Since it was founded in 2002, the Applied Physiology Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech has had close ties to rehabilitation science. Now, thanks to the generosity of a Georgia Tech and Emory University alum’s family foundation, Applied Physiology will work with the Emory University School of Medicine and Shepherd Center’s Crawford Research Institute to create a new training program for Applied Physiology doctoral students focused on neurorehabilitation. 

The Applied Physiology Ph.D. program, part of the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences, focuses primarily on the physical and neural function of the human motor system. “Because of that,” explains T. Richard Nichols, Biological Sciences professor and head of Applied Physiology, “rehabilitation has always been a very strong theme in our program.”

That deeper focus on rehabilitation sciences is now formalized by the creation of the Jack and Dana McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program. The new initiative is the result of a $1 million gift from Dana and Jack McCallum (BIO ’66) that will be used over the next four years to support graduate student and faculty research, as well as train new scientists in neurorehabilitation. 

Emory University School of Medicine, where Jack McCallum received his M.D., will be a close partner in developing the program. A course designed to train graduate students in clinical neurorehabilitation will be taught at the school in addition to collaborating closely in research funded by the investment.

“This gift is really going to strengthen the tie between specifically Biological Sciences and the Emory University School of Medicine, which was the intention of the gift,” explains Biological Sciences professor and associate chair of faculty development Young-Hui Chang. “I think it’s going to provide one more, but very strong, avenue for collaboration between the two institutions.”

Refocusing on rehabilitation

With a clinical focus, research funded through the program will target aspects of rehabilitation for people who have neurological diseases like Parkinson disease — or trauma, such as a spinal cord or brain injury.

The investment will also drive new major research focused on understanding the neurophysiological basis for injury and recovery related to central and peripheral nervous system trauma, and on the preclinical development of potential therapies.

“As people survive and live longer with acquired conditions such as stroke and Parkinson disease, and with traumatic injuries such as brain and spinal cord injury, there is a tremendous demand for rehabilitation researchers to meet needs of the large and growing population of persons with neurologic conditions,” explains Edelle Field-Fote, a professor with joint appointments in the Emory University School of Medicine and Applied Physiology at Georgia Tech, who also serves as director of spinal cord injury research at the Shepherd Center. “The goal of the McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program is to help address this need. The program will develop rehabilitation scientists with the training to advance knowledge underlying clinical care and the skills to develop interventions that can reduce disability, thereby improving functioning and quality of life for persons with neurologic conditions.”

Research and practice in motion

The Applied Physiology graduate program is no stranger to clinical research and development, having served as home of a clinical master’s degree in prosthetics and orthotics, which migrated to Kennesaw State University in 2020, and also hosting a training grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH), funding students whose research focused on rehabilitation for persons with limb loss. In 2018, Applied Physiology launched a dual Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Physical Therapy degree program in collaboration with the Division of Physical Therapy at Emory University, with Field-Fote as its director. 

"Emory University’s Division of Physical Therapy greatly values our collaborations with Georgia Tech and its Applied Physiology program,” shares Tami Phillips, associate professor and interim program director of the Division of Physical Therapy. “The opportunity for Ph.D. students to work in research labs across institutions and D.P.T/Ph.D. students to bridge the gap between clinical neurorehabilitation practice and research will lead to innovations that will benefit individuals with neurologic conditions.”

As Nichols points out, these ties between research and the clinic build a solid foundation for the new training program. “Our faculty in Applied Physiology are used to dealing with clinical collaborators and clinical problems, but we're working more at a fundamental level in terms of the science. It really provides a nice environment for this training program and will help move us into a new area of neurorehabilitation.”

New funding for current graduate students in Applied Physiology, as well as those enrolling in the dual Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Physical Therapy program, is set to begin this year. Targeted toward advanced students, the efforts are expected to allow the Applied Physiology program to admit more new students and to award competitive McCallum Research Fellowships to help fund thesis research after they reach Ph.D. candidacy.

“I am so grateful to Dana and Jack McCallum for their foresight and generosity,” shares Field-Fote. “I am most excited by the great potential that this program has for advancing the clinical care and foundational sciences related to neurorehabilitation.”

For more information on the Applied Physiology program or the Jack and Dana McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program, contact Young-Hui Chang at yh.chang@ap.gatech.edu.

For more information on how to support the School of Biological Sciences or the Applied Physiology Program, contact Leslie Roberts at leslie.roberts@cos.gatech.edu and visit: cos.gatech.edu/giving

Little Einsteins Organization (LEO) is a chartered Georgia Tech campus organization that conducts science, technology, engineering, and math focused activities with children in Atlanta.

Each week, LEO works with more than 150 kids at various elementary schools in Atlanta. The organization has more than 100 Georgia Tech student members and nearly 2,000 followers on Instagram. Membership is open to all undergraduate and graduate Georgia Tech students.

The past two years have presented many challenges for those involved in education, but that hasn’t stopped Georgia Tech’s Little Einsteins Organization from helping provide students in K-5 schools with instruction and activities focused on STEM. 

They’ve accomplished that by changing how they bring science and engineering to the kids — meeting at Hands on Atlanta for science demonstrations, and sending kits to local libraries for children and their families to take home — so that children can perform experiments found in do-it-yourself kits assembled by Georgia Tech volunteers.

“I think they have done wonderful outreach activities, and have been so creative and committed to reach out, despite the very different pandemic landscape,” says Pamela Pollet, LEO academic advisor and senior academic professional in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “This project is unique because it gives Georgia Tech students the opportunity to support the education of young children in Atlanta during a time of isolation and online schooling.”

Pollet says the pandemic hasn’t kept LEO student and instructor volunteers from keeping their commitment to Atlanta’s students, especially those in underserved communities. 

And before Covid, Pollet saw firsthand LEO’s impact when volunteers helped the younger students conduct experiments in their schools. “Their friend’s volcano erupted much more than theirs. Why? What was different? ‘How come my catapult is not working?’ It is okay if it does not work — let’s take a look and think how we can make it work," she shares. "LEO members created a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere in which students were so engaged and curious.”

There was also the opportunity for Atlanta children to see future versions of themselves in the Georgia Tech students. “They recognized themselves or connected with LEO members as if they were in an age group of older sisters or brothers. It demystified the image given to a scientist or engineer.”

Olivia Gravina, a fourth-year undergraduate in the School of Mathematics, serves as LEO president for the 2021-22 school year. Gravina says one of the group’s latest efforts to get creative during Covid challenges involved putting together at-home STEM kits for kids involved in Hands On Atlanta’s "Disco" program, formerly known as the Discovery program. Disco is a Saturday morning enrichment program which currently offers STEM, social emotional learning, fitness, and health-related activities to K-5 youth across nine Atlanta-area schools.

“We made 150 homemade ice pack kits, and 150 soap Silly Putty kits,” Gravina says. Teams of LEO members made instructional videos for each of the activities which included explanations of the science behind them. Then, Tech's LEO members joined Zoom calls with students from schools involved in the Disco program. 

“The young students had the opportunity to ask questions, and Georgia Tech students were able to encourage the younger students and see the impact of the kits they had provided,” Gravina shares.

Another recent activity, a collaboration with Fulton County Libraries, saw LEO members assembling kits for building small catapults, which also included instructional videos. “We delivered 620 catapult-making kits, which translates to 20 kits in each of the 31 branches of the Fulton County Library System,” Gravina explains.

“It was absolutely brilliant to use the libraries, kits and videos to maintain the excitement of hands-on experimenting,” Pollet adds.

“It was needed even more, especially for younger kids. Being virtual all day leaves many of them disconnected from the material and what science is about: Experiments, observations, questions, analysis," Pollet shares. "And again, they can connect the experiments with Georgia Tech students they can easily relate to.”

Gravina says LEO is still working through plans for the season ahead, but hopes to continue coordinating activities in Atlanta libraries. She encourages other Georgia Tech students to join those activities.

Pollet says the ability to show younger students that they could eventually pursue science careers is critical, pandemic or no pandemic.

“Young, dynamic Tech students who are doing science, and taking the time to do it with them,” Pollet says. “That is really inspiring.”

More information on Little Einsteins Organization is available on their website, and on their Instagram page. Learn more about Hands On Atlanta’s Disco program here. 

Little Einsteins Organization (LEO) is a chartered Georgia Tech campus organization that conducts science, technology, engineering, and math focused activities with children in Atlanta.

Each week, LEO works with more than 150 kids at various elementary schools in Atlanta. The organization has more than 100 Georgia Tech student members and nearly 2,000 followers on Instagram. Membership is open to all undergraduate and graduate Georgia Tech students.

The past two years have presented many challenges for those involved in education, but that hasn’t stopped Georgia Tech’s Little Einsteins Organization from helping provide students in K-5 schools with instruction and activities focused on STEM. 

They’ve accomplished that by changing how they bring science and engineering to the kids — meeting at Hands on Atlanta for science demonstrations, and sending kits to local libraries for children and their families to take home — so that children can perform experiments found in do-it-yourself kits assembled by Georgia Tech volunteers.

“I think they have done wonderful outreach activities, and have been so creative and committed to reach out, despite the very different pandemic landscape,” says Pamela Pollet, LEO academic advisor and senior academic professional in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “This project is unique because it gives Georgia Tech students the opportunity to support the education of young children in Atlanta during a time of isolation and online schooling.”

Pollet says the pandemic hasn’t kept LEO student and instructor volunteers from keeping their commitment to Atlanta’s students, especially those in underserved communities. 

And before Covid, Pollet saw firsthand LEO’s impact when volunteers helped the younger students conduct experiments in their schools. “Their friend’s volcano erupted much more than theirs. Why? What was different? ‘How come my catapult is not working?’ It is okay if it does not work — let’s take a look and think how we can make it work," she shares. "LEO members created a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere in which students were so engaged and curious.”

There was also the opportunity for Atlanta children to see future versions of themselves in the Georgia Tech students. “They recognized themselves or connected with LEO members as if they were in an age group of older sisters or brothers. It demystified the image given to a scientist or engineer.”

Olivia Gravina, a fourth-year undergraduate in the School of Mathematics, serves as LEO president for the 2021-22 school year. Gravina says one of the group’s latest efforts to get creative during Covid challenges involved putting together at-home STEM kits for kids involved in Hands On Atlanta’s "Disco" program, formerly known as the Discovery program. Disco is a Saturday morning enrichment program which currently offers STEM, social emotional learning, fitness, and health-related activities to K-5 youth across nine Atlanta-area schools.

“We made 150 homemade ice pack kits, and 150 soap Silly Putty kits,” Gravina says. Teams of LEO members made instructional videos for each of the activities which included explanations of the science behind them. Then, Tech's LEO members joined Zoom calls with students from schools involved in the Disco program. 

“The young students had the opportunity to ask questions, and Georgia Tech students were able to encourage the younger students and see the impact of the kits they had provided,” Gravina shares.

Another recent activity, a collaboration with Fulton County Libraries, saw LEO members assembling kits for building small catapults, which also included instructional videos. “We delivered 620 catapult-making kits, which translates to 20 kits in each of the 31 branches of the Fulton County Library System,” Gravina explains.

“It was absolutely brilliant to use the libraries, kits and videos to maintain the excitement of hands-on experimenting,” Pollet adds.

“It was needed even more, especially for younger kids. Being virtual all day leaves many of them disconnected from the material and what science is about: Experiments, observations, questions, analysis," Pollet shares. "And again, they can connect the experiments with Georgia Tech students they can easily relate to.”

Gravina says LEO is still working through plans for the season ahead, but hopes to continue coordinating activities in Atlanta libraries. She encourages other Georgia Tech students to join those activities.

Pollet says the ability to show younger students that they could eventually pursue science careers is critical, pandemic or no pandemic.

“Young, dynamic Tech students who are doing science, and taking the time to do it with them,” Pollet says. “That is really inspiring.”

More information on Little Einsteins Organization is available on their website, and on their Instagram page. Learn more about Hands On Atlanta’s Disco program here. 

The Georgia Tech College of Computing has received an $11 million grant from Schmidt Futures to create one of the four software engineering centers within the newly launched Virtual Institute for Scientific Software (VISS). The new center will hire half-a-dozen software engineers to write scalable, reliable, and portable open-source software for scientific research.

“Scientific research involves increasingly complex software, technologies, and platforms,” said Alessandro Orso, the software engineer and professor of computer science who is heading up the project. “Also, platforms constantly evolve, and the complexity and amount of data involved is ever-growing.”

The result is that these software systems are often developed as prototypes that are difficult to understand, maintain, and use, which limits their efficacy and ultimately hinders scientific progress.

Software engineers are trained to address these kinds of issues and know how to build high-quality software, but their time is too expensive for a typical research project’s budget. In typical grants, software is often treated as a byproduct of research, meaning that limited funding is allocated for it.

That’s where Schmidt Futures comes in. Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. They are investing $40 million in VISS over five years at four universities: Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Cambridge.

“Schmidt Futures’ Virtual Institute for Scientific Software is a core part of our efforts to mobilize exceptional talent to solve specific hard problems in science and society,” said Executive Vice President Elizabeth Young-McNally.

At Georgia Tech, the funds will hire a software engineering lead, as well as three senior and two junior software engineers. A faculty director and an advisory board will help guide the group’s work, which will include collaborations with Georgia Tech scientists.

"We are very proud to host one of the four inaugural Schmidt Futures Virtual Institute of Scientific Software centers,” said Charles Isbell, Dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair of Computing.

“Georgia Tech’s center will advance and support scientific research by applying modern software engineering practices, cutting-edge technologies, and modern tools to the development of scientific software. The center will also engage with students and researchers to train the next generation of software engineering leaders.”

Microorganisms are highly abundant in the surface ocean, reaching densities exceeding a billion organisms per liter. Collectively responsible for roughly half of global carbon fixation, diverse groups of microbes coexist while relying on limited nutrients even as some microbes depend on energy from the sun to grow via photosynthesis. 

Precisely because microbes compete for scarce nutrients, how such a vast diversity of ocean microbes coexist has long puzzled scientists. A collaborative group of researchers from 13 institutions aimed to shed light on the subject as part of new work published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution led by Joshua Weitz, Professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.

“The pressing matter of survival for many microorganisms at the surface is acquiring enough nitrogen,” explains Daniel Muratore, a doctoral candidate in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Tech and one of three co-first authors of the study. “Since microbes need to acquire nitrogen to function, we might imagine that the particular microbial type that is best at acquiring nitrogen will ultimately win – because it'll be able to grow faster than everything else. And yet that's not the case.”

By integrating data on the timing of metabolic processes of different microbes in the surface ocean throughout the 24-hour light cycle – from the transcription of genes for metabolic proteins to the synthesis of macromolecules like lipids – the researchers discovered that the coexistence of diverse microbes is shaped by the timing of uptake.

“What we saw when we let the data speak for itself was that nitrogen uptake and assimilation had some of the most distributed timing, where different microbes are doing similar metabolic processes at different times of day,” Muratore explains. While genes associated with the uptake of a scarcer resource like nitrogen were transcribed at different times by different organisms, microbes tended to transcribe genes related to carbon metabolism and photosynthesis during daytime hours while the sun was shining.

With staggered nitrogen uptake, Muratore points out that “instead of having to compete with the whole field, [microbes] only have to compete with the organisms that share that specific shift with them. Perhaps that's one way that the competition is alleviated and can facilitate all of these diverse microbes being able to live off of the same nutrient source.”

A deep dive into microbial metabolism

The study began in 2015, when scientists across disciplines in the Simons Foundation’s Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE) collected different types of data looking at microbes in the surface of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the Earth’s largest stretch of contiguous ocean. “[We were interested in] understanding how that fluctuation of photosynthesis during the day and the absence thereof at night propagates through the microbial community [in the ocean],” explains Angela Boysen, co-first author on the study who conducted this research while a doctoral student at the University of Washington and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. “Fluctuations in energy input influence how the ecosystem overall functions, how much carbon is stored, where the carbon moves around, and how organisms might interact with each other.”

Data on metabolic processes were collected simultaneously from the same body of water every four hours, giving researchers an unprecedented look at how metabolic activity differs among these microbes throughout the 24-hour day-night cycle. “Collecting all these different sample types – genes, metabolites, lipids, chemical, etc. – at the same time is really a first way to look at the whole ecosystem all at once from all these different perspectives,” Matthew Harke, a co-first author of the study and a research scientist at the Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute, shares. “That's something that has rarely, if at all, been done.”

The research cruise ultimately yielded data on over 65,000 unique genetic transcripts, metabolic markers, and macromolecules over time in multiple types of organisms, making the integration and interpretation of the data a big challenge. To make the data more interpretable, authors turned to machine learning methods, which work to cluster together data with similar patterns over time. 

The emergent data clusters revealed that most of the activity occurred at four time points: dusk (6 p.m.), night (2 a.m.), morning (6 a.m.), afternoon (between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.). While these times were important for the many types of microbes studied, the key metabolic activities at each time differed. For instance, photosynthesizing microbes expressed genes coding for proteins important in nitrogen uptake pathways the most at dusk, while organisms that rely on external organic matter for energy expressed these genes most in the morning. Transcription of genes associated with iron uptake, another scarce resource in the open ocean, also took place at different times across species.

By uncovering new evidence that staggering resource uptake is potentially critical for the co-existence of diverse marine microbes, Harke highlights that “this paper really makes us re-think our perception of what it’s like to be a microbe in the ocean.” The ocean is vast, and the researchers are hoping to examine how widely their findings hold.

“In the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, we see fairly stable waters, we have day and night cycles that are fairly stable across the seasons,” Harke explains. “What does it look like in an area of the world where that’s not stable? Do these types of things repeat themselves in coastal regions, or at other scales that we might want to look at, or other parts of the world with different dynamics that might be influencing physiology? Those are the big questions that come out of this.”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01606-w

This work was supported by grants from the Simons Foundation as part of the SCOPE collaboration (Simons Foundation grants 329108, 721244, 721223, 721252, 721256, 724220, 723787, 721229, 721225, and 721231), an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Postdoctoral Scholarship Program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution & U.S. Geological Survey, and the Simons Collaboration on Computational Biogeochemical Modeling of Marine Ecosystems (Simons Foundation grant 549894).

The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) has announced that a 2022 Molecular Pharmacology Early Career Award will be presented to Dr. Matthew Torres, faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences, in recognition of his scholarly achievements as a junior investigator in the field of molecular pharmacology.

Dr. Torres is receiving this award in recognition of his innovative research that combines genetics, mass spectrometry, and cutting-edge bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications impact protein function and cell physiology, and also in recognition of his strong commitment to teaching, mentoring and service. Dr. Torres is currently an Associate Professor in the School. He received his PhD in biochemistry and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The primary focus of Dr. Torres’s lab is to combine yeast genetics, mass spectrometry (MS) and bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications (PTMs) impact protein structure, function and cell behavior. His group studies how PTMs regulate G protein signaling pathways, with a current emphasis on the G protein gamma subunit. His lab also developed SAPH-ire (“Systematic Analysis of PTM Hotspots”), a bioinformatics tool that employs machine learning to prioritize PTMs important for protein function and provide recommendations for experimental analysis. Dr. Torres has been a member of ASPET since 2017.

The award will be presented by the Division for Molecular Pharmacology at the ASPET Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on Monday, April 4, 2022 where Dr. Torres will deliver a lecture on his research titled "From m/z to G_αβγ: Accessing the Collective Wisdom in Proteomics to Reveal Posttranslational Governors of G protein Signaling".

The talk will focus on the development of protein bioinformatic and computational tools that revealed how G_γ subunits - through phosphorylation of their intrinsically disordered N-termini - can serve as governors of G_βγ signaling.

Story adapted from:

2022 ASPET Award Winners