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Andrés García, Executive Director, Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience: The Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, or IBB, is an interdisciplinary research institute at Georgia Tech. But it’s more than that. It’s a dynamic, wonderful community of faculty, staff, and trainees working together to solve the biggest problems in bioengineering and bioscience. A huge contribution that IBB brings to the Georgia Tech community is the state-of-the-art core facilities.

Julia Kubanek, Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research: We have core facilities for microscopy, cell characterization, and mass spectrometry to allow students to characterize molecules from their experiments. All of these items of instrumentation are ones that students later can use to say that they have expertise in these areas and help them go out in the world and build their careers.

Michelle Quizon, Graduate Student, Bioengineering and Bioscience; Unified Graduate Students Co-president and Chair: I got involved with IBB because I recognized very early on that the IBB community is one that leads change and leads impact. Here at IBB, we are a community of scientists that have connections to entrepreneurs and industry partners, clinicians — everything is here at IBB. I’m very thankful to be a part of a community that is not just academia.

Julia Kubanek: We have several student training opportunities. One of those is for high school students who come from local area schools and work in the summer on research projects. They are partnered with other members of research groups that are run by faculty here at Georgia Tech.

Clinton Smith, Undergraduate Student, Project ENGAGES Alumnus, and Cell Manufacturing Technologies Trainee: I’m in my senior year of undergrad, and I’m applying to graduate schools and graduate fellowships now — something that I would have never imagined when I was in high school.

Julia Kubanek: IBB is a beautiful example of how people come together to work together on a common goal associated with bioengineering and bioscience. When this building was built, Bob Nerem, who was the founding director of IBB, said, “Don’t just give me a building. It’s got to have a coffee shop.” And the reason it has to have a coffee shop is because that’s where people will gather and talk and start new collaborations.

Andrés García: Bob was a visionary in the areas of bioengineering, and he’s really the founding father of at least four disciplines. But Bob thought that science was a people business and that IBB was really a family, not just a job. One of the greatest things about being the director of IBB is I get to see the impact that the research and the education have in the world. I do think that the research and training that we do here will change the world for the best.

Chaouki T. Abdallah, Former Executive Vice President for Research at Georgia Tech: At Georgia Tech, our mission is to improve the human condition — making the needed a reality and the impossible possible.

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