Emma Bingham graduated from MIT in 2019 with a bachelor of science in physics. During her undergrad years, she split her time between working in research labs and editing the student newspaper. After college, she worked at a data and journalism startup, The Wire China/WireScreen, where she learned a lot about business and economics data and reporting. Working at the company expanded her understanding of what research is and can be, and she realized in the long term she wanted to return to the research modality of science. She joined the Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech in 2021 and is co-advised by Peter Yunker and Will Ratcliff. She studies the physics of the origin of multicellular life and the role of entropy in evolution. Her research is informed by curiosity about the big questions in biology, and she is interested in the role quantitative thinking might play in addressing these questions. 

Maxfield Comstock  graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 2016 with a B.S. in mathematics and computer science. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he worked as a software engineer for PillPack (now part of Amazon), a pharmacy company that delivers and organizes prescriptions for their customers, where his areas of focus included shipping logistics, automation, networking, and cloud infrastructure. Maxfield is now began the Ph.D. program in CSE at Georgia Tech in 2020 and is advised by Professor Elizabeth Cherry. His current projects include parameter fitting and data assimilation for cardiac models, and interactively simulating large numbers of flocking birds using WebGL. Maxfield has found that his research is informed by computer science, software engineering, numerous mathematical disciplines, physics, biology, and medicine, and he am excited to be part of an interdisciplinary group that takes advantage of the different perspectives and knowledge of researchers with a variety of backgrounds and personal interests.

Gabriella Chebli graduated from Agnes Scott College with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Chemistry. While an undergraduate, she conducted research under the direction of Chemistry professor Thomas Morgan to revise the structure of a class of natural products called “hyloins” that are found in the frog species Boana punctata. Chebli also worked in the lab of Biology professor, Iris Levin, studying telomere length in adult barn swallows. Chebli first joined the Kubanek Lab as an REU participant, working on a metabolomics-based project on harmful algal blooms. After graduating from Agnes Scott, she took a gap year, where she volunteered with ecotourism kayak tours with Seaside Adventure in Kachemak Bay, Alaska and interned at the Lammi Biological Station in Lammi, Finland. In the Kubanek Lab, Chebli is researching chemical ecology and assisting with an algal biofuel ponds project and maintenance of phytoplankton cultures.

Katie MacGillivray received a Bachelor’s in Chemistry from Harvard in 2014, and a Master’s in Biology from NYU in 2017. She joined the Quantitative Biosciences PhD program at Georgia Tech in 2019, where she is co-advised by Will Ratcliff and Brian Hammer. In the Ratcliff lab, she studies the early evolution of aggregative multicellular organisms, and in the Hammer lab, she studies the ways that bacteria can defend themselves against attacks by the Type VI secretion system. Katie enjoys culturing microorganisms so much that she grows mushrooms in her spare time.

You can follow Katie on Twitter at @KAMacGillivray.

Zachary Mobile is pursuing a degree in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Tech, which he began in Fall 2021. Before coming to Georgia Tech, Zachary received his B.S. in physics and an M.S. in biomathematics at Illinois State University (ISU). He now works in computational neuroscience with Hannah Choi. Zachary’s current project involves studying how structural cascades of convergence and divergence contribute to efficient coding in neuronal networks. He got interested in this field when he heard about a physics professor at ISU who uses mathematical models to understand systems in the brain. During his time at ISU, the two worked together on some fun projects involving the famous Hodgkin-Huxley neuron model and a temperature sensing neuron in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Zachary is excited to expand and enrich his skills in computational neuroscience through the resources and opportunities that InQuBATE provides, as well as the plethora of knowledge accessible within Georgia Tech, more generally.

Nicholas (Nicky) Zhang is a Ph.D. student in Bioengineering at Georgia Tech. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a B..S in Biomedical Engineering and previously researched 3-D printing in bone and skeletal muscle tissue engineering.  Now, he studies spatial epigenetics in Dr. Ahmet Coskun’s Single Cell Biotechnology Laboratory, where his current interests lie in studying single-cell biology at super-resolution to uncover mechanistic understandings of cell behavior and function in situ.  He is passionate about big data techniques applied to life science problems and is excited to join InQuBATE to help foster his growth in data science.  Outside of work, Nicky enjoys swimming, snowboarding, and cooking.