The Bioengineering and Bioscience Unified Graduate Students (BBUGS) have launched a new website. The new BBUGS website offers features that will enhance the communication and interactions among the students and the bio-community. BBUGS members can now create profiles that will be viewable to the public which allow students to share their current research and accomplishments with other academic and industry organizations within the bioengineering and bioscience fields.

Additionally, the new BBUGS website has incorporated a message board whereby BBUGS members can post announcements pertaining to job openings, scholarship/grant availabilities, seminars/workshops or upcoming social activities. The new website design includes new and improved functionality to make navigation throughout the website less complicated and more manageable.

BBUGS is currently the largest, most diverse, graduate student group on the Georgia Tech campus and is an interdisciplinary student group, comprised of 8 different departments, with their home in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Comprised of over 500 members, BBUGS serves as the core student group for the bioengineering and bioscience community and is open to all Georgia Tech and Emory University students from bio-related fields.  Existing members are encouraged to go to the new website and create a profile to stay engaged. 

In order to continue to provide Georgia Tech researchers with "state of the art" equipment, unparalleled performance and more opportunities to access shared resources, select research cores in the Petit Institute will begin to recover materials, supplies and maintenance-related costs by charging a minimal fee for the use of various pieces of equipment. 

While the Micro CT and histology cores are already set up as cost recovery service centers, we plan to bring the microscopy core online as a cost recovery service center in February of 2012.

Other cores will follow as rates are developed and approved by the Georgia Tech Office of Grants and Contracts Accounting. A phased approach will be used in setting the rates to aid laboratories in planning and provide researchers with an opportunity to make adjustments to budgets.

Beginning in February 2012, users will be charged a small percentage of the cost-based rate for usage. The initial charge to Georgia Tech users for confocal time is anticipated to be $2.75/hr. The rates will be increased in subsequent years but remain highly subsidized by the Petit Institute.

In order to administer the new cost recovery service center, users will access Petit Institute core facilities resources through a new online reservation system, serviced by iLab. The Petit Institute website will remain intact and the only change is that users will register, view and reserve equipment, request services, view bills and enter payment information through the iLab Solutions website.

The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech announces its 2012 class of Petit Undergraduate Research Scholars.  The "Petit Scholars" are top undergraduate students from Atlanta-area universities chosen from a highly competitive selection process to conduct independent research projects for a full year at the Petit Institute. 

The Petit Scholars program is administered by the Petit Institute and Todd McDevitt, a Petit Faculty Fellow and associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, who volunteers as the faculty advisor for the program.

"We had a very competitive applicant pool this year," McDevitt said.  "Due to the generosity of various donors, we were able to award nineteen research scholarships this year."

From January through December of 2012, each of the 19 scholars will be mentored by a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow in a Petit Institute laboratory.  During this period, the scholars will work to develop their own research projects which they themselves have selected after a thorough interview process with potential mentors.  Research is conducted within the areas of cancer biology, biomaterials, drug design, development and delivery, molecular evolution, molecular cellular and tissue biomechanics, regenerative medicine, stem cell engineering and systems biology.  Many scholars will have made enough progress in their research by the end of the year to participate on scientific publications and/or present at conferences.  

The class of 2012 is represented by students from Georgia Tech, Emory University, Spelman College and Agnes Scott College.

2012 Class of Petit Scholars:
Michael Butler - Georgia Tech
Frederick Damen - Georgia Tech
Kyle Ferguson - Georgia Tech
Kelsey Gratton - Georgia Tech
Alexandria Harrison - Spelman College
Susan Hastings - Georgia Tech
Kathleen Heller - Georgia Tech
Jacob Johnson - Georgia Tech
Taylor Kavanaugh - Georgia Tech
Lu Ling - Georgia Tech
Robert Mannino - Georgia Tech
Mohamad Ali Najia - Georgia Tech
Marc Powell - Georgia Tech
Sydney Rowson - Georgia Tech
Abhinav Sharma - Emory University
Andrew St. James - Georgia Tech
Patrick Strane - Georgia Tech
Anirudh Sundararaghavan - Georgia Tech
Alexandra Wagner - Agnes Scott College

Since its inception in 2000, the program has supported hundreds of top undergraduate researchers who have gone on to distinguished careers in research, medicine and industry.  Originally established as a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program from a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awarded to the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for Tissue Engineering, the program was expanded to a full year research opportunity that has grown from funding 10 scholars per year to 19 scholars in 2012.

Funding for the Petit Scholars is supported by Atlanta area community members, including the Friends of the Petit Institute, as well as corporate sponsorship.  If you are interested in donating to this valuable program, please contact us.

Petit Scholars program information

It’s not easy battling HIV on two fronts, let alone on two continents, but with the help of his colleagues in Atlanta and in South Africa that’s exactly what Dr. Manu Platt is doing.

If all goes according to plan the Georgia Tech biomedical engineering professor’s cutting-edge research will give doctors the ability to predict, treat, and prevent the occurrence of cardiovascular disease in HIV patients while he also develops a low-cost diagnostic tool that could help monitor patient success with treatment to help stem the spread of HIV in Africa.

At the time not much was known about the connection between HIV and cardiovascular disease; although it was clear that HIV patients were at much higher risk of suffering cardiovascular events than the general population. The risk was even higher for children born with HIV, something that is far too common in countries like South Africa where 10-15% of the population is HIV positive.Dr. Platt, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s Wallace H. Coulter Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, began his foray into HIV research as a first-year professor in 2009 when he answered a call for new researchers that was jointly sponsored by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the International AIDS Society (IAS).

While attending the 2009 IAS conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Cape Town, South Africa, Platt realized that his lab at Georgia Tech was ideally suited for addressing this critical gap in HIV research.

“Here at Georgia Tech we do tissue engineering,” says Platt. “We’ve been doing it for years and we’ve been doing it very effectively in the cardiovascular arena.”

“We can make tissue-engineered arteries with human cells that can be infected by this human virus. We’re also great at having bioreactors that can recreate the human physiological flow environment with shear stress and pressure. We have an excellent test system for HIV-mediated cardiovascular disease. “

The difficulty is that there is limited access to HIV samples within the United States, and that’s where Platt’s collaboration with Dr. Denise Evans in South Africa comes in. The duo met at the IAS conference in Cape Town and instantly realized that their areas of research dovetailed very nicely. Evans works out of the Helen Joseph Clinic in Johannesburg that sees over 400 HIV positive patients per day, that agree to donate their for research purposes and get reimbursed for travel while awaiting their chance to see the doctor.

Knowing what enzymes are tied to cardiovascular events in HIV negative patients, Platt and his Georgia Tech collaborator, Dr. Rudy Gleason (Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering), travelled to South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand last fall and ran tests on samples drawn from patients at the Helen Joseph Clinic in order to determine if those markers were higher than in the general population.

“We knew that these enzymes are important to the disease and we had already developed a test to measure them,” said Platt, “but we had not measured them in HIV patients.”

Platt and Gleason will continue analyzing their results over the next few months while they also work with their other collaborator, Dr. Roy Sutliff, from the Emory University School of Medicine’s Department of Pulmonology, who specializes in mouse models which have been instrumental in the group’s cardiovascular research. Once they complete their analysis of the results the trio should be able to guide other researchers and drug companies in developing new and more effective ways to treat cardiovascular disease in HIV patients.

But that’s not all. Like many fields of research, Dr. Platt’s work had an unforeseen application. When he was developing tests for the enzymes that cause cardiovascular disease it was suggested to Platt by Dr. Evans that he also look for a few other key markers in the samples drawn from the South African samples. The theory was that by measuring viral load and T-cell counts conclusions could be drawn about how well patients are following their drug regimen since t-T-cell counts should be tied to how regularly they are taking the antiretroviral drug cocktail used by HIV patients in Africa.

The problem is that the drugs have to be taken daily, and a single lapse could cause a patient’s viral load to spike and their T-cell count to drop, greatly endangering their health.

While many patients are very adherent to the drug regimen not all are, and local community groups have been looking for a simple, low-cost bio-marker that would help indicate how adherent a patient has been and how well the antiretroviral cocktail is working. Platt and his colleagues are developing that test and are in the process of adapting it for the field so that it can be easily transported and used by traveling doctors.

“If it starts to pan out we’ll have a great test to send out in the field to see if people are taking their drugs,” said Platt. “That’s where the engineering comes in- we’re trying to optimize it to make it even simpler, easier, and inexpensive.

“It’s a test that we also use for cancer studies in my lab. We already have a post-doc working on improving the device so it can be put on a cancer clinician’s bench. While they’re doing that it will totally work in parallel with the HIV analysis.”

HIV patients who are undergoing regular drug treatments greatly reduce their risk of transmitting the virus which is why the phrase “Treatment is Prevention” is the mantra in the world of AIDS.

By developing a tool that can help clinicians monitor patient progress Platt is helping to stem the spread of HIV while simultaneously using his cardiovascular research to improve the lives of those already living with the virus.

Biomedical Engineering Professor Eberhard Voit, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Class of 2012. He was chosen for the honor: "For outstanding contributions to the development of computational systems biology and the use of model-based problem-solving in biomedical engineering."

Voit holds the David D. Flanagan Chair in Biological Systems in The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and Associate Director of the Integrative BioSystems Institute.

There were 107 individuals elected to the College, who will be inducted at a ceremony at AIMBE’s Annual Event on February 20 in Washington, D.C. The inductees, who were nominated by their peers, were screened by committees of Fellows within their specialty and were finally elected by the full College as the official College of Fellows Class of 2012. The College of Fellows is comprised of the top two percent of medical and biological engineers in the country.

The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience announces its annual “Above and Beyond” awardees. Loren Williams, Ph.D. and Todd Sulchek, Ph.D are the recipients of the faculty awards and Colly Mitchell has been named the staff recipient. 

The Petit Institute Above and Beyond Awards are selected by the Faculty Steering Committee and given to team-based individuals who demonstrate exemplary service to the institute and contribute to its collegial, collaborative environment.  Three awards are given each year to a senior faculty member, a pre-tenure faculty member and a staff member.

Loren Williams, professor in Chemistry and Biochemistry, has contributed to the Petit Institute significantly this year. Williams is the director of one of the Petit Institute interdisciplinary research centers, RiboEvo.  RiboEvo is a NASA-funded center which is focused on integrated interdisciplinary research and education in astrobiology. As part of the center’s activities, Williams voluntarily participated in the Buzz on Biotechnology high school open house where his center hosted two booths, one with a 3-D visualization of DNA, RNA using PyMol and another demonstration showcasing the use of liquid nitrogen in cryogenics and molecular biology. In addition, Williams organized the 2011 Suddath Symposium and participated in several Petit Institute activities including the Industry Partners Symposium dinner and the Bio-Center Poster Session. Williams also sits on the core facilities steering committee. Williams will have an equally busy 2012 as he is chair of the Astrobiology Science Conference which will attract over 700 scientists to Atlanta and Georgia Tech next year.

Todd Sulchek, assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering, was nominated for his participation and support of the Petit Scholars program over the last several years and for consistently being an active community citizen. Sulchek has participated in many Petit Institute-related events, seminars and community-wide poster sessions.  In addition, Sulchek received a NSF CAREER Award for his proposal titled: "Understanding Multivalent Biological Bonds for Biosensing Applications."  Sulchek will continue to support Petit Institute activities in 2012 as he is scheduled to give a seminar for the Petit Institute’s IBB Breakfast Club seminar series in February.

Colly Mitchell, special program coordinator for marketing and communications,has been working for the Petit Institute since 2007. In 2008, she began tomanage the Petit Scholars program.  At the time Mitchell took over, the program wasdeclining.  Over the course of thelast 3 years, she has played a key role in improving the number and quality ofthe applications and in 2011 the program is thriving.  During her tenure at the Petit Institute, Mitchell has made acomplex job look easy by supporting a variety of Petit Institute events forgroups ranging from students to high-profile donors and administrators. Inaddition, she is responsible for various communication activities, includingdisplay of news and events on the atrium’s flat screen TV and the institute’swebsite. Perhaps even more impressively, she manages all of this on a part-timebasis and does so with a calm demeanor, a constant smile and an easyprofessionalism that earns her the respect and admiration of her colleagues.  

Winship Cancer Institute researchers are testing an experimental therapy for glioblastoma, the most common and most aggressive form of primary brain cancer. The study uses brain imaging in an effort to detect whether the therapy is having an effect after one week.

The therapy combines vorinostat, an experimental drug, with temozolomide, which is standard treatment for glioblastoma.“Vorinostat is a different type of cancer drug,” says Hyunsuk Shim, PhD, associate professor of radiology at Emory University School of Medicine. “It’s an epigenetic therapy, and the desired effect is to turn genes that could suppress tumor growth back on. One of the desired effects is to restore normal metabolic behavior to the cancer cells, halting tumor growth.”

Epigenetics refers to the study of how genes are packaged or modified, carrying additional information beyond the DNA sequence itself. In many tumor cells, genes that prevent runaway growth in normal cells (tumor suppressor genes) are silenced by epigenetic modification. Inhibiting enzymes called histone deacetylases may reverse this silencing, with possible benefits in treating glioblastoma.

Vorinostat may also help temozolomide, which damages tumor DNA, work better by making tumor cells more sensitive to the drug. Vorinostat, a histone deacetylase inhibitor, is approved by the FDA for CTCL (cutaneous T cell lymphoma) but not brain cancer.

In this National Cancer Institute (NCI)-sponsored clinical trial, the researchers are using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to detect changes in brain metabolism brought on by vorinostat. MRS, a form of imaging similar to MRI, allows doctors to monitor the levels of several brain chemicals. The researchers will gauge the levels of inositol and N-acetylaspartate, which are both indicators of healthy brain metabolism.

“This form of therapy may not be effective for all patients, but it is better to figure out as early as possible which patients the drug is working for,” Shim says.

Researchers want to develop new imaging tools to monitor how vorinostat is affecting the tumor. The study is designed to gather information that will allow doctors to make a quick decision on whether vorinostat is effective for a given patient without injecting contrast material.

Shim is collaborating with Jeffrey Olson, MD, professor of neurosurgery, hematology and medical oncology and the co-director of Winship’s brain tumor program, and Xiaoping Hu, PhD, director of Emory’s Biomedical Imaging Technology Center and professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Hu is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.For more information about the clinical trial, which currently is enrolling patients, contact 404-778-1900.

The study is being supported by the National Cancer Institute.

Writer: Quinn Eastman

The Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center of Emory University is an academic health science and service center focused on missions of teaching, research, health care and public service. 

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced the establishment of its Breakthrough Awards Program, which is designed to enable investigators to further their Inflammatory bowel disease research and increase the likelihood of a breakthrough discovery.


A research proposal by Julie A. Champion, Ph.D, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Andrew S. Neish, M.D., professor in anatomic pathology at Emory University School of Medicine, will receive $100,000 to continue the promising research that resulted from the foundation through its Innovator Award program last year. The “Breakthrough Awards” are given to existing Kenneth Rainin Foundation funded Innovator Award recipients that have demonstrated significant research progress during their initial year's work.


Over the course of the next year, the team’s research aims to develop effective therapeutics that harness the immunomodulatory properties of bacterial molecules for the treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease. The hope is that by exploiting the inherent ability of intestinal pathogens to control inflammatory signaling pathways in a person’s own body, that they can adapt bacterial effector or regulatory molecules and use them as an immunotherapy.

“A major challenge in realizing the therapeutic potential of these molecules is the ability to engineer a delivery system capable of delivering protein inside intestinal epithelial cells,” Champion said.


Inflammatory bowel disease is a chronic disorder in which the intestines become inflamed. The cause of inflammatory bowel disease is not known, although researchers believe that the most likely cause is an immune reaction the body has against its own tissues in the intestine. The disease is thought to affect over 1 million Americans. 


The Kenneth Rainin Foundation is a private family foundation that funds inspiring and world-changing work. The Foundation’s mission is to eliminate any suffering from inflammatory bowel disease. Breakthrough Awards are determined at an annual meeting of Innovator Awardees with the foundation’s scientific advisory board and other board members. The Innovator Awards Program is open to tenure track professors at all levels from any scientific discipline and from any non-profit research institutions worldwide. Interdisciplinary collaborations, like this proposal by Georgia Tech and Emory, are important to the Foundation.

A new study demonstrates that mechanical forces affect the growth and remodeling of blood vessels during tissue regeneration and wound healing. The forces diminish or enhance the vascularization process and tissue regeneration depending on when they are applied during the healing process.

The study found that applying mechanical forces to an injury site immediately after healing began disrupted vascular growth into the site and prevented bone healing. However, applying mechanical forces later in the healing process enhanced functional bone regeneration. The study’s findings could influence treatment of tissue injuries and recommendations for rehabilitation.

“Our finding that mechanical stresses caused by movement can disrupt the initial formation and growth of new blood vessels supports the advice doctors have been giving their patients for years to limit activity early in the healing process,” said Robert Guldberg, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “However, our findings also suggest applying mechanical stresses to the wound later on can significantly improve healing through a process called adaptive remodeling.”

The study was published last month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Because blood vessel growth is required for the regeneration of many different tissues, including bone, Guldberg and former Georgia Tech graduate student Joel Boerckel used healing of a bone defect in rats for their study. Following removal of eight millimeters of femur bone, they treated the gap with a polymer scaffold seeded with a growth factor called recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-2 (rhBMP-2), a potent inducer of bone regeneration. The scaffold was designed in collaboration with Nathaniel Huebsch and David Mooney from Harvard University.

In one group of animals, plates screwed onto the bones to maintain limb stability prevented mechanical forces from being applied to the affected bone. In another group, plates allowed compressive loads along the bone axis to be transferred, but prevented twisting and bending of the limbs. The researchers used contrast-enhanced micro-computed tomography imaging and histology to quantify new bone and blood vessel formation.

The experiments showed that exerting mechanical forces on the injury site immediately after healing began significantly inhibited vascular growth into the bone defect region. The volume of blood vessels and their connectivity were reduced by 66 and 91 percent, respectively, compared to the group for which no force was applied. The lack of vascular growth into the defect produced a 75 percent reduction in bone formation and failure to heal the defect.

But the study found that the same mechanical force that hindered repair early in the healing process became helpful later on.

When the injury site experienced no mechanical force until four weeks after the injury, blood vessels grew into the defect and vascular remodeling began. With delayed loading, the researchers observed a reduction in quantity and connectivity of blood vessels, but the average vessel thickness increased. In addition, bone formation improved by 20 percent compared to when no force was applied, and strong tissue biomaterial integration was evident.

“We found that having a very stable environment initially is very important because mechanical stresses applied early on disrupted very small vessels that were forming,” said Guldberg, who is also the director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “If you wait until those vessels have grown in and they’re a little more mature, applying a mechanical stimulus then induces remodeling so that you end up with a more robust vascular network.”

The study’s results may help researchers optimize the mechanical properties of tissue regeneration scaffolds in the future.

“Our study shows that one might want to implant a material that is stiff at the very beginning to stabilize the injury site but becomes more compliant with time, to improve vascularization and tissue regeneration,” added Guldberg.

Georgia Tech mechanical engineering graduate student Brent Uhrig and postdoctoral fellow Nick Willett also contributed to this research.

 Georgia Tech’s Stem Cell Biomanufacturing Integrated Graduate Education Research Training (IGERT) program, recently identified by Nature magazine as one of the “out of the box” manufacturing educational programs in the country, announced its second class of graduate students today. The seven new trainees come from a wide variety of disciplines including the school of chemical and biomolecular engineering, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering and material science and engineering.

The $3 million NSF-funded IGERT was awarded to Georgia Tech in 2010 to educate and train the first generation of PhD students in the translation and commercialization of stem cell technologies for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. The current state of the field of stem cell research offers a unique opportunity for engineers to contribute significantly to the generation of robust, reproducible and scalable methods for phenotypic characterization, propagation, differentiation and bioprocessing of stem cells.

Directed by Co-Principal investigators, Todd C. McDevitt, PhD, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Robert M. Nerem, PhD, professor emeritus in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, this grant provides a unique training opportunity to top engineering graduate students looking to understand how to scale and control stem cells into clinically relevant numbers. The goal, to train the next generation of experts in this new field of stem cell biomanufacturing for the development of stem cell technologies, diagnostics, and therapies.

Catalyzed by a surge of activity in the late 1990s, advances in stem cell biology over the past decade have continued to accelerate at a rapid pace. The manufacturing industry is expanding with commercial development of stem cell products projected to be $10 billion within the next 6-8 years. Moreover, the transformation from discoveries in stem cell biology to viable cellular technologies has enormous promise to revolutionize a range of applications for many aspects of society. As a result, stem cell biomanufacturing is on the verge of broadly impacting regenerative medicine, drug discovery and development, cell-based diagnostics and cancer.

Earlier this year, United States President Barack Obama asked Georgia Tech’s President G.P. “Bud” Peterson to join the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership steering committee to revolutionize manufacturing in the United States. Along with other industry and university representatives, the purpose of this committee is to identify and invest in the key emerging technologies, such as information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology to help U.S. manufacturers improve cost, quality and speed of production in order to remain globally competitive. The stem cell biomanufacturing industry need look no further than President Peterson’s backyard for future experts in stem cell biomanufacturing.

“I have received dozens of calls and emails from industry looking for graduates of this program because of the uniqueness of the training and the need for manufacturing expertise,” stated McDevitt. “Georgia Tech has a real opportunity to become a leader in this emerging field and begin to answer questions about down-stream processes so that when the first clinical therapies are discovered, scientists are prepared to be able to respond with cells in the quantity and quality that will be needed for treatment.”

The Stem Cell Biomanufacturing IGERT is further catalyzed by the Stem Cell Engineering Center, which was also established in 2010 and brings together research laboratories from all over the state of Georgia to discuss and develop collaborative opportunities for research labs engineering novel stem cell based technologies, therapies, and diagnostics.

Georgia Tech's Stem Cell Biomanufacturing IGERT award will train over 30 graduate students in the first 5 years of the program. The IGERT offers a core curriculum in stem cell engineering and analytical design processes coupled with elective tracks in advanced technologies, public policy, ethics or entrepreneurship.

2011 Trainees 
Tom Bongiorno – George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Advisor – Todd Sulchek
Rob Dromms – School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Advisor – Mark Styczynski
Devon Headen – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Advisor – Andres Garcia
Greg Holst – George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Advisor – Craig Forest
Torri Rinker – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Advisor – Johnna Temenoff
Shalini Saxena – School of Material Science & Engineering, Advisor – Andrew Lyon
Josh Zimmerman – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Advisor – Todd McDevitt

2010 Trainees
Amy Cheng – George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Advisor – Andrés García
Alison Douglas – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Advisor – Thomas Barker
Jennifer Lei – George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Advisor – Johnna Temenoff
Douglas White – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Advisors – Melissa Kemp & Todd McDevitt
Jenna Wilson – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Advisor – Todd McDevitt