Emory has a proud tradition of scholarship that reaches outside the campus gates to make a difference in the world. Graduate faculty and students create new drugs for devastating diseases, deepen human understanding and respect for the intelligence of animals, combat the distortions of Holocaust denial, and much more.
When Gilda Barabino was a junior in a New Orleans high school, her chemistry teacher refused to call on any of his female students. “He actually said, and I will never forget it, ‘Chemistry is not for girls.’’’ Appalled but undaunted, she enrolled in a chemistry class at nearby Xavier University that summer. She earned the highest grade and, at the request of the professor, became a tutor for college students struggling with the subject. She went on to earn a degree in chemistry from Xavier and became the first African American student admitted to the chemical engineering program at Rice University in Houston, where she earned a doctorate. Today she is a professor in the joint Emory/Georgia Tech Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, where she strives for another first: putting an end to the devastating effects of sickle cell disease.
In sickle cell disease, which disproportionately affects African Americans, abnormal sickle-shaped blood cells block small blood vessels in the body, causing organ damage. Barabino’s lab uses engineering principles to understand why this happens and how to prevent it. With a microscopy system that mimics blood flow, her team studies the molecular interaction between sickle blood cells, white blood cells, and the cells lining the blood vessel walls. The goal is to identify a molecule that will stop the interaction, which could enable a new drug therapy.
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