Julia Kubanek serves as Georgia Tech’s Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research and is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. In this role, she oversees and supports interdisciplinary activities at Georgia Tech including the Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRIs); the Pediatric Technology Center (PTC), the Novelis Innovation Hub; the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging (CABI); and the Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI). She also partners across the institute on developing and advancing new research initiatives based on student and faculty interests, expertise, and societal need.

Kubanek has held several previous leadership roles at Georgia Tech, including Associate Dean for Research in the College of Sciences and Associate Chair in the School of Biological Sciences. She joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2001. Her areas of research interest include chemical signaling among organisms (especially in aquatic systems), natural products chemistry, metabolomics, chemical biology, and drug discovery. She has authored approximately 100 research articles on marine plankton and coral reef chemical ecology, and on the discovery, mechanism of action, and biosynthesis of marine natural products. She was awarded the NSF CAREER Award in 2002, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2004, and was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2012. In 2016, she served as chair of the Gordon Research Conference in Marine Natural Products; since 2016, she has chaired the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. Kubanek received her B.Sc. in Chemistry from Queen’s University, Canada, in 1991 and her Ph.D. in at the University of British Columbia in 1998, and performed postdoctoral research at the University of California – San Diego and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Amirali Aghazadeh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and also program faculty of Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, and Bioengineering Ph.D. programs. He has affiliations with the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEAS) and Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences. Before joining Georgia Tech, Aghazaeh was a postdoc at Stanford and UC Berkeley and completed his Ph.D. at Rice University. His research focuses on developing machine learning and deep learning solutions for protein and small molecular design and engineering.
 

My lab is focused on understanding how proteins and other biological systems function at a molecular level. To probe these systems, we carry out molecular dynamics simulations, modeling biological behavior one atom at a time. The simulations serve as a "computational microscope" that permits glimpses into a cell's inner workings through the application of advanced software and high-powered supercomputers. We are particularly interested in how bacteria utilize unique pathways to synthesize proteins and insert them into both the inner and outer membranes, how they import nutrients across two membranes, and how their cell walls provide shape and mechanical strength.

Melissa Lambeth Kemp received her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from University of Washington. Dr. Kemp joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2006 after completing postdoctoral training at MIT. Her expertise is in computational modeling of metabolism and signal transduction, as well as developing statistical modeling tools to examine network relationships in high-dimension datasets. One major aspect of her research program linking ROS – the byproducts of aerobic metabolism – to the fundamental way that cells interpret instructions from their environment, their neighbors, and their own genetic blueprint. Specific applications of her diverse work include systems modeling of transient phosphatase oxidation of kinase cascades, patient-specific differences in cytotoxicity to redox-cycled chemotherapeutics and radiation, and the coordination of oxidative metabolism with epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition. Her research program also includes a component of developing high-throughput screening methods for assaying cue-signal-response relationships in cells and analytical tools for single cell gene expression. 

Dr. Kemp currently serves as the Research Director of the multi-site NSF Engineering Research Center “Cell Manufacturing Technologies”. In her former role as Associate Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center “Emergent Behavior of Integrated Cellular Systems”, she spearheaded the multi-site center’s computational activities by developing agent-based models of context-dependent cellular decisions to generate new hypotheses of intercellular communication in pluripotent stem cell differentiation and emergent patterning; this work continues currently in quantifying organizational principles and spatial relationships in iPSC-derived tissues from multi-omics data. Dr. Kemp’s career honors include a Whitaker Graduate Fellowship, Merck/CSBi postdoctoral fellowship, Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, NIH New Innovator Award, and the CSB2 Prize for Innovative Measurement Methods from the Council for Systems Biology in Boston.

Dr. Kostas Konstantinidis joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in November 2007. He received his BS in Agriculture Sciences from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) in 1999. He continued his studies at the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI) under the supervision of Prof. James M. Tiedje, where he obtained a PhD in 2004. His PhD studies were fully supported by the Bouyoukos Fellowship program and were devoted in advancing our understanding of the ecology and physiology of soil bacteria through the comparative analysis of their whole-genome sequences. This research resulted in a NSF-funded project to advance the species definition for prokaryotes, which also fostered a short post-doc position at the Center for Microbial Ecology. He then moved to MIT and the laboratory of Prof. Edward DeLong to get trained on innovating metagenomic techniques. His work at MIT provided important new insights into the complexity and function of oceanic microbial communities as well as how life is adapting in the deep and cold Oceans. His research interests are at the interface of genomics and computational biology in the context of microbial ecology with the overarching goal to broaden understanding of the genetic and metabolic potential of the microbial world. Advancing our knowledge on these issues is essential for a better understanding of the microbes that power, by and large, the biogeochemical cycles that sustain life on Earth and cause or control important diseases in humans and animals. He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) and the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP). Konstantinidis held the Carlton S. Wilder Junior Professorship for five years and subsequently received the Maulding Faculty Fellowship in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Christine Heitsch is Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, with courtesy appointments in Biological Sciences and Computational Science & Engineering as well as an affiliation with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience.

She is also Director of the new Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology (SCMB), an NSF-Simons MathBioSys Research Center, and finishing her tenure directing the GT Interdisciplinary Mathematics Preparation and Career Training (IMPACT) Postdoctoral Program.

Heitsch's research interests lie at the interface between discrete mathematics and molecular biology, specifically combinatorial problems "as motivated by" and "with applications to" fundamental biomedical questions like RNA folding.

Students interested in pursuing graduate studies in discrete mathematical biology can do so through a number of GT PhD programs including Bioinformatics or Quantitative Biosciences as well as Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO), Computational Science & Engineering (CSE), and (of course) Mathematics.
 

Munmun De Choudhury is an Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Computing in Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. De Choudhury is renowned for her groundbreaking contributions to the fields of computational social science, human-computer interaction, and digital mental health. Through fostering interdisciplinary collaborations across academia, industry, and public health sectors, Dr. De Choudhury and her collaborators have contributed significantly to advancing the development of computational techniques for early detection and intervention in mental health, as well as in unpacking how social media use benefits or harms mental well-being. De Choudhury's contributions have been recognized worldwide, with significant scholarly impact evidenced by numerous awards like induction into the SIGCHI Academy and the 2023 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award. Beyond her academic achievements, Dr. De Choudhury is a proactive community leader, a persistent contributor to policy-framing and advocacy initiatives, and is frequently sought for expert advice to governments, and national and international media.

Dyer’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and neuroscience. Her lab develops computational methods for discovering principles that govern the organization and structure of the brain, as well as methods for integrating multi-modal datasets to reveal the link between neural structure and function.

My research focuses on three major areas: (a) understanding and improving worker well-being, (b) temporal dynamics in team contexts, and (c) research methods. Collectively, my research seeks to improve our understanding of optimal human functioning more generally, across time, and within specific contexts (e.g., organizational, teams).