I feel Georgia Tech is much better than UCSD in bioengineering. Can someone tell me otherwise or give me other point of view? With this funding, they cannot do it bad
Read the Complete article at
http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/biological-machines/
Probing Cell Clusters: Georgia Tech is a Partner in New $25M NSF Center that will Investigate the Creation of Biological Machines
While the behaviors of individual cells and the functions and properties of tissues and organs have been extensively studied, the complex interactions of cell clusters have not been examined in great detail.
Robert Nerem, the Parker H. Petit Distinguished Chair for Engineering in Medicine at Georgia Tech, will serve as an associate director of the new EBICS Center and will oversee the Center’s diversity objectives.
The new $25-million Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems (EBICS) Center to be operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Georgia Institute of Technology intends to change that.
The EBICS Center — established by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of its Science and Technology Centers Integrative Partnerships program — aims to advance research in complex biological systems, create new educational programs based on this research, and demonstrate leadership in its involvement of groups traditionally underrepresented in science and engineering.
“Ultimately, we envision being able to create biological modules — sensors, processors, actuators — that can be combined in various ways to produce different capabilities,” said Roger Kamm, Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical and Biological Engineering at MIT, and the Center’s founding director. “If we are successful, this will open up an entirely new field of research with wide-ranging implications, from regenerative medicine to developmental biology.”
Georgia Tech will receive more than $1.6 million per year to support the research and educational efforts in the EBICS Center. Georgia Tech’s participation in the Center will be administered through the Georgia Tech/Emory Center (GTEC) for Regenerative Medicine. Robert Nerem, who is an associate director of EBICS and the director of GTEC, will work closely with Kamm and the other associate directors to achieve the Center’s educational and research goals, and oversee its diversity objectives.
Georgia Tech faculty will contribute to the development of the knowledge, tools and technologies necessary to create these highly sophisticated biological machines.
“Critical to the successful design of engineered cellular systems is a fundamental understanding of interactions between cells and their environment, their control by biochemical and mechanical cues, and the coordinated behavior of functional biological machines,” said Gang Bao, the Robert A. Milton Chair in Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Gang Bao, the Robert A. Milton Chair in Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, will coordinate the EBICS Center’s four research areas. (Click image for high-resolution version. Credit: Gary Meek)
Bao will coordinate the Center’s four research areas, which include:
* Investigating how individual cells integrate the various biological, biochemical and physical cues from their environments to determine their ultimate states and biological behaviors.
* Determining the emergent behaviors and interactions of cell clusters, including the transition from single cell to multi-cell behavior, the nature of communication between cells, and how this leads to functional coordination among neighboring cells and cell populations.
* Creating and characterizing simple cellular machines that perform increasingly complex tasks, such as sensing, information processing, protein expression and transport.
* Developing enabling technologies to ensure the goals of the other three areas can be met.