From Labs to the Bedside, Graduate Students Find Opportunity At Every Corner

Since the first Ph.D. students enrolled in 2000, the Coulter Department has forged an intentional path to train future leaders in biomedical engineering, advancing research and scholarship in the field both nationally and abroad.

“We're not just a biomedical program or engineering program,” Davis explained. “[We’re] biomedical engineering—students need to learn to speak both languages.”

Master’s programs are designed for various career pathways and students have a choice between non-thesis or thesis options to either build their credentials or seek out laboratory opportunities to gain the research experience needed to move into a Ph.D. program.

For those interested in the business and commercialization side of the biomedical industry, the Coulter Department offers a master’s in biomedical innovation and design (MBID). Davis said program participants take classes wholly different from other master’s students.

“So, a regular master student could take anything from our graduate curriculum, but the MBID program is a very set curriculum that involves product development, prototyping, and marketing. And it's taught by people who can put a business spin on [the curriculum],” Davis said.

At Emory University’s School of Medicine, the Coulter Department offers a second MBID program that focuses on advanced therapeutics for those desiring to explore the clinical side. Students are immersed in a multi-disciplinary curriculum centered around cell therapy, gene therapy, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine.

“There are fundamentals, but we want our students to learn about how you might design a drug based on a target model, how you move it through testing then to licensing,” Davis said. “So once again, it's not just a traditional masters, it's something that's directly focused to get students ready for what's to come in the real world.”

The other specialized master’s program in robotics is a collaborative effort between the Coulter Department and five other disciplines at Georgia Tech—mechanical engineering, electrical & computer engineering, aerospace engineering, interactive computing, and physics—offering students wide-ranging coursework to train them for careers in the design and development of robotics and automated solutions.

Critical to the success of students in the Ph.D. program is collaboration and innovation, Davis said. With nine research areas ranging from neuroengineering to cancer technology, students are not limited in what they can pursue.

“We have specialties in everything. If you want to do it, you can find it here,” Davis said. “We want students who are willing to take risks and willing to push the envelope in order to succeed.”

From the start, students in the Coulter Department’s graduate programs are supported by faculty who are leaders in their specialties and can mentor students throughout their academic career. Add to that, the Coulter Department has forged dynamic relationships with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory Healthcare.

“We’re unique here in Atlanta where we have a top engineering school, top medical school and a top children's hospital all within a few miles of each other,” Davis said. “In fact, that's one thing we're trying to institute at the graduate level is clinical immersion—we want students to get out and be able to talk the talk of clinicians.”

He added, “They’ll be going to drug and medical device companies, and they’ll have to interact with patients and doctors. If you can't speak the language of the doctors, how can you solve the problems they're trying to fix?”

 

Davis said the department’s rich alumni network has also yielded numerous internship and professional development opportunities placing students in front of major employers in the biotech space both in Atlanta and around the country.

“It's this sort of great network where we send our students out to the best companies and they understand the value of what our students can bring,” Davis said.

Employing a strategy of building a diverse talent pool for the biomedical engineering field – whether that is in industry or academia – has paid off for graduate students in recent years.

Mohammad Sendi, ’22, won a grant in 2021 from Bio-Medical Instruments and the Foundation for Neurofeedback and Neuromodulation Research while earning his doctorate from the Coulter Department. He used the grant to better study the effects of brain stimulation for PTSD patients using EEG scans. He currently works as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School.

In the same year, Joshua Lewis ‘20, worked in the lab of Melissa Kemp, Ph.D., the Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Professor, to further his research on treating brain disorders through neuromodulation. Through a partnership with Wake Forest University and Kemp’s support, Lewis was able to publish the study in Nature Communications.

Cydney Wong, a Ph.D. candidate, and current graduate assistant in the Coulter BME department, was named one of 21 Science ATL Communications Fellows in 2021, broadening her knowledge of science communication to bring greater public awareness to glaucoma research.

Eight students earned fellowships from the National Science Foundation in 2022 to conduct cell research for cancer immunotherapy, immune-related diseases, and stem cell therapies.

And In the spring of 2023, 6th year graduate student Nettie Brown was one of six individuals to receive the GT NEXT award from the Georgia Tech Office of Technology Licensing. Mentored by Prof. Johnna Temenoff, Brown will use the $5K award to boost her dissertation research around the utilization of biocompatible materials and the delivery of cartilage materials to promote facial cartilage regeneration, especially for ear and nose reconstruction applications. 

Other graduate alumni have gone on to join venture capitalist firms for biotech startups and returned to the Coulter Department to serve as full-time faculty.

“I would say our student is brave,” Davis said. “We want students who are willing to take risks and push the envelope in order to succeed, and I think we get that for the most part.”