The research focus of Boris Prilutsky's laboratory is Neural Control and Biomechanics of Movement. They study how the nervous system controls hundreds of muscles and kinematic degrees of freedom of the body to produce purposeful motor behaviors and how the neural control of motor behaviors is affected by neural and musculoskeletal injuries.

I am an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the evolution of complex life. My Ph.D. training focused on the evolutionary stability of cooperation in the legume-rhizorium symbiosis. Here I developed new experimental methods to study how among-organism genetic conflict arises and can be mitigated. A similar evolutionary tension lies at the heart of all key events in the origin of complex life, termed the ‘Major Transitions in Evolution’: namely, how do new organisms arise and evolve to be more complex without succumbing to within-organism conflict? Studying the early evolution of multicellular organisms has been particularly difficult because these transitions occurred deep in the past, and transitional forms have largely lost to extinction. As a postdoc, I circumvented this constraint by creating a new approach to study the evolution of multicellularity: we evolved it de novo. Since founding my own research group at Georgia Tech in 2014, I have combined this approach with mathematical modeling and synthetic biology to examine how simple clumps of cells evolve into multicellular organisms. Our research has shown how classical constraints in the origin of multicellularity — e.g., the origin of life cycles, multicellular development, cellular differentiation, and cellular interdependence — can be solved by Darwinian evolution. At home, I raise two kids on a hobby farm (really just a big garden) with bees, chickens, rabbits, goats, a dog, and lots of edible plants.

Michael Goodisman is interested in understanding how evolutionary processes affect social systems and how sociality, in turn, affects the course of evolution. His research explores the molecular basis underlying sociality, the nature of selection in social systems, the breeding biology of social animals, the process of self-organization in social groups, and the course of development in social species. His teaching interests are centered on the importance of behavior, genetics, and ethics in biological systems. Goodisman also works to improve and advance undergraduate education.

Roger Wartell received his B.S. degree in Physics from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1966. In 1971, he received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester where he worked in the group of Elliot Montroll on the DNA helix-coil transition. From 1971-1973 he was a NIH postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Robert Wells at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1978-79, and Visiting Scholar at National Institutes of Health-Bethesda from 1987-88. 

Wartell joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1974. Roger received a NIH Career Development Award in 1979 and served as Associate Chair in School of Physics from 1987-88, and Chair of the School of Biology from 1990-2004. He is a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at Georgia Tech. His current research is focused on protein-RNA interactions relating to sRNA regulation in bacteria, and the assembly and reactions of small RNAs in ice.

T. Richard Nichols received the B.S. degree in biology from Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, in 1969, and the Ph.D. degree in physiology from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 1974. He is currently a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.,He is currently a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.

FRANK ROSENZWEIG is a professor of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the director of the University of Montana Institute on Ecosystems. Rosenzweig’s research is aimed at illuminating the evolution of complex traits that augment biodiversity and drive major transitions in the history of life. His lab seeks to understand how changes in genome architecture alter global patterns of gene expression, whether such changes explain the physiology and behavior of novel genotypes, and the extent to which adaptation is shaped by trade-offs and constraints. Rosenzweig was a lead author of the 2015 NASA Astrobiology Strategy Document and member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute Executive Committee. He currently serves as co-Lead of the NASA Research Coordination Network, LIFE: From Early Cells to Multicellularity, as a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences and as Principal Investigator of the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research award ENGINE OF INNOVATION: How compartmentalization drives evolution of novelty and efficiency across scales. Rosenzweig received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Tennessee, and his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania.

I graduated in Biological Sciences (B.Sc, University of Salford, 1997) prior to undertaking a Ph.D in molecular microbiology studying quorum sensing in Pseudomonas aeruginosa (University of Nottingham, 2001). I worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Nottingham on both EU and BBSRC funded grants, before obtaining a Royal Society University Fellowship (2006-2014). I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. In 2017 I moved as an Associate Professor to the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. I was promoted to Full Professor in 2022. I was appointed as the Director of the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection in January 2023. 

I currently serve as the Deputy Editor in Chief of Microbiology, where I have previously served as editor and senior editor. I have also previously served on the editorial boards of FEMS Microbiology Letters, BMC Microbiology, Microbiology Open and Royal Society Open Science. I was an elected member of the Microbiology Society Council (2012-2016) and also served on their conference and policy committees. I was selected to be an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer (2021-2023) and was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2023. 

In my spare time I play bass guitar. I recorded some original music in a band called Meaner and I currently play in a covers band called The Variants of Concern. I also have a long-standing interest in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Ingeborg Schmidt-Krey is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. Her research interests lie in the structure and function of eukaryotic membrane proteins, two-dimensional crystallization, electron crystallography, single particle analysis, and electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM).

Dr. Jang’s lab uses multi-disciplinary approaches to study muscle stem cell biology and develops bioactive stem cell delivery vehicles for use in regenerative medicine. Dr. Jang’s lab studies both basic aspects of muscle stem cell biology, especially systemic/metabolic regulations of stem cell and stem cell niche, as well as more translational aspects of muscle stem cell and mesenchymal stem cell for use in therapeutic approaches for musculoskeletal aging, neuromuscular diseases, and traumatic injuries.