Spring 2020 — From the President

Last spring, this magazine published an oral history of Kell Hall, the university’s first permanent building and longtime research science headquarters, which we recently demolished to make way for much-needed greenspace. This spring, we’re planning to break ground on the newest addition to the Atlanta Campus: the third phase of Georgia State’s Science Park.

Occupying an entire city block, the Science Park already features the university’s most advanced research facilities. The project’s first two phases yielded the Petit Science Center in 2010 and the Research Science Center in 2016.

Once complete, the new building will contain eight floors of ultramodern, biosafety-commissioned laboratory space dedicated to the study of infectious diseases, a critical piece of our expanding research portfolio.

But our research isn’t growing in just a bricks-and-mortar sense. Our research community is larger and more productive than ever. Last year, Georgia State faculty earned more than $100 million in sponsored funding for the fifth year in a row. We’re now one of the fastest-growing research institutions in the nation.

But while these statistics are impressive, they don’t tell the whole story of research at Georgia State. That’s because they don’t show you the ways our faculty are making an impact in communities here in Georgia and across the world.

At the Perimeter College campus in Clarkston, a city known as the “Ellis Island of the South,” faculty have established a Prevention Research Center to address the health needs of the thousands of migrants and refugees living there.

In the Institute for Biomedical Sciences, researchers are working to develop what could be the first successful universal flu vaccine, which would eliminate the need for annual flu shots, as well as the first safe vaccine and effective treatment for respiratory syncytial virus, which hospitalizes tens of thousands of infants in the U.S. every year.

A collaboration among the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, the College of Arts & Sciences and the J. Mack Robinson College of Business, the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group is uncovering vital information about online criminal activity that could help protect people, businesses and governments.

And just weeks ago, Regents’ Professor Jenny Yang published an exciting breakthrough: a new tool that could significantly improve our ability to find, diagnose and treat cancer before it has spread. Yang, who holds 35 patents, also recently became the university’s first professor to be awarded a fellowship by the National Academy of Inventors.

These are just a few examples of how researchers at Georgia State are making a difference #TheStateWay.