That is, as long as you don’t count that whole Super Bowl thing.

Lieberman has started the year with excellent news: She’s been asked to serve on the academic editorial board of a major scientific journal, and she and her research team – the Lieberman Lab - can continue their work on early-stage glaucoma, thanks to this month’s renewal of a $1.48 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant.

“We had known since June that the grant score we got was meritorious,” Lieberman says. “But you can’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

If any birds have learned that the hard way, it’s the Atlanta Falcons. In the days before Super Bowl LI proved that point, Lieberman patiently waited to hear about her grant request.

Her spirits got a boost early this month when Georgia Tech’s Office of Sponsored Programs – the Institute’s support department for research administration – told her it needed to do some budget updating. “Which is a good sign,” she says.

“But then the Falcons lost.”

Lieberman was determined to not let that painful collapse jinx her hopes or dampen her mood. Sure enough, the very next morning, Lieberman learned from NIH that she could continue her work and keep her staff of researchers employed for the next four years.

After the first five years of funding, “four more will be nine years straight of working on this exact same line of questioning, which is super, super gratifying,” she says. “We didn’t have anything in the beginning, just very basic observations. Because we were able to make important contributions to the field, NIH has given us more money to continue. That’s a huge milestone.”

The path to success has included two advances in understanding glaucoma, a collection of eye diseases that make up the second leading cause of blindness worldwide.

Lieberman’s Lab focuses on the protein myocilin. When the gene encoding for myocilin has a defect, the resulting mutant protein is toxic to the part of the eye responsible for controlling eye pressure. Mutant myocilin accumulates, preventing the easy flow of aqueous humor fluid and raising eye pressure, which can damage the optic nerve. Myocilin-associated glaucoma is hereditary and early-onset, affecting the vision of children and adults through approximately age 35, Lieberman says.

“If you gunk up the molecular sieve that lets fluid drain out of the eye, the pressure goes up,” Lieberman said. “This mutant protein kills the cells that are making sure that the sieve stays appropriately porous.”

In 2014, the Lieberman Lab and collaborators at the University of Kansas and South Florida announced that they had identified molecules that could serve as drugs to block the impact of mutant myocilin. The next year, Lieberman’s lab announced it had solved the three-dimensional structure of a particular domain in myocilin – the olfactomedin (OLF) - that is tied to early-onset glaucoma.

OLF is where most of the protein mutations are documented in patients, and the new NIH grant will support studies that will help unlock more of myocilin’s mysteries.

Lieberman’s fantastic February also includes the news that she’ll serve a three-year term as an academic editorial board member for PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology. The high-impact publication is known for spotlighting innovative research throughout the biological sciences. But before getting excited about the email inviting her to join PLoS Biology, she had to make sure it was the real thing.

“Nowadays, if you’re an academic researcher, every morning you wake up to a lot of emails from people and entities you’ve never heard of inviting you to present at conferences or to submit manuscripts to journals. Because I get this spam all the time, I had to pause and realize this invitation was in fact the real deal.”

Lieberman will be handling the review of up to two articles each month, setting up peer reviews and helping to determine whether they should be accepted or rejected.

“I have a lot of experience with rejection,” she jokes. “PLoS Biology has high expectations,” she says, seriously. “We’ll see what comes down the pike. I’m very excited.”

In her editorial role, Lieberman can also help fellow Georgia Tech researchers navigate the PLoS Biology process for their own papers. “I want people around here to know that I can help facilitate their submissions,” she says. “I can’t officially be the editor for an article that’s from Georgia Tech, but I can help send them to somebody else.”

Scientists from engineering, biology, chemistry, and computing won’t discover new vaccines and medical devices — or advance what we know about diseases — by working on their own. The next biomedical breakthroughs to provide accessible health care for billions of people worldwide will come from the collaboration between different laboratories and disciplines.

That core belief led to the creation of the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB), the newest building at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The site opened in May and a formal dedication ceremony was held today. 

EBB houses labs for research in chemical biology, cell and developmental biology, and systems biology. The building allows Georgia Tech to consolidate its biomedical research efforts in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, infections, and other life-threatening conditions.

President G.P. “Bud” Peterson said the building symbolizes what Georgia Tech is all about — collaboration and innovation.

“The EBB will drive innovation and have an undeniable impact on biomedical science and human health,” Peterson said. “EBB brings together some of the world’s finest researchers in a collaborative environment, and these collaborations will result in incredible breakthroughs.”

The building provides nearly 219,000 square feet of multidisciplinary research space and enhances the Institute’s partnerships with Emory University Hospital and with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“Together, we are changing the lives of children,” said Donna Hyland, president and CEO of Children’s Healthcare. “The space within this building helps bring our new Pediatric Technology Center to life and gives researchers another place to combine expertise in clinical care, research, and technology to solve problems that will help make kids better today and healthier tomorrow.”

The building is located on 10th Street, at the north end of the existing biotechnology complex. Other buildings in the complex include: the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, the U.A. Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building, the Ford Environmental Science and Technology Building, and the Molecular Science and Engineering Building.

More than 140 faculty and nearly 1,000 graduate students from 10 different academic units work in the labs and facilities there.

“EBB puts Georgia Tech at the forefront of biosciences and bioengineering research,” said M.G. Finn, professor and chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The building’s unique design allows Georgia Tech researchers to expand their work, he said.

EBB contains “research neighborhoods” designed around a specific focus or topic. These neighborhoods bring together scientists, engineers, and researchers from different disciplines around common themes or areas of interest. They share laboratories, offices, and common spaces.

Stairs alternate on various floors, encouraging people to move within the neighborhoods and throughout the building and interact with one another. Small and informal meeting areas are located near the stairwells, to further encourage researchers to talk with one another.

“We will help, influence, and support one another and bring new insights in a way that can’t happen if a building is restricted to a particular department or discipline,” Finn said.

“Ultimately we are all working to fight disease and save lives,” he said. “EBB is designed to foster the research to do just that.”

EBB is the largest building investment in Georgia Tech history. The $113 million building was made possible because of a partnership between the Institute, the Georgia Tech Foundation, and the State of Georgia, Peterson said.

State appropriations provided $64 million for the project. Georgia Tech provided $15 million in Institute funds, and private funding raised another $34 million in commitments pledged over five years.

EBB will help drive Georgia’s economy, Peterson said.

“It will foster economic development through the formation of startup enterprises, the creation of high-skilled, high-paying jobs, and the commercialization of new devices, drugs, and technologies,” Peterson said.

Many medical devices used on children were designed for adults. And because the market for children’s medical devices is small, many companies shy away from building medical technologies for children.

Georgia Tech is helping to fill that gap in the market. From an app that allows parents to send pictures of their child’s potential ear infection to a doctor, to surgical tools tailored to a child’s physiology, the Institute is leading the push toward improving and saving children’s lives through technology.

Read more about the “Small Wonders” evolving in Georgia Tech labs in this article from Research Horizons.

But what exactly does it take to move a lab?

“You would think that you could just get a mover and ship everything and be done, and that hasn’t been the case,” said Erin Kirshtein, who manages research projects and grants for Associate Professor Thomas Barker’s Matrix Biology and Engineering Lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “Every little section has its own little piece that needs multiple hands.”

Read more about what it takes to move the labs that produce some of the world's top research.

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CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

About 90 scientists, engineers, students, and representatives from the Department of Defense gathered recently at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, where they shared leading-edge research that addresses the health challenges facing military personnel. Because, while the reality of war may be as grim as ever, soldiers are surviving injuries in greater numbers, which demands better therapeutic and rehabilitative options.

“The symposium really exceeded my expectations in every way,” says Robert Guldberg, executive director of the Petit Institute and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “The purpose was to highlight military health-related research at Georgia Tech, Emory, and the University of Georgia (UGA). We have established very strong collaborations among the three institutions in areas like regenerative medicine, neuro-engineering, and prosthetics and orthotics.”

It took a collaborative effort on all fronts to produce the symposium. The event was co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Bioengineering and Soldier Survivability (CABSS) at Georgia Tech, a U.S. Army funded research grant coming to a close this year, and the Center for Regenerative Engineering and Medicine (REM).  REM is a collaborative center led by co-directors Steve Stice (UGA), Ned Waller (Emory), and Johnna Temenoff (Georgia Tech). The symposium was organized by Tom Barker, Petit Faculty Fellow and associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), and Martha Willis, program manager in the Woodruff School.

Research in technologies addressing a wide range of clinical challenges in the military and veteran’s population were presented throughout the day, and a poster session to highlight additional projects and research efforts encouraged symposium participants to network and look for areas of common interests and focus.  

Topic Highlights:

Post traumatic osteoarthritis (OA), a debilitating and extremely painful condition characterized by gradual but progressive degradation of the cartilage surrounding the joints is often the result of battlefield injuries and it plagues wounded soldiers and veterans at rates higher than that of the general population. Effective pain relief for OA is limited and, remarkably, no disease modifying OA drugs are currently approved. Researchers at Georgia Tech are developing therapies and strategies for intra-articular delivery of micronized human amnion membrane that have shown promise in preventing the development of osteoarthritis following knee trauma in animal studies, and have gone on to show that they can regenerate regions of degraded cartilage in already arthritic joints.

ImmunoEngineering, or the application of engineering tools and principles to quantitatively study the immune system in health and disease, allows researchers to develop new and improved therapies by precisely controlling and modulating a patient’s immune response. Researchers at Georgia Tech’s Center for ImmunoEngineering discussed “Immuno-Engineering Soldier Health: From Sepsis and Trauma to Rehabilitation and Regeneration.”  Krishnendu Roy, the center director described his center as a collaboration of engineers, chemists, physicist, computational scientists, and immunologists, focused on a broad range of diseases.  He emphasized that correcting the long term immune-imbalance that causes chronic inflammation and suppresses many of the body’s natural healing mechanisms is critical for the success of any regenerative and rehabilitative therapies in our wounded warriors.

Other researchers at Georgia Tech and the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center outlined work conducted in their laboratories and facilities in regenerative engineering strategies for tendon overuse, extremity trauma and complex, multi-tissue injuries that simultaneously effect bone, muscle, vasculature and neural anatomy.  Existing injury models tend to address individual components, but composite defect models and methods are bringing these technologies to the point of translation to human trials and actual clinical application.  At UGA, researchers highlighted regenerative medicine efforts in bone fracture healing and nerve repair following traumatic brain injury.  

Novel engineering approaches to hemostasis, scar formation and contracture as well as infection fighting materials that could be brought to bear on battlefield injuries were discussed, and researchers from Emory addressed neuromuscular control as well as some of the clinical complications associated with extremity amputation.  Reminding us of the long-term reality of our military veterans living with amputations, one of the final presentations addressed the challenges of improving the technology behind prosthetic sockets, as researchers attempt to find solutions that improve comfort and function.

The symposium wrapped up with a presentation by one of the invited military guests, Brian Pfister from the U.S. Army’s Clinical and Rehabilitative Medicine Research Program (CRMR), entitled “DoD Priorities and Opportunities for Regenerative and Rehabilitative Technologies.”  Following his presentation, a long line of symposium participants waited to pick Pfister’s brain. This was expected and one of the main reasons for the symposium, which organizers saw as a chance to become better acquainted with Department of Defense goals and funding priorities. They also saw it as a community-building event where researchers could explore new synergies and begin developing multi-investigator grant opportunities.

“At the end of the day, I felt incredibly energized by the research progress presented and the potential these technologies have to impact critical health issues experienced by our military personnel in very significant ways,” says Guldberg. “Our faculty and their students are clearly on the front lines of the latest advancements, whether we are talking about new approaches for treating acute problems like extremity trauma, bleeding, or infections, or the longer-term challenges associated with traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic osteoarthritis, or optimizing the functional mobility of amputees.”

In addition to Pfister, military guests at the symposium included Eva Lai of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP), Bob Christy of the Army Institute of Surgical Research (AISR), and Susan Taylor and Mike Leggier of the Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM). Their presence, the nature of the research that was on display (including the stark images of soldiers’ injuries), and Pfister’s explanation of priority areas (extremity regeneration in the areas of muscle, nerve, and vascular) emphasized the ultimate purpose of the symposium, and the challenges facing researchers in this field.

“We have to keep in mind that this is not research as usual, but really focused on developing and translating healthcare technologies that help put back together our military personnel injured during service to our country,” Guldberg says. “This symposium served as a small but important step in that direction by bringing together like-minded members of our community and connecting with key program leaders at the Department of Defense.”

Contact:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Now, more than ever, those opportunities are plentiful in biosciences at Georgia Tech, where researchers are creating medical devices for children, understanding how diseases occur, improving vaccines, and building better biomaterials for drug delivery. Georgia Tech’s unique blend of engineering, biology, chemistry, and computing — along with partnerships with world-class medical facilities in Atlanta, such as Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta — has transformed the Institute’s campus into a magnet for bio-minded scientists.

“What we bring to the table is a new perspective in the biological sciences that is data driven, that is quantitative, that focuses on devices and techniques and on being unafraid to ask fundamental questions,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, the chair and professor of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “It’s a different approach to biology as an engineer.”

The rise of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech has created a ripple effect across the biosciences on campus. Biologists studying genetics, ecology, and personalized medicine are collaborating with engineers to solve challenging medical problems. The bio quad, home to the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB); the U.A. Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building; the Ford Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T) Building; and the Molecular Science and Engineering (M) Building, already forms a hub of interdisciplinary research. Soon, other collaboration-oriented buildings will be added, solidifying the Institute’s commitment to developing its bioscience portfolio, which touches everything from mechanical engineering, to electrical engineering, to materials science and engineering.

Bioscience the Georgia Tech way has attracted high-profile faculty, such as M.G. Finn, pioneer of click chemistry and rumored Nobel Prize candidate. Also flocking to campus are fresh young minds, such as Susan N. Thomas, an assistant professor in the new field of immunoengineering. These researchers and others, who might not have come to Georgia Tech even 10 years ago, say that the Institute is already making a dent in some of the world’s biggest medical challenges, and is poised to do more. Nascent fields of research, such as immunoengineering, systems biology, pediatric bioengineering, chemical biology, and biomanufacturing, are emerging strengths on campus, positioning Georgia Tech to help define what these fields become. Georgia Tech is already recognized as a leader in regenerative medicine, cardiovascular engineering, neuroengineering, and mechanobiology.

“Considering what had been done in the past 10 years, I thought the next 10 years at Georgia Tech would be pretty exciting,” said Finn, the interim chair and professor of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “Very few places in the world — if anywhere — will embed fundamental science in with applications science and technology better than we do here.”

Read more of this article from Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine.

“It’s a nice honor, to be recognized like this, but all of us are engaged in a number of collaborative efforts, so any successes we achieve individually represent the efforts of a broad community of our collaborators and colleagues,” says Todd McDevitt, Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and also director of the Stem Cell Engineering Center. “Collectively, we’re a lot stronger than the individual pieces alone.”

McDevitt, along with Ravi Bellamkonda, Ross Ethier and Krishnendu Roy are among the 20 scientists featured in the article by Ellie Hensley, who writes, “Respected research universities like Georgia Tech and Emory University draw top talent, and a high level of collaborations between institutions like these creates a unique environment for scientists in the state.”

Indeed, partnerships with other institutions – like the one between Georgia Tech and Emory resulting in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering – are a big reason these scientists happen to be here.

“That was very important to me. The collaborative effort is definitely something that attracted me to Georgia Tech – that, and also the opportunity to work with highly talented people who work in similar research areas,” says Roy, Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Professor and Director of the Center for Immunoengineering at Georgia Tech, who came here from the University of Texas at Austin last summer.

Regarding the Georgia Tech-Emory collaboration, Ethier adds, “The idea of a partnership between public and private universities is certainly unusual, and a testament to people having vision and foresight.” 

Ethier, the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Lawrence L. Gellerstedt, Jr. Eminent Scholar in Bioengineering, researches the biomechanics of cells and whole organs, targetting, among other things, glaucoma and new ways to treat the condition, which is the second most common cause of blindness. But it takes a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach, and enthusiastic support and leadership from a variety of sources, to make groundbreaking discoveries, and all of that is in place here, enough of it to have lured Ethier from the UK to Atlanta.

“The GRA provided me with the infrastructure to kick-start my research here, and that was really important,” says Ethier. “And there’s a can-do attitude here that’s so refreshing. You’re talking to folks, you ask a question and they tend to say, ‘yeah, we can figure out a way to make that happen.’”

That willingness to make things happen – and also to take risks – is one of the human (and institutional) elements that appeals most to Bellamkonda, who chairs the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and researches neural tissue engineering and cancer and is working to develop targeted drug delivery for brain tumor therapy. 

“In my mind, we have a can-do, fearless attitude in medical research that perhaps comes from the influence of engineering thought in medicine,” he says. “In my personal case, I've realized somewhere along the way that research is not about building a career – its about making progress and having an impact. Kids and older patients who might benefit from our research don't have the luxury of time – they need the advances we are working on today. And for this reason, it is worth taking on higher risk, high reward projects to complement more incremental research. These two elements - not being afraid of failure, and the need to make progress at a different pace than the field as a whole is moving, lead to breakthroughs in my mind. And my experience is completely consistent with this.”

Atlanta and Georgia, while not yet in the same league with longtime bio centers like Boston or San Francisco, is nonetheless a powerful and growing hub of activity. The state is 12^th in research funding, and Atlanta is fifth in research expenditures, according to the article in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

So, these four scientists, and their colleagues at Georgia Tech and across the state, are the architects of a new age in medical research. And Georgia’s institutions and researchers already are setting the pace in some fields. The next big step, of course, is translating this research into commercial use, and part of that involves the creation or development of new jobs to transform the growing health industry.

Take, for example, the NSF-funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program in stem cell biomanufacturing. Awarded to Georgia Tech in 2010, the program is designed to educate and train the first generation of Ph.D. students in the translation and commercialization of stem cell technologies for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

“We’re at an exciting point in Georgia where new initiatives are originating and ready to take off,” McDevitt says. “We’re not a traditional hub, where they’ve got an established culture. We’re still creating ours, and being at the forefront of leading new fields is exhilarating. We can have a significant impact in defining what the goals and objectives are going to be, and that will really inform industry.”

The Georgia ImmunoEngineering Consortium (GIEC) will bring together engineers, physicians, chemists, physicists, computational scientists, immunologists and clinical investigators to better understand how the immune system works and how to precisely modulate it to target challenging diseases.

The research teams will focus on cancer, infectious diseases, autoimmune and inflammatory disorders (diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, fibrosis, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, etc.), and areas of regenerative medicine including transplantation, bone and cartilage repair, and treatments for spinal cord injuries.

“The immune system and its multi-faceted role in human health and disease form the cornerstone of medical research, says Ignacio Sanz, MD, co-chair of the consortium steering committee. Sanz is Mason I. Lowance Chair of Allergy and Immunology and director of the Lowance Center of Human Immunology at Emory, director of rheumatology in the Department of Medicine in Emory School of Medicine, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

“This consortium not only combines the expertise of researchers throughout a variety of disciplines focused on the human immune response, but also reflects an increasing focus on engineering technologies and informatics in improving the diagnosis and treatment of challenging diseases.”

“By joining our immense strengths in immunology and bioengineering, we aspire to become an international leader in immunoengineering science; develop new technologies for prevention, rapid diagnosis, and treatment of immune-related disorders and train the next generation of physicians and engineers in this cutting edge research,” says Krishnendu Roy, PhD, co-chair of the consortium steering committee, director of the Center for ImmunoEngineering in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech and Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan professor of biomedical engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. 

Immunoengineering is the application of engineering tools and principles to better understand and monitor our immune system in health and in diseases. This knowledge is then used to develop more effective vaccines and therapies against a wide range of diseases like cancer, HIV, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, arthritis etc. and also to improve tissue regeneration, wound healing and transplantation, explain Sanz and Roy.

“Game-changing innovation and world-class scholarship occur at the boundaries of fields of study where collaborators bring different perspectives to challenging problems,” says Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. “This is the essence of the successful 17-year partnership between engineering and science at Georgia Tech, and medical science and clinical practice at Emory.”

Existing centers and departments that will collaborate within the new consortium include the Center for ImmunoEngineering at Georgia Tech as well as the Emory Vaccine Center, Lowance Center for Human Immunology, Departments of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, Hematology and Oncology, and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in Emory School of Medicine, the Emory-Children’s Pediatric Research Center, and Winship Cancer Institute, among others.

The consortium has partnered with the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), a nonprofit organization that expands research and commercialization capacity in Georgia’s universities to launch new companies, create high-value jobs and transform lives.

“The Georgia ImmunoEngineering Consortium is a unique academic collaboration that represents strong opportunities to align our state’s extensive university research base with targeted life sciences industry development in Georgia,” says C. Michael Cassidy, GRA president and CEO. “GRA looks forward to seeing the new discoveries and commercial opportunities that result from this partnership.”

The consortium will also collaborate with research partners at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and partners at various colleges and universities around Georgia, the United States, and around the world.

“Using engineering approaches to help unlock the biology of the immune system opens the door for exciting new discoveries that can alter human disease,” says David S. Stephens MD, vice president for research in Emory’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center, chair of the Department of Medicine in Emory University School of Medicine, and a member of the consortium steering committee. 

Additional members of the steering committee from Georgia Tech include M.G. Finn and Susan Thomas, and from Emory include Rafi Ahmed and Edmund K. (Ned) Waller.

A symposium will celebrate the consortium launch:

Georgia ImmunoEngineering Symposium:
Feb. 28, 2014, 7 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Emory Conference Center

For more information about the consortium, please view the website.

- Holly Korschun, Emory University

McDevitt is an associate professor in the Coulter Department, a Petit Faculty Fellow in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and director of the Stem Cell Engineering Center at Georgia Tech. The objective of McDevitt’s research program is to develop enabling technologies for the directed differentiation of stem cells for regenerative medicine, disease models, and diagnostic applications. Much of his research focuses on the application of technologies to engineer stem cell fate, on stem cell bioprocessing and on engineering regenerative therapies from stem cells. McDevitt has garnered more than $9 million in funding, including a Transformative R01 award from the NIH and an NSF IGERT on Stem Cell Biomanufacturing. He received the 2010 Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award, a New Investigator Award from the American Heart Association and was recognized as one of the “40 Under 40” by Georgia Trend magazine. McDevitt graduated cum laude from Duke University, with a B.S.E. and a double major in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 in Bioengineering from the University of Washington, where he worked for Patrick S. Stayton, and where he conducted post-doctoral research in the pathology laboratory of Charles E. Murry. 

Roy joined the Coulter Department this summer as professor and is currently the director of the Center for Immunoengineering.  He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). He received his B.S. from the Indian Institute of Technology, M.S. from Boston University and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Following his Ph.D., he joined a start-up biotechnology company, Zycos Inc., where he served as a senior scientist in drug delivery research.  He joined The University of Texas at Austin in 2002, where most recently he was professor of Biomedical Engineering. He also served as the director of the graduate program and as associate chair for education and outreach. His research interests are in the areas of immunoengineering with particular focus on material-directed cells signaling and immune cell generation and controlled drug and vaccine delivery technologies with applications in cancer and immunotherapies.  Roy has received the Young Investigator Awards from The Society for Biomaterials (SFB) and the Controlled Release Society (CRS). He has been extensively funded by NIH, NSF, the Coulter Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation and the Cancer Prevention And Research Institute of Texas, among others. He serves as a member of the editorial boards for the Journal of Controlled Release and the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics.

Georgia Tech and Emory created the joint department of biomedical engineering in the fall of 1997. The collaborative relationship blends the expertise of medical researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine with that of the engineering faculty at Georgia Tech, and is the first of its kind between a public and private institution. The collaboration has resulted in a biomedical engineering program that consistently ranks among the top five in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.