Congratulations to Meghanasri Ganta, Karolina Mercado, and Yusuf Abdalla for winning President’s Undergraduate Research Salary Awards (PURA) for Summer and Fall 2026! PURA funds student salaries to conduct undergraduate research with Georgia Tech faculty and offsets travel expenses for undergraduates to present their research at professional conferences. Read more about PURA here.
Congratulations to LSI undergraduate student (and soon to be graduate student) Tommy Neuman for winning the fellowship from the NSF GRFP! The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program is a prestigious program that recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, supporting their tuition and stipend for three years during a five-year fellowship period. Read more here.
LSI welcomes research technician Julie Tobin! Julie grew up in Newtown, Connecticut and graduated from the University of Rochester with a B.S. and M.S. in Immunology, Microbiology, and Virology. During her undergraduate studies, she characterized cytokine profiles and gene expression in systemic sclerosis/rheumatoid arthritis murine models and clinical patients under Dr. Benjamin Korman. As a Master’s student, she worked under Dr. Brian Ward to determine the mutation rate of vaccinia virus with a cell-based fluorescent assay. After graduation, she worked as a lab technician at ADM where she evaluated the viability and functionality of probiotic spore-forming bacteria. At LSI, Julie is a research technician working on the ARPA-H POSEIDON and CODA projects. In her free time, Julie enjoys trying new restaurants, playing video games, and playing with her two cats, Everything Bagel and Bartholomu. Read more about our team here!
It isn’t a far-fetched fantasy, either, thanks to investigators like Kwong and his colleagues at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, Georgia Tech and beyond. Their research in a diverse range of disciplines—including biomedical engineering, immunology, computation and artificial intelligence (AI)—is edging us toward a future in which clinicians can screen for multiple cancers earlier than ever, leading to better treatment outcomes, longer lives and a more robust health care system.
While companies raise billions of dollars to advance cancer detection blood tests, Kwong and fellow Winship researcher Philip Santangelo are leading ongoing multimillion-dollar federal efforts, launched by the Biden Administration, to drastically reduce the cancer mortality rate.
“It’s challenging to detect cancer at its earliest stages, but that is the objective,” says Kwong, a member of Winship’s Cancer Immunology Research Program and an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech. “That’s the dream, and it’s within reach.”
Read the full feature in Emory University’s Winship Magazine here.
By Jerry Grillo • Illustration by Stephan Schmitz