Emory established the award as a way to recognize faculty who score in the top one-percentile or better on a federal grant application, or any research award that is percentiled during review.Both Jo and Yoganathan are professors in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech/Emory. Yoganathan is the first GT faculty member to receive such an award at Emory.
Jo is the Associate Chair for Emory Affairs for the BME department and is the John and Jan Portman Professor in Biomedical Engineering. He is also Professor of Cardiology in Department of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. Yoganathan is the Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering, a Regents’ Professor, and Associate Chair for Translational Research for the department.
Jo heads the Cardiovascular Mechanobiology and Disease Lab in the Health Sciences Research Building at Emory. His area of research is in the mechanobiology and cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis and aortic valve disease. He currently has funding from NIH on five grants involving vascular diseases.
Yoganathan established the Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics (CFM) Research lab in 1979 at Georgia Tech. The CFM lab focuses on understanding complex cardiovascular problems using fundamental engineering and science. Yoganathan has received more than 28 grants and 11 patents. He is currently an investigator on five NIH projects.
Robert Nerem, Institute Professor Emeritus, Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, Vinod Thourani, Associate Professor of Cardiothroracic Surgery, Emory University School of Medicine, and Elena Aikawa, Harvard School of Medicine are collaborators on this NIH grant. Swetha Rathan, Bioengineering graduate student in Yoganathan lab and Casey Ankeny, currently Instructor at Arizona State University played a critical role in this grant application as well.