Yonggang Ke, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, has been selected to receive a National Science Foundation CAREER Award which recognizes the highest level of excellence among early-stage researchers. The $500,000 NSF CAREER award will be allocated over a five year period.

A key challenge in synthetic molecular self-assembly is to construct artificial, controllable systems that imitate intricate structures and complex behaviors in biological systems. Ke’s project aims to harness the power of DNA self-assembly to design and construct scalable, modular, dynamic nanostructures that simulate some of the key aspects of information transfer observed in signaling cascades (e.g. T cell activation signaling cascades initiated by T cell receptor binding), including programmable initiation, propagation, and regulation of information transfer within the artificial DNA nanostructures. His project will provide an enabling platform for self-assembly of dynamic nanomaterials and nanodevices for a variety of important scientific research and applications. Students participating Ke’s project will receive training in cutting-edge biomolecular assembly and nanoscience research. The research program will also be integrated with the development of extensive educational outreach activities that are designed to recruit, educate and train the next generation scientists.

Yonggang Ke, Ph.D., joined the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University in 2014. He is an associate member of the cancer genetics and epigenetics research program at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. Ke received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, affiliated with the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. 

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Walter Rich

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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology