To request a media interview, please reach out to School of Biological Sciences experts using our faculty directory, or contact Jess Hunt-Ralston, College of Sciences communications director. A list of faculty experts and research areas across the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech is also available to journalists upon request.
Georgia Tech Applied Biology & ROTC alum Lt. Col. Jennifer Avery retired after a remarkable career in the airforce. She and her husband were the first married pilots to fly the B-2. Her husband retired alongside her after dual 20 year long careers. "We did it," Avery said, "All the way through. Together."
lunar surface | 2018-09-18T00:00:00-04:00
It's an unfortunate fact of life that as we get older, our cells gradually lose the ability to heal themselves. Thankfully, one part of that might be treatable in the near future. Young Jang of the School of Biological Sciences and researchers have developed a hydrogel that holds muscle stem cells.The team says this could treat injuries in the elderly and people with muscular dystrophy. Read the Georgia Tech coverage of the study here and coverage by BioSpace.
Focus Scholars | 2018-08-20T00:00:00-04:00
The School of Biological Sciences' Mindy Millard-Stafford's simple explanation for brain fog continues to garner attention. Spoiler alert: it's staying hydrated. For more insight on the cognitive price we pay for dehydration, read Georgia Tech's take here.
Flax Lecture Series | 2018-08-20T00:00:00-04:00
Dehydration can impair your ability to think clearly, a new study suggests. Researchers found that athletes who lost fluid equal to 2% their weight took a hit to their cognition. Even this mild to moderate level of dehydration - the loss of 2 pounds for someone who weighs 100 pounds and four pounds for someone weighing 200 - led to attention problems and impaired decision making, according to the report in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. In particular, dehydration led to impairment in tasks requiring attention, motor coordination, and so-called executive function, which includes things like map recognition, grammatical reasoning, mental math, and proofreading, for example. “We’ve known that physical performance suffers at a threshold of 2% of body mass, particularly when it’s from exercise in a warm environment,” said study coauthor Mindy Millard-Stafford, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the physiology lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
nutritiiono | 2018-07-05T00:00:00-04:00
Will Ratcliff's tips for successful scientific presentations are endorsed by the American Chemical Society. Will Ratcliff is an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences. One of his research interests is discovering mechanisms by which single-cell organisms evolve into multicellular ones.
Dr. AIsha Johnson | 2018-06-05T00:00:00-04:00
According to a recent study, unusual sightings of alligators and other predators are not due to the animals expanding their ranges in search of food, which was the previous consensus. Instead, the animals are recolonizing ecosystems they once inhabited before humans came along and stripped them of resources. School of Biological Sciences Professor Mark Hay comments on the study, which was published in the journal Current Biology.
Jeffrey Markowitz | 2018-05-08T00:00:00-04:00
Maggots aren't the cutest creatures. But David Hu, who is affiliated with the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences, spends time with them in a lab, studying their motion to determine how they are able to eat food so efficiently. Hu's lab is not a creepy, crawling maggot madhouse without a purpose: these creatures may be harnessed for breaking down waste.
John Lewis Student Center | 2018-04-13T00:00:00-04:00
Here's a thought to make your skin crawl: Viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet by far. And trillions upon trillions fall from the sky every day, according to a recent study that was the first to tell us just how many viruses float above the Earth. Now you know why School of Biological Sciences Professor Joshua Weitz was one of three researchers calling for a better understanding of viral ecology in a 2017 editorial in Nautilus. There is a silver lining to this virus deluge; some of them may actually be good for their hosts.
Extension of Self | 2018-04-13T00:00:00-04:00
"A person's accomplishments accumulate over years and decades. Something else accumulates, too — their poop. The quantities of poop that people leave behind during an individual bathroom break can vary widely, depending on age, body weight, diet, exercise and other factors." David Hu's research on how long it takes animals to defecate informs this story. Hu is affiliated with the Schools of Mechanical Engineering, Biological Sciences, and Physics.
nicholas platt | 2018-03-21T00:00:00-04:00
If you could rewind time and let evolution happen all over again, would the end result resemble life as we know it? This is no longer a theoretical question. While he was at Georgia Tech, School of Biological Sciences' Eric Gaucher worked with Betul Kacar on a NASA-funded project to replay evolution again and again with the bacterium E. coli, rewinding the evolution of a specific key protein that the bacteria needed to survive.
GradIO | 2018-03-08T00:00:00-05:00
