As Ahmet F. Coskun and his team of researchers continue their mission to create a 3D atlas of the human body, mapping cells and tissues, they’re making discoveries that could lead to better treatments for the most common type of lung cancer.

While they’re at it, they’re pioneering new fields of research, and possibly spinning the work into a new commercial venture.

Last year, Coskun and his team introduced a new study in “single cell spatial metabolomics,” which explores the distribution of small molecules — metabolites — within tissues and organs. Now they’re spearheading “spatial interactomics,” a research area concerned with interactions between various biomolecules inside of individual cells. 

To study these interactions, they’ve developed an innovative technique, or tool, to better understand why non-small cell lung cancer, or NSCLC, resists treatment in so many patients. They call it the “intelligent sequential proximity ligation assay,” or iseqPLA.

“It’s a smart test that can look at proteins and how they interact with each other in space,” said Coskun, Bernie Marcus Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“Basically, we’re the first to create a new research area on spatial protein-protein interactions, which can tell us more about cell types and their functions,” said Coskun. “With spatial interactomics, we can validate how cells physically touch, sense, and regulate nearby cells through the interaction of pairs of proteins.”

So, the immediate goal of spatial interactomics is to investigate how protein-protein interactions drive drug resistance in NSCLC. And iseqPLA allows researchers to visualize how it’s all happening at the subcellular level. Coskun’s team described its work recently in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. He’s also forming a company to commercialize the technology.

Smarter Tools

Drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs, like Osimertinib) have been successful in treating people with NSCLC. But many patients who initially respond well to the regimen, eventually develop a resistance. Protein interactions, a molecular kind of crosstalk, are a prime suspect in causing this resistance. 

Proteins interact with each other all the time, and this mingling controls how cells grow, divide, or survive. Coskun and his team want to see how these interactions change in response to cancer treatment, and iseqPLA shows them, essentially attaching glowing tags to proteins, lighting up their locations and interactions under a microscope.

“Think of it like a super detailed map showing how different proteins in a cell are connected,” Coskun said. 

The iseqPLA can examine 47 protein interactions in a single sample, which saves a lot of time (and resources) when compared to older methods, which look at two to three interactions at a time.

The researchers also created a computer model to analyze the spatial data they collected from iseqPLA, identifying patterns in protein interactions to help predict whether a cell was responding to a treatment or developing resistance.

“We showed that the test works not only in lab-grown cells but also in tissues from mice and humans,” Coskun said. “It can really help us understand how patients respond to certain treatments.”

Building a Spatial Omics Market

Going forward, Coskun aims to enhance iseqPLA to study interactions among RNA, proteins, and metabolites, as well as the RNA, proteins, metabolites, etc., and other subcellular dynamics. He also hopes to get the technology into the hands of other researchers.

“We believe it will be a groundbreaking tool,” he said.

With that in mind, Coskun is planning to form a startup company called SpatAllize. He’s working with VentureLab, the nonprofit organization at Georgia Tech that provides entrepreneurship programs for students and faculty.

“We are currently performing customer interviews and forming a strategy for a viable plan towards the marketplace,” he said.

He also plans to expand iseqPLA’s utility into other areas of research, focusing on how protein interactions influence the immune system, the heart, and brain health. His team is also developing a spatial interactomics robot that integrates iseqPLA with advanced imaging and automated deep learning.

“This will allow us to map all molecules within cells and tissues for an even better understanding of drug-cell interactions, particularly in cancer treatment planning,” Coskun said.

 

CITATION: Shuangyi Cai, Thomas Hu, Abhijeet Venkataraman, Felix G. Rivera Moctezuma, Efe Ozturk, Nicholas Zhang, Mingshuang Wang, Tatenda Zvidzai, Sandip Das, Adithya Pillai, Frank Schneider, Suresh S. Ramalingam, YouTake Oh, Shi-Yong Sun, and Ahmet F. Coskun. “Spatially resolved subcellular protein–protein interactomics in drug-perturbed lung-cancer cultures and tissues.” Nature Biomedical Engineering.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-024-01271-x

 

FUNDING: This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, grant Nos. P50CA217691, P30CA138292, and R33CA291197; and the National Science Foundation, grant No. R35GM151028. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

COMPETING INTERESTS: Coskun, Cai, and Hu declare a patent application related to the spatial-signaling interactomics assay (U.S. Provisional 63/399,427 and U.S. Application No. 18/452,178). 

In 2017, a long, oddly shaped asteroid passed by Earth. Called ‘Oumuamua, it was the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, but it wasn’t an isolated incident — less than two years later, in 2019, a second interstellar object (ISO) was discovered. 

“‘Oumuamua was found passing just 15 million miles from Earth — that’s much closer than Mars or Venus,” says James Wray. “But it was formed in an entirely different solar system. Studying these objects could give us incredible insight into extrasolar planets, and how our planet fits into the universe.”

Wray, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, has just been awarded a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship to do just that. Pivot Fellowships are among the most prestigious sources of funding for cutting-edge research, and support leading researchers who have the deep interest, curiosity and drive to make contributions to a new discipline.

Wray has primarily studied the geoscience of Mars. He will leverage knowledge of nearby planets to understand ISOs and planets much farther away. “I want to understand how planets got to be the way they are, and if they could have ever hosted life,” he explains. “Extrasolar planets give us many more places to ask those questions than our solar system does, but they're too distant to visit with spacecraft. ISOs provide a unique opportunity to explore other solar systems without leaving our own.”

The Fellowship will provide salary support as well as funding for research, travel, and professional development. “Seed funds like this are so valuable,” says Wray. “I’m incredibly grateful to the Simons Foundation. I’d also like to thank Georgia Tech for its support,” he adds, sharing that the Center for Space Technology and Research supported a related research effort at the University of Hawaii earlier this year. “My mentor and I were able to spend some of that time improving our Pivot Fellowship proposal, which played a critical role in securing this Fellowship.”

In search of ISOs

Wray will study small solar system bodies like asteroids and comets to decode the processes of planet formation and space weathering, and will analyze data from the 2017 and 2019 ISOs.

He will also work alongside collaborators including Karen Meech of the University of Hawaii, who led the paper characterizing ‘Oumuamua, to conceptualize what an intercept mission might look like. 

“We still have a lot of questions regarding ISOs,” he says. “Hundreds of papers have already been written about them, but we still don't know the answers.” One key mystery is the composition of the bodies: both the 2017 and 2019 objects were compositionally different from those in our solar system.

“Are they inherently different from the bodies in our solar system, or did the long journey to our solar system make them that way? Is our solar system different from others?” Wray asks. “We could answer so many questions with even a simple picture of the next ISO that comes close enough for us to intercept with spacecraft.”

A cosmic timeline

While there is no guarantee that another ISO might be spotted in our solar system, the timing is opportune — upcoming telescope surveys are poised to detect such interstellar objects. “In mid-2025, when I will start this Fellowship, the new Rubin Observatory will begin scanning the entire sky,” Wray says. “It has the potential to discover up to several new ISOs per year.”

“ISO visits are always brief,” he adds, “so the research needs to be in place for when one is spotted.” If an interstellar object is detected, Wray and Meech will be poised to leverage specialized telescopes in Hawaii, along with others worldwide, to better understand it, studying its size, shape, and composition — and potentially sending spacecraft to image it.

“We might never find another ISO — or they might be the key to imminent breakthroughs in understanding our place in the galaxy,” Wray adds. “I'm extremely grateful to the Simons Foundation for the flexibility to pursue this research at whatever pace the cosmos allows.”

 

Amino acids are essential for nearly every process in the human body. Often referred to as ‘the building blocks of life,’ they are also critical for commercial use in products ranging from pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements, to cosmetics, animal feed, and industrial chemicals. 

And while our bodies naturally make amino acids, manufacturing them for commercial use can be costly — and that process often emits greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide (CO2).

In a landmark study, a team of researchers has created a first-of-its kind methodology for synthesizing amino acids that uses more carbon than it emits. The research also makes strides toward making the system cost-effective and scalable for commercial use. 

“To our knowledge, it’s the first time anyone has synthesized amino acids in a carbon-negative way using this type of biocatalyst,” says lead corresponding author Pamela Peralta-Yahya, who emphasizes that the system provides a win-win for industry and environment. “Carbon dioxide is readily available, so it is a low-cost feedstock — and the system has the added bonus of removing a powerful greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, making the synthesis of amino acids environmentally friendly, too.”

The study, “Carbon Negative Synthesis of Amino Acids Using a Cell-Free-Based Biocatalyst,” published today in ACS Synthetic Biology, is publicly available. The research was led by Georgia Tech in collaboration with the University of Washington, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the University of Minnesota.

The Georgia Tech research contingent includes Peralta-Yahya, a professor with joint appointments in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE); first author Shaafique Chowdhury, a Ph.D. student in ChBE; Ray Westenberg, a Ph.D student in Bioengineering; and Georgia Tech alum Kimberly Wennerholm (B.S. ChBE ’23).

Costly chemicals

There are two key challenges to synthesizing amino acids on a large scale: the cost of materials, and the speed at which the system can generate amino acids.

While many living systems like cyanobacteria can synthesize amino acids from CO2, the rate at which they do it is too slow to be harnessed for industrial applications, and these systems can only synthesize a limited number of chemicals.

Currently, most commercial amino acids are made using bioengineered microbes. “These specially designed organisms convert sugar or plant biomass into fuel and chemicals,” explains first author Chowdhury, “but valuable food resources are consumed if sugar is used as the feedstock — and pre-processing plant biomass is costly.” These processes also release CO2 as a byproduct.

Chowdhury says the team was curious “if we could develop a commercially viable system that could use carbon dioxide as a feedstock. We wanted to build a system that could quickly and efficiently convert CO2 into critical amino acids, like glycine and serine.”

The team was particularly interested in what could be accomplished by a ‘cell-free’ system that leveraged some process of a cellular system — but didn’t actually involve living cells, Peralta-Yahya says, adding that systems using living cells need to use part of their CO2 to fuel their own metabolic processes, including cell growth, and have not yet produced sufficient quantities of amino acids.

“Part of what makes a cell-free system so efficient,” Westenberg explains, “is that it can use cellular enzymes without needing the cells themselves. By generating the enzymes and combining them in the lab, the system can directly convert carbon dioxide into the desired chemicals. Because there are no cells involved, it doesn’t need to use the carbon to support cell growth — which vastly increases the amount of amino acids the system can produce.”

A novel solution

While scientists have used cell-free systems before, one of the necessary chemicals, the cell lysate biocatalyst, is extremely costly. For a cell-free system to be economically viable at scale, the team needed to limit the amount of cell lysate the system needed.

After creating the ten enzymes necessary for the reaction, the team attempted to dilute the biocatalyst using a technique called ‘volumetric expansion.’ “We found that the biocatalyst we used was active even after being diluted 200-fold,” Peralta-Yahya explains. “This allows us to use significantly less of this high-cost material — while simultaneously increasing feedstock loading and amino acid output.”

It’s a novel application of a cell-free system, and one with the potential to transform both how amino acids are produced, and the industry’s impact on our changing climate. 

“This research provides a pathway for making this method cost-effective and scalable,” Peralta-Yahya says. “This system might one day be used to make chemicals ranging from aromatics and terpenes, to alcohols and polymers, and all in a way that not only reduces our carbon footprint, but improves it.”

 

Funding: Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program.

DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.4c00359

This month, the future of artificial intelligence (AI) was spotlighted as more than 120 academic and industry researchers participated in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing’s inaugural Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society.

With looming questions about AI's growing roles and consequences in nearly every facet of modern life, School of IC organizers felt the time was right to diverge from traditional conferences that focus on past work and published research.

“Presenting papers is about disseminating work that has already been completed. Who gets to be in the room is determined by whose paper gets accepted,” said Mark Riedl, School of IC professor.

“Instead, we wanted the summit talks to speculate on future directions and what challenges we as a community should be thinking about going forward.”

The two-day summit, held at Tech’s Global Learning Center Oct. 28-30, convened to discuss consequential questions like:

• Is society ready to accept more responsibility as greater advancements in technologies like AI are made?
• Should society stop to think about potential consequences before these advancements are implemented on its behalf, and what could those consequences be?
• What policies should be enacted for these technologies to mitigate harms and augment societal benefits?

A highlight of the summit’s opening day was Meredith Ringel Morris's keynote address. As director of human-AI interaction research at Google DeepMind, she presented a possible future in which humans could use AI to create a digital afterlife.

In her remarks, Morris discussed AI clones, which are AI avatars of specific human beings with high autonomy and task-performing capabilities. Someone could leave such an agent behind as a memory for loved ones to enjoy once they are gone, and future generations could access it to learn more about an ancestor.

On the other hand, it could easily lead to loved ones experiencing extended grief because they have trouble moving on from losing a family member.

These AI capabilities are in development and will soon be publicly available. As industry and academic researchers continue to develop them, the public needs to learn about their eminent impacts.

“There’s a lot that needs to be done in educating people,” Morris said. “It’s hard for well-intentioned and thoughtful system designers to anticipate all the harm. We must be prepared some people are going to use AI in ways we don’t anticipate, and some of those ways are going to be undesirable. What legal and education structures can we create that will help?”

In addition to Morris’s keynote, the summit’s first day included 20 talks about future and emerging technologies in AI, sustainability, healthcare, and other fields. 

The second day featured eight talks on translating interventions and safeguards into policy.

Day-two speakers included: 

• Orly Lobel, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and director of the Center for Employment and Labor Policy at the University of California-San Diego. Lobel worked on President Obama’s policy team on innovation and labor market competition, and she advises the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). 
• Sorelle Friedler, Shibulal Family Professor of Computer Science at Haverford College. She worked in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) under the Biden-Harris Administration and helped draft the AI Bill of Rights. 
• Jake Metcalf, researcher and program director for AI on the Ground at the think tank Data & Society. The organization produces reports on data science and equity for the US Government. 
• Divyansh Kaushik, Vice President of Beacon Global Strategies, has given testimony to the US Senate on AI research and development.

Kaushik earned a Ph.D. in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University before beginning his career in policy. He highlighted the importance of policymakers fostering relationships with academic researchers.

“Policymakers think about what could go wrong,” Kaushik said. “Academia can offer evidence-based answers.”

The summit also hosted a doctoral consortium, which allowed advanced Ph.D. students to present their research to experts and receive feedback and mentoring.

“Being an interdisciplinary researcher is challenging,” said Shaowen Bardzell, School of IC chair.

“We wanted the next generation to be in the room listening to the experts share their visions and also to provide our own experiences when possible on how to navigate the challenges and rewards of doing work in the intersection of AI, healthcare, sustainability, and policy.”

Many people dream of flying into space for NASA, but few achieve it. Georgia Tech has produced 14 astronauts, inspiring current students to pursue this challenging path. Despite long odds, aspiring astronauts apply repeatedly, driven by passion and determination. Their journey, whether successful or not, pushes them to excel and grow personally and professionally.

Read more »

A first-of-its-kind algorithm developed at Georgia Tech is helping scientists study interactions between electrons. This innovation in modeling technology can lead to discoveries in physics, chemistry, materials science, and other fields.

The new algorithm is faster than existing methods while remaining highly accurate. The solver surpasses the limits of current models by demonstrating scalability across chemical system sizes ranging from large to small. 

Computer scientists and engineers benefit from the algorithm’s ability to balance processor loads. This work allows researchers to tackle larger, more complex problems without the prohibitive costs associated with previous methods.

Its ability to solve block linear systems drives the algorithm’s ingenuity. According to the researchers, their approach is the first known use of a block linear system solver to calculate electronic correlation energy.

The Georgia Tech team won’t need to travel far to share their findings with the broader high-performance computing community. They will present their work in Atlanta at the 2024 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC24).

[MICROSITE: Georgia Tech at SC24] 

“The combination of solving large problems with high accuracy can enable density functional theory simulation to tackle new problems in science and engineering,” said Edmond Chow, professor and associate chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

Density functional theory (DFT) is a modeling method for studying electronic structure in many-body systems, such as atoms and molecules. 

An important concept DFT models is electronic correlation, the interaction between electrons in a quantum system. Electron correlation energy is the measure of how much the movement of one electron is influenced by presence of all other electrons.

Random phase approximation (RPA) is used to calculate electron correlation energy. While RPA is very accurate, it becomes computationally more expensive as the size of the system being calculated increases.

Georgia Tech’s algorithm enhances electronic correlation energy computations within the RPA framework. The approach circumvents inefficiencies and achieves faster solution times, even for small-scale chemical systems.

The group integrated the algorithm into existing work on SPARC, a real-space electronic structure software package for accurate, efficient, and scalable solutions of DFT equations. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Phanish Suryanarayana is SPARC’s lead researcher.

The group tested the algorithm on small chemical systems of silicon crystals numbering as few as eight atoms. The method achieved faster calculation times and scaled to larger system sizes than direct approaches.

“This algorithm will enable SPARC to perform electronic structure calculations for realistic systems with a level of accuracy that is the gold standard in chemical and materials science research,” said Suryanarayana.

RPA is expensive because it relies on quartic scaling. When the size of a chemical system is doubled, the computational cost increases by a factor of 16. 

Instead, Georgia Tech’s algorithm scales cubically by solving block linear systems. This capability makes it feasible to solve larger problems at less expense. 

Solving block linear systems presents a challenging trade-off in solving different block sizes. While larger blocks help reduce the number of steps of the solver, using them demands higher computational cost per step on computer processors. 

Tech’s solution is a dynamic block size selection solver. The solver allows each processor to independently select block sizes to calculate. This solution further assists in scaling, and improves processor load balancing and parallel efficiency.

“The new algorithm has many forms of parallelism, making it suitable for immense numbers of processors,” Chow said. “The algorithm works in a real-space, finite-difference DFT code. Such a code can scale efficiently on the largest supercomputers.”

Georgia Tech alumni Shikhar Shah (Ph.D. CSE 2024), Hua Huang (Ph.D. CSE 2024), and Ph.D. student Boqin Zhang led the algorithm’s development. The project was the culmination of work for Shah and Huang, who completed their degrees this summer. John E. Pask, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, joined the Tech researchers on the work.

Shah, Huang, Zhang, Suryanarayana, and Chow are among more than 50 students, faculty, research scientists, and alumni affiliated with Georgia Tech who are scheduled to give more than 30 presentations at SC24. The experts will present their research through papers, posters, panels, and workshops. 

SC24 takes place Nov. 17-22 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. 

“The project’s success came from combining expertise from people with diverse backgrounds ranging from numerical methods to chemistry and materials science to high-performance computing,” Chow said.

“We could not have achieved this as individual teams working alone.”

Coral reefs are home to about a quarter of all marine life. They support millions of jobs around the world and protect coastal communities from storms. Scientists report they’re also in the midst of a crisis, with a fourth mass bleaching event spreading around the world.

Bleaching happens when ocean waters heat up, causing corals to expel the colorful algae that live in their tissues. It can lead to disease and death for coral, wiping out critical and complex marine ecosystems.

Four Georgia Tech Ocean Science and Engineering (OSE) Ph.D. students have spent the last few months working on creative ways to prevent bleaching by cooling the water around coral reefs. They presented their ideas in late October to marine biologists and conservations in the Florida Keys as part of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation’s Coral Reef Thermal Stress Design Thinking Challenge & Workshop.

Read about the team's coral-cooling solution on the College of Engineering website.

Y Combinator, known for launching over 5,000 startups including Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, Dropbox, and Zapier, is coming to Georgia Tech’s campus on Tuesday, Nov. 12, at 5 p.m. in the John Lewis Student Center’s Walter G. Ehmer Theater for a panel event hosted by CREATE-X. The panel will feature Y Combinator Group Partner Brad Flora and the founders of Greptile, all Georgia Tech alumni, who will discuss their experiences with the startup accelerator. 

Since tickets are limited, students are encouraged to RSVP for Y Combinator @ Georgia Tech. As a part of the event, students can apply for Office Hours With Flora, which will be held earlier in the day, by answering optional questions in the RSVP form. Y Combinator will notify selected students. The sessions enable students to discuss side projects or startups, startup idea development, finding co-founders, and monetizing products. Confirmed RSVPs are required to attend the event and office hours. 

Y Combinator offers an intensive, three-month program designed to help startups succeed. It provides startups with seed funding, mentorship, and access to a network of investors, industry experts, and alumni.

In 2022, Daksh Gupta and SooHoon Choi participated in CREATE-X Startup Launch and developed Tabnam, which became Greptile after several iterations. Initially, the startup was promoted as an AI shopping assistant that scrapes the internet to tell users what people think about their product. 

In 2023, after they graduated from Georgia Tech, Choi, Gupta, and Vaishant Kameswaran launched the latest version of the startup. Now the AI platform focuses on entire codebases and allows users to query via an API. Through the platform, users chat with their codebases, generate descriptions for tickets, automate PR reviews, and build custom internal tools and automations on top of the API. Over 800 software teams, including Wombo, Metamask, Warp, Exa AI, Bland, and Leya, use Greptile. In June, it had a $4 million seed round. Greptile was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort. 

For those inspired by Greptile’s success and interested in launching their own startup, CREATE-X is currently accepting applications for Summer 2025 Startup Launch. The priority deadline is Sunday, Nov. 17. Early applicants have a higher chance of acceptance, the opportunity for more feedback, and more opportunities to apply if one idea isn’t accepted.

Startup Launch provides mentorship, $5,000 in optional funding, and $150,000 in services to help Georgia Tech students, alumni, faculty, and researchers launch businesses over 12 weeks in the summer. Teams can be interdisciplinary, made up of co-founders even outside of Georgia Tech, and solopreneurs. CREATE-X, as a whole, has had more than 34,000 participants, launched 560 startups, and has generated a total startup portfolio valuation exceeding $2 billion.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a syndicate of eight Southeast universities — with Georgia Tech as the lead — a $15 million grant to support the development of a regional innovation ecosystem that addresses underrepresentation and increases entrepreneurship and technology-oriented workforce development. 

The NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Southeast Hub is a five-year project based on the I-Corps model, which assists academics in moving their research from the lab to the market. 

Led by Georgia Tech’s Office of Commercialization and Enterprise Innovation Institute, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub encompasses four states — Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama. 

Its member schools include:

• Clemson University 
• Morehouse College 
• University of Alabama 
• University of Central Florida 
• University of Florida 
• University of Miami 
• University of South Florida 

In January 2025, when the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub officially launches, the consortium of schools will expand to include the University of Puerto Rico. Additionally, through Morehouse College’s activation, Spelman College and the Morehouse School of Medicine will also participate in supporting the project. 

With a combined economic output of more than $3.2 trillion, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub region represents more than 11% of the entire U.S. economy. As a region, those states and Puerto Rico have a larger economic output than France, Italy, or Canada. 

“This is a great opportunity for us to engage in regional collaboration to drive innovation across the Southeast to strengthen our regional economy and that of Puerto Rico,” said the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s Nakia Melecio, director of the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub. As director, Melecio will oversee strategic management, data collection, and overall operations​. 

Additionally, Melecio serves as a national faculty instructor for the NSF I-Corps program. 

“This also allows us to collectively tackle some of the common challenges all four of our states face, especially when it comes to being intentionally inclusive in reaching out to communities that historically haven’t always been invited to participate,” he said. 

That means bringing solutions to market that not only solve problems but are intentional about including researchers from Black and Hispanic-serving institutions, Melecio said. 

Keith McGreggor, director of Georgia Tech’s VentureLab, is the faculty lead charged with designing the curriculum and instruction for the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub’s partners. 

McGreggor has extensive I-Corps experience. In 2012, Georgia Tech was among the first institutions in the country selected to teach the I-Corps curriculum, which aims to further research commercialization. McGreggor served as the lead instructor for I-Corps-related efforts and led training efforts across the Southeast, as well as for teams in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Republic of Ireland. 

Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, Georgia Tech’s vice president of Commercialization and chief commercialization officer, is the project’s principal investigator. 

The NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub is one of three announced by the NSF. The others are in the Northwest and New England regions, led by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. The three I-Corps Hubs are part of the NSF’s planned expansion of its National Innovation Network, which now includes 128 colleges and universities across 48 states. 

As designed, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub will leverage its partner institutions’ strengths to break down barriers to researchers’ pace of lab-to-market commercialization. 

"Our Hub member institutions have successfully commercialized transformative technologies across critical sectors, including advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, cybersecurity, and biomedical fields,” said Sivakumar. “We aim to achieve two key objectives: first, to establish and expand a scalable model that effectively translates research into viable commercial ventures; and second, to address pressing societal needs.

"This includes not only delivering innovative solutions but also cultivating a diverse pipeline of researchers and innovators, thereby enhancing interest in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta, is a proponent of the Hub’s STEM component. 

“As a biology major-turned-congresswoman, I know firsthand that STEM education and research open doors far beyond the lab or classroom.,” Williams said. “This National Science Foundation grant means Georgia Tech will be leading the way in equipping researchers and grad students to turn their discoveries into real-world impact — as innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. 

“I’m especially excited about the partnership with Morehouse College and other minority-serving institutions through this Hub, expanding pathways to innovation and entrepreneurship for historically marginalized communities and creating one more tool to close the racial wealth gap.” 

That STEM aspect, coupled with supporting the growth of a regional ecosystem, will speed commercialization, increase higher education-industry collaborations, and boost the network of diverse entrepreneurs and startup founders, said David Bridges, vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute. 

“This multi-university, regional approach is a successful model because it has been proven that bringing a diversity of stakeholders together leads to unique solutions to very difficult problems,” he said. “And while the Southeast faces different challenges that vary from state to state and Puerto Rico has its own needs, they call for a more comprehensive approach to solving them. Adopting a region-oriented focus allows us to understand what these needs are, customize tailored solutions, and keep not just our hub but our nation economically competitive.”