Wednesday, May 20, 2020 11:00AM

May 20, 2020 | 11AM-12PM | Spring 2020 NANOFANS Webinar Series - “Nanotechnology in Infectious Diseases (Diagnostics/Therapeutics)”: Session 4 - “Engineered Biomaterials Reveal Viral Immunity Mechanisms and Augment Therapy”

Susan Thomas, Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Georgia Institute of Technology

"Spring 2020 NanoFANS (Focusing on Advanced Nanobio- Systems) program will be offered in a weekly webinar format during the month of May. The focus of this event will be “Nanotechnology in Infectious Diseases (Diagnostics/Therapeutics).”

In the current global pandemic situation, infectious diseases are the leading cause of mortality worldwide, with viruses such as, ebola, SARS-Cov, SARS-Cov-2 in particular, making global impact on healthcare and socio-economic development. The rapid development of drug resistance to currently available therapies and associated side effects leads to serious public health concern; hence, devising novel treatment strategies is of paramount importance. The application of nanotechnology in infectious diseases is fast-revolutionizing the biomedical field and the healthcare sector and has a potential to diagnose, treat and prevent diseases."

Abstract: The transport of fluids, biomolecules and cells to draining lymph nodes is facilitated by the concerted influence of the blood and lymphatic vascular systems. Our efforts to characterize the impact of these transport processes on disease progression, in particular by regulating immunity, as well as to develop novel therapeutic approaches for immunotherapy that mitigate these effects, will be described.

Bio: Susan Napier Thomas, Ph.D. holds the Woodruff Professorship and is an Associate Professor with tenure of Mechanical Engineering in the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she holds adjunct appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Biological Science and is a member of the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. Prior to this appointment, she was a Whitaker postdoctoral scholar at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (one of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology) and received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering with an emphasis in Bioengineering cum laude from the University of California Los Angeles and her Ph.D. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Department as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow from The Johns Hopkins University. For her contributions to the emerging field of immunoengineering, she has been honored with the 2018 Young Investigator Award from the Society for Biomaterials for "outstanding achievements in the field of biomaterials research" and the 2013 Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society "in recognition of high level of originality and ingenuity in a scientific work in biomedical engineering." Her interdisciplinary research program is supported by multiple awards on which she serves as PI from the National Cancer Institute, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, amongst others.

Registration Link: https://tinyurl.com/nanofanswebinar

Event Address: Webinar link will be sent to all those registered prior to the event