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The director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases at UGA is working to devise an early warning system for diseases which could save lives and allow public health resources to be used more efficiently and effectively.

John Drake is a UGA Distinguished Research Professor in UGA’s Odum School of Ecology. He recently delivered a presentation at TEDxUGA titled, “The Tipping Point: What Jenga Can Teach Us About Epidemics.”

Drake says that constructing a system to detect diseases outbreaks before they reach an epidemic is a “tricky scientific puzzle.” What makes it challenging is figuring out which factors will be able to sound the alarm.

Read more about John Drake and his work by checking out the original article on UGA Today.

William Kisaalita, PhD, teaches undergraduate and graduate level course work within the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering. His current research encompasses tissue engineering with an emphasis on cell-based biosensors that is applicable to drug discovery. Dr. Kisaalita has also worked on developing technology for low-resource environments. He has actively given UGA students the tools they need in order to solve real-world problems and has inspired many in the field of engineering.

Read the full article on UGA Today

A study conducted by a BHSI faculty member sheds light on how aggression and weak study skills contribute to the national high school dropout right.

Pamela Orpinas is a BHSI member and a professor of health promotion and behavior at UGA’s College of Public Health.

The study found that students dropping out have complex behavioral and academic problems, she said. The key to helping a student stay in school is spotting the signs and behaviors that put students at risk of dropping out earlier in their academic careers.

Read more here.

Read the original research article.

Debra Mohnen, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and member of UGA’s Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, along with her
research team have downplayed the role of gene GAUT4 in order to lower the internal levels of pectin in plant cell walls. The result is a plant that can be broken down into simple sugars that can then be converted into biofuels. This research was conducted in collaboration with the Department of Energy’s BioEnergy Science Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Tennessee, ArborGen, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Read more here.

Read the full research article.

Steven Stice, BHSI Faculty member and director of the UGA Regenerative Bioscience Center, has joined an elite group of 912 innovators hailing from more than 250 prestigious research universities and governmental and nonprofit research institutions by becoming a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow.

NAI Fellow status is a professional distinction awarded to academic inventors and innovators who create or facilitate outstanding inventions that have had a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.

Stice has led industry and academic research teams in the field of pluripotent stem cell research for over 25 years. At UGA his pioneering work in developmental biology and genetics has helped advance human and animal medicine.

Find out more about Steven Stice’s outstanding achievement and more about his work by reading the full article on UGA Today.

BHSI member Claire de La Serre is eager to discuss her research relating to isolating the triggers of overeating and learning about diet-driven abnormal communication between the gut and the brain. Serre is also an asset to her students as far as keeping them up-to-date on the latest research findings in foods and nutrition, in fact, she was herself once a PhD student in nutrition at the University of California; she then went on to complete her postdoctoral fellowship at John Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. By making it a priority to stay-up-to-date with the latest research findings in scientific literature, Serre encourages her students to carefully analyze research papers themselves and offer up their own interpretations of data.

Find out more about Serre and her research on the gut and the brain by reading the full article here.

The Drug Discovery Core (DDC) laboratory is a brand-new, campus-wide collaborative facility that is designed to hasten the development of therapeutic drugs for a number of major diseases.

The DDC is a result of an initiative that started with a survey distributed to UGA researchers in 2016 which identified chemical screening and toxicity profiling as the most critical needs for enhancing drug discovery research at UGA. The DDC will work to address those needs for faculty who have already been working in infectious disease, regenerative medicine, cancer biology, and other human health-focused disciplines.

The DDC’s creating was initiated largely by two BHSI faculty members, Shelley Hooks, who is the interim director of the center of Drug Discovery and associate professor of pharmaceutical and biomedical science, and Brian Cummings, who is the director of the Interdisciplinary Toxicology Program and professor in the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences department.

Find out more exciting information about the development of this initiative and its objectives by reading the full article at UGA Today.

BHSI’s very own Andrew Park talks about his experience in infectious disease research across UGA’s campus:

#UGA‘s Andrew Park is committed to expanding how we think about the boundaries of parasites and infectious diseases.https://t.co/qvA3QfbSrm pic.twitter.com/WtwpZenSAs

— UGA (@universityofga) October 26, 2017

Find out about his parasite research is helping develop new ideas on how to manage antibiotic resistance and what his findings related to the Ebola crisis in west Africa. Read the full article here.

The Georgia Research Alliance, a non-profit organization, has partnered with research universities since 1990 to provide world-class scientists who foster “science and technology-based development.” Many of these scholars here at UGA have enhanced the university’s research capabilities and impact.

UGA has recruited five GRA Eminent Scholars since 2015 which has led to a staggering 33 percent cumulative increase in research expenditures during the following period. These GRA program scientists bring benefits not only to the industries in which they research, but also students at UGA. Labs of GRA Eminent Scholars create high-level learning environment to help prepare them to become next-generation leaders in science.

Among these five scholars are C.J. Tsai, a GRA Eminent Scholar in Molecular Biology; Scott Jackson, a GRA Eminent Scholar in Plant Functional Genomics; Stephen Dalton, a GRA Eminent Scholar in Molecular Biology; Dennis Kyle, a GRA Eminent Scholar in Antiparasitic Drug Discovery; and Karen Norris, a GRA Eminent Scholar in Immunology and Translational Biomedical Research.

You can discover even more GRA Eminent Scholars and their research ambitions by reading the full article here.