is just beginning to scratch the surface of the changes we’re seeing in this ecosystem.”

Next Chapter

The SPRUCE site experiment involves two kinds of treatment, warming and also elevated carbon dioxide. The warming treatment started in 2014. All of the data sets for the PNAS paper are from 2016. The elevated carbon dioxide treatment began in the final days of data collection, so it wasn’t particularly relevant for this study. “Going forward, we’re thinking the effects of elevated carbon dioxide will be one potential future story to tell,” Kostka said. “This is a long-term experiment and many of these large scale climate change field experiments do not observe substantial changes to microbial communities until 10 years after they start.”

Ultimately, SPRUCE experimental activity is designed and intended to develop a quantitative mechanistic understanding of carbon cycling processes, according to Paul Hanson, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist leading the long-range project as principal investigator.

“SPRUCE provides experimental insights for a broad range of plausible future warming conditions for an established peatland ecosystem, combined with or without elevated carbon dioxide,” Hanson said.

So far, the evidence is pointing to a grim possibility: Warming enhances the production of carbon substrates from plants, stimulating microbial activity and greenhouse gas production, possibly leading to amplified climate-peatland feedbacks. Think, gasoline on a fire.

“That would be the worst case scenario,” Kostka said. “We don’t really know yet how plants and microbes will exchange carbon and nutrients in a warmer world. Will that carbon be locked up by the plants and stored in the soil? Will it be respired by microbes and released as a gas?

We are just beginning to see major changes in the microbes and plants at the SPRUCE peatland. Although the first few years of the experiment indicate that a lot more methane will be released to the atmosphere, we will be looking to see if these changes are sustained over the long term.”

CITATIONS: Rachel M. Wilson, Malak M. Tfaily, Max Kolton, Eric Johnston, Caitlin Petro, Cassandra A. Zalman, Paul J. Hanson, Heino M. Heyman, Jennifer E. Kyle, David W. Hoyt, Elizabeth K. Eder, Samuel O. Purvine, Randy K. Kolka, Stephen D. Sebestyen, Natalie A. Griffiths, Christopher W. Schadt, Jason K. Keller, Scott D. Bridgham, and Jeffrey P. Chanton, and Joel E. Kostka. “Soil metabolome response to whole ecosystem warming at the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments experiment” (PNAS, June 2021) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004192118

AERIAL PHOTO: Hanson, P.J., M.B. Krassovski, and L.A. Hook. 2020. SPRUCE S1 Bog and SPRUCE Experiment Aerial Photographs. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TES SFA, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. https://doi.org/10.3334/CDIAC/spruce.012 (UAV image number 0050 collected on October 4, 2020).

Joel Kostka – Microbial Ecology

SPRUCE Experiment

“Shaking a Sleeping Bog Monster” (Research Horizons)

NSF Supports Research on the Microbes in Peat Moss

ScienceMatters Podcast: Digging Up Climate Clues in Peat Moss

At the first ever CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics, held on June 10, 2021, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection at Georgia Tech (CMDI) came together virtually to discuss ecological and evolutionary perspectives on infectious disease dynamics.

“The mission of the CMDI is to transform the study and the sustainable control of microbial dynamics in contexts of human and environmental health,” notes Sam Brown, director of CMDI and professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. “In keeping with this work, the CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics brought together these scientists as neighbors in Atlanta, and as organizations committed to the research of disease prevention and control.”

“In addition to showcasing the overlapping research interests of the CMDI and the CDC, the symposium also offered members of the Georgia Tech and CDC communities an open platform to ask questions of researchers in real time, as well as an opportunity to make new connections and encourage collaboration,” says Jennifer Farrell, a Ph.D. student studying microbiology at Georgia Tech who helped organize the meeting.

Farrell shares:

The online symposium drew 178 participants from across Georgia Tech and the CDC, setting the stage for continued communication and collaboration between the two institutions. The day kicked off with opening remarks from Brown and Juliana Cyril, director of the Office of Technology and Innovation, Office of Science, CDC. Cyril and Brown each highlighted the unique relationships and collaborative potential between the two organizations.

Talks spanned pathogen systems, from the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Streptococcus pneumoniae (Rich Stanton and Davina Campbell, CDC; Pengbo Cao, CMDI; Bernie Beall, CDC), to colonization dynamics of the fungal pathogen, Candida auris (Joe Sexton, CDC), to shield immunity in SARS-CoV-2 (Adriana Lucia-Sans and Andreea Magalie, CMDI).

Talks were further divided into research themes such as biofilm control (Pablo Bravo, CMDI; Rodney Donlan, CDC; Sheyda Azimi, CMDI) and microbiomes in infection (Commander Alison Laufer-Halpin, CDC; Jennifer Farrell, CMDI).

“In line with the commitment of the CMDI to promote trainee career development, the CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics was organized and run by Center graduate students and post-doctoral scientists, and CMDI talks were presented exclusively by Center trainees,” adds Farrell. “We look forward to continuing the conversation with our CDC colleagues in the future!”

Laura Cadonati has been appointed as the new associate dean for Research in the College of Sciences (CoS) Dean’s Office at the Georgia Institute of Technology effective July 1, 2021.

Cadonati serves as a professor in the School of Physics and as director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech.

“I am delighted to welcome Laura to the CoS Dean’s Office,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair. “She is an accomplished researcher and educator whose breadth of experience will be invaluable to the College. I am looking forward to working with Laura in the years ahead on supporting and highlighting the amazing research across the College — and on the implementation of the research component of our CoS strategic plan.”

Cadonati received her Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 2001. She joined the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (CRA) at Georgia Tech in January 2015 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and was appointed director of the CRA in July 2020.

“I am honored by the trust the College of Sciences is placing in me,” Cadonati shares, “and I look forward to supporting our faculty in all the ways necessary to advance their research to new levels — and deepening our College’s scientific impact on our campus and in society as a whole.”

As associate dean for Research, Cadonati will focus on cultivating College of Sciences faculty members to develop and sustain excellence in scholarship and research, as well as creating an environment in which innovation, entrepreneurship, and public service are fundamental characteristics of graduates of the College.

She will coordinate the research enterprise and agenda for the College and its stakeholders, and will foster the College’s leadership in developing scientific solutions for a better world.

Cadonati will also focus on identifying new research opportunities, encouraging research collaborations, facilitating partnerships among faculty both within and outside of the Institute, and will execute on the College’s new strategic plan to realize our shared mission and vision.

In addition to a continued embrace of fundamental science, Cadonati will focus on cross-cutting and convergent scientific directions to guide the College’s research investments, specifically elevating the following ongoing initiatives within the six schools of the College:

Quantum systems including quantum materials, quantum computing, and quantum information science
Neuroscience, physics of movement, and robotics
Microbial dynamics and infection, evolution, astrobiology, and the origins of life
Planetary sciences and astrophysics
Data science that harnesses machine learning and artificial intelligence to spur the data revolution in the sciences
Climate science, biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, and global change

Cadonati’s own research interests include gravitational waves and particle astrophysics. She has published and co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, has presented a number of lectures and invited seminars, and has held leadership positions in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), including leading its data analysis and astrophysics division at the time of the discovery of gravitational waves — which led to the 2017 Nobel prize in Physics to the founders of the project. As deputy spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, she has facilitated collaborations between LIGO and its partners, including astronomers and particle observatories around the world.

Cadonati is a fellow of the American Physical Society and is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER (Faculty Early Career Development Program) award. She is an associate editor for the European Journal of Physics and also serves on several advisory boards.

In 2018, she received the Institute’s Outstanding Faculty Research Author Award, which recognizes “faculty who most contributed to highly impactful publications describing the results of research conducted at Georgia Tech during the period January 1, 2013, to December 31, 2017” for her work and achievements in ushering the era of multi-messenger gravitational-wave astronomy.

Cadonati is joined in the College of Sciences Dean’s Office by Jennifer Leavey and Carrie Shepler, who recently accepted appointments as assistant deans in the College, also effective July 1, 2021.

About the College of Sciences

The College of Sciences cultivates curiosity, encourages exploration, and fosters innovation to develop scientific solutions for a better world. Our connected community of scientists and mathematicians collaborates across disciplines and challenges to achieve excellence in science, teaching, and research. Working across six internationally ranked schools with the brightest young minds in our fields, we mentor future leaders to identify and push the frontiers of human knowledge, imagination, and innovation.

We nurture scientifically curious students by offering diverse educational and research experiences. As an internationally recognized, preeminent institution in the sciences and mathematics, we help students build empowering foundations in the sciences and mathematics — educating and preparing the next generation of scientists who will create the technologies of the future.

Most of the disciplines within our six schools — Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology — are ranked in the top 10%. We organize ourselves in multidisciplinary research neighborhoods to promote broad exchange of ideas. We also offer exciting opportunities for students to engage in research, and train with top professors in chosen fields.

Our internationally recognized senior faculty and an extraordinarily talented group of junior faculty are genuinely concerned about undergraduate and graduate education, and they bring the excitement of new discoveries in the research laboratory to the classroom. The quality of the faculty and the curriculum, combined with new state-of-the-art facilities and a low student to faculty ratio, ensure the excellent educational opportunities available to our students.

About Georgia Tech

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.

Meet Julia Kubanek, Vice President of Interdisciplinary Research at Georgia Tech.

Kubanek oversees all interdisciplinary research activities including the Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRIs), Interdisciplinary Research Centers, the Pediatric Technology Center, and the Georgia Center for Medical Innovation.

What is your field of expertise and why did you choose it?

My students and I ask how living organisms communicate and interact with each other using chemistry as a language of life. We explore molecules produced by microbes, plants, and animals as words in this language, delivering messages like “don’t eat me! I taste terrible” or “yes, I’m one of your kind! mate with me” or “the surface of my body is a terrible place to land, you won’t grow well on top of me." Humans know these molecules more as antibiotics, toxins, and strange smells – but to the living organisms that produce them and those sensing these molecules in natural environments, they are an essential part of survival and reproduction.

We do most of our research in marine systems, discovering new chemical messages that affect the health of the oceans, which can also be leveraged by scientists as new medicines and solutions to environmental challenges. Some of the environmental challenges we focus on are harmful algal blooms and biofuel production. I chose this field of research because I love wilderness and am fascinated by the diversity of species on earth – including the capacity of diverse organisms to produce unusual chemicals.

What makes the way the IRIs enables campus research unique?

The IRIs provide an intellectual home for researchers who have interests in common but different backgrounds and expertise. Each IRI has members from all over our campus and we each bring a different perspective on how to get research done. We find commonality on what kinds of scientific and societal questions need to be answered and then pool our various expertise to answer those questions, through joint projects, centers, training programs, and outreach activities.

What couldn’t have happened without Georgia Tech's IRIs?

After we bring samples from the field into the lab, my research is dependent on specialized equipment, not all of which we have in our own lab. In fact, I’m glad we don’t have all that equipment in our lab because I wouldn’t be able to maintain it all or learn everything about each instrument. For my group’s research, the IRI core facilities and their personnel have been essential to gathering data from many kinds of specialized instrumentation. My students and postdocs get hands-on experience with these instruments which helps build their careers. The diverse core facilities of the IRIs and the expertise of their staff enable us to apply many kinds of experiments to solve each scientific question, rather than being focused only on one technical capability.

What impact is your interdisciplinary research having on the world?

My group’s research has enabled the discovery of several new potential drugs, including molecules that inhibit pathogens like the malaria parasite, drug-resistant bacteria, and coronaviruses. The IRIs have also helped us figure out the mechanisms by which some of these drugs work. Involvement in the IRIs has also enabled us to better understand why and how harmful algal blooms become more toxic under certain environmental conditions, which has implications for seafood safety.

What do you like to do in your spare time when you are not working on your research or teaching?

I love to hike and swim in wild places. These days, I am spending some of my time around the Smoky Mountains where I seek out wildflowers I have not seen before and to hope that I’ll get to see a bear (but not a rattlesnake). I have seen both in the last year, and the experience was simultaneously thrilling and frightening. I am an occasional volunteer with Trees Atlanta, a frequent jogger in my neighborhood, and an eager (but unskilled) yoga practitioner. My yoga teachers say there is no such thing as being bad at yoga, but I think they are just being nice to me.

A new five-year, $1.27 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will help transform the study of quantitative- and data-intensive biosciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The grant will create the Integrative and Quantitative Biosciences Accelerated Training Environment (InQuBATE) Predoctoral Training Program at Georgia Tech. InQuBATE is designed to train a new generation of biomedical researchers and thought leaders to harness the data revolution.

“We want to improve and enhance the training of students to focus on biological questions while leveraging modern tools, and in some cases developing new tools, to address foundational challenges at scales from molecules to systems,” said Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences. Weitz is co-leading the program with Peng Qiu, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Biology is undergoing a transformation, according to Weitz and Qiu, requiring a new educational paradigm that integrates quantitative approaches like computational modeling and data analytics into the experimental study of living systems.

“Our intention is to develop a training environment that instills a quantitative, data-driven mindset, integrating quantitative and data science methods into all aspects of the life science training pipeline,” added Weitz, founding director of Tech’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS).

The roots of InQuBATE go back to the fall of 2016, shortly after QBioS was launched. Weitz saw an opportunity to augment what he was teaching in his cornerstone course, Foundations of Quantitative Biosciences, in which students model living systems from the molecular level up through cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems. In doing so, students “got a brief introduction to implementing high-dimensional data analytics, visual analytics, clustering, and modern machine learning methods. But we couldn’t cover allthose topics in detail,” Weitz said.

So, he reached out to Qiu, who was teaching data analytic methods in his Machine Learning in Biosciences course: “Instead of us developing that class, we started strongly encouraging QBioS students to take Peng’s class,” Weitz said.

“For me, this was a great opportunity to work with students from the biology side who had real interests in learning data mining and machine learning, as well as students from the engineering side,” said Qiu, principal investigator in the Machine Learning and Bioinformatics Lab in Coulter BME. “We could see that it was a great learning environment and the QBioS students really excelled in the class. That gave us confidence. Now we’re building this [InQuBATE] training program, and hope it will foster even greater cross pollination.”

The training program is designed to do exactly that, bringing together students and faculty from three Georgia Tech colleges: computing, engineering, and sciences. That combination of expertise is reflected in the leadership team. In addition to principal investigators Weitz (College of Sciences) and Qiu (College of Engineering), the faculty leadership team includes Elizabeth Cherry (School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing), Eva Dyer (Coulter BME, College of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine), and Marvin Whiteley (School of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences).

The InQuBATE program will ultimately support 15 Ph.D. students over five years. The first cohort — prioritizing second-year Ph.D. students — will be selected in August. Next spring, the program will begin soliciting applications from first-year Ph.D. students.

“The program will extend the breadth of student training without adding time to the Ph.D.,” Weitz said. “For students on the engineering or computing side, InQuBATE will augment their living systems research experience. For students on the living systems side, the program will augment their training in modeling and data analytics.”

Weitz, Qiu, and their collaborators also are developing a series of semester-long and short-form (a week or less) courses that will be available to other graduate students, in addition to the InQuBATE cohorts.

“We intend to make programmatic offerings available to a broader community,” Weitz said. “In the long term, we hope InQuBATE takes on a central role in shaping the culture of integrative approaches in the study of living systems at Georgia Tech.”

Jennifer Leavey and Carrie Shepler have accepted appointments as assistant deans in the College of Sciences Dean’s Office at the Georgia Institute of Technology effective July 1, 2021.

Leavey, named assistant dean for Faculty Mentoring in the College, also serves as principal academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences, director of the Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project, and coordinator of the College’s educational activities related to science and sustainability.

"I look forward to helping faculty connect with others who will help them grow professionally and removing barriers that might be limiting their success,” Leavey shares. “I have benefitted from a number of excellent mentors in my 16 years on campus, and I hope to help others develop similar relationships."

Shepler joins the Dean’s Office as assistant dean for Teaching Effectiveness in the College, also serves as principal academic professional focusing primarily on undergraduate program initiatives in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where she has directed the first-year chemistry program and other instructional activities.

“I am so excited that the College has chosen to emphasize its educational mission through the creation of this new role,” Shepler says. “I have always identified professionally as a teacher above all else, and it is a privilege to have the opportunity to share that passion on this scale.”

Through their roles as assistant deans, Leavey and Shepler join Laura Cadonati (newly appointed associate dean of Research for the College of Sciences, also effective July 1) in cultivating faculty members to develop and sustain excellence in scholarship and research, as well as creating an environment in which innovation, entrepreneurship, and public service are fundamental characteristics of graduates of the College.

Their collaborative leadership will execute key components of the College’s new strategic plan — focused on catalyzing discovery and solutions, amplifying impact, and building communities of excellence across the workplace, education and training, and research endeavors — to realize our shared mission and vision.

"The Dean’s Office is truly excited to have Jennifer and Carrie joining our team," says Matt Baker, associate dean for Faculty Development in the College. “Their talent, experience, and enthusiasm will allow the College of Sciences to tackle important problems that we’ve never previously had the bandwidth to address.”

Meet Jennifer Leavey

After graduating from Georgia Tech with a bachelor’s in chemistry in 1995, Leavey received her Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis at Emory University. After conducting research fellowships in cellular immunology at the University of Georgia and Emory University, she joined the School of Biology (now the School of Biological Sciences) at Georgia Tech as an academic professional.

She has taken a leading role in the growth of the College of Sciences Explore Living Learning Community, serving as its faculty director. She has also developed innovative vertically-integrated projects (VIPs) including Living Building Science, which is based on the science around the Kendeda Building, and STEMComm, which promotes scientific communication through creative media about recent scientific discoveries and engineering innovations. Leavey has also served as director of the Bee-INSPIRED summer undergraduate research program at Georgia Tech.

Leavey has been recognized through a number of awards, including the Institute's Innovation in Co-curricular Education Award (2014) and the Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award (2012). She has also served as principal investigator of multiyear awards to support undergraduate experiential learning from both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Meet Carrie Shepler

Shepler received her bachelor’s in chemistry and communication arts from Georgetown College in Kentucky, and completed her Ph.D. in environmental radiochemistry at Washington State University. Before joining the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech, she held instructional roles at Washington State and at the University of Georgia as a Franklin Teaching Post-Doctoral Fellow.

Shepler is the recipient of several awards including the College’s Eric R. Immel Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016) and the Institute's Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award (2011).

"Carrie is widely recognized for her dedication to students and excellence in instruction," says David Collard, senior associate dean in the College of Sciences (CoS). "The creation of the assistant dean position to focus on teaching effectiveness has its origins in the recommendations of a CoS cohort of Provost's Teaching and Learning Fellows a couple of years ago,” he explains. “I can think of no one better than Carrie to lead the development of a robust program of peer-led review of instruction that fosters faculty development."

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Christina Ragan has been a lecturer of biology and the director of Outreach for Georgia Tech’s B.S. in Neuroscience program since only January of this year. Yet she has already won an award for her teaching because “her contributions to neuroscience education at various stages along her academic journey have been numerous and influential.”

That’s what the international Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN) organization, which supports neuroscience research and education, says in a statement announcing Ragan as the winner of its 2020 Carol Ann Paul Neuroscience Educator of the Year Award.

“I am so honored and grateful,” Ragan says. “It means so much that my own peers, who are experts in neuroscience education, nominated me for this award. It's been a very tumultuous time, not just for education but for the world, and this recognition is a nice glimmer of sunshine during an otherwise stressful time.”

One of Ragan’s contributions to neuroscience education is highlighted by one of her nominators quoted in the FUN statement: “We first connected in early 2018 through the Teaching Resources for Biological Psychology and Neuroscience Facebook page that Christina founded and continues to actively support. I have found this page to be an incredible resource that allows me and over a thousand members to connect, share, and learn about new and effective teaching techniques.”

Ragan started the Facebook page in 2015 when she was a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University. “I created the group, initially inviting my grad school friends, because there really weren't many avenues for people to get feedback and request activities and assignments for neuroscience courses,” she says. “I wanted tried and true effective assignments and the ability to discuss ideas, so that's how the page was born.” That page now has more than 1,300 members.

Ragan’s outreach activities include annual Brain Awareness Day and Week activities during the month of March. Brain Awareness is a global campaign designed to foster public enthusiasm and support for brain science, and is coordinated by the Dana Foundation. This year, Ragan organized a virtual interactive session on neuroscience for middle school students.

Ragan’s research interests include determining individual differences in the neurobiology of maternal behavior and anxiety during the postpartum period. “In her classroom, she has integrated her experiences researching maternal anxiety,” says another nominator.

Ragan has also been a research mentor for numerous students, helping many undergraduates in independent neuroscience research projects. Many of these students have received grants for their work, some have co-authored research publications, and many have presented their work at scientific conferences.

The Educator Award is given annually to a regular member or fellow of FUN in recognition of efforts related to promoting effective teaching of neuroscience at the undergraduate level. The award honors the late Carol Ann Paul from Wellesley College, an influential founder of one of the earliest undergraduate neuroscience programs, Ragan says.

“Receiving this award adds to the many awards neuroscience faculty at Georgia Tech have received, and continues to highlight the quality of education that our undergraduate students obtain in the neuroscience program.”

Ragan will co-host the inaugural Neuroscience Teaching Conference July 22-23, 2021. More information on the virtual conference can be found here.

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