The Second Century Initiative’s Return On Investment: Faculty Collaborations – Didier Merlin

Note from the Editor:

When Georgia State University started the Second Century Initiative – predecessor to the Next Generation Program – the institution sought to bring the best and brightest researchers and scholars to raise Georgia State’s profile and reputation for innovative interdisciplinary research and scholarship.

After five rounds of the program, the return-on-investment for 2CI faculty hiring has paid great dividends in scholarship and research. An important part of this is the opportunity for collaborations between faculty members inside the university – and collaborations outside the university.

When faculty members from different fields collaborate, new possibilities for research and scholarship arise. Thanks to 2CI, these new possibilities translated into work addressing problems facing society while boosting discovery.

This series will examine how individual 2CI faculty members have made a difference in research and scholarship at Georgia State through opportunities for collaboration – examples of how the initiative continues to be one of the university’s greatest investments for the future.

When Dr. Didier Merlin heard about an opportunity to expand beyond his research in medical biology through collaborations with other academic departments, he was excited to learn more about the open faculty appointment through the Second Century Initiative at Georgia State.

“I felt that there was a need in my research at the time to become a bit broader,” said Dr. Merlin, now a member of the university’s Institute for Biomedical Sciences (IBMS) and recently appointed by Georgia State as a Distinguished University Professor.

“I wanted to address different kinds of research fields, such as chemistry and physics,” he said. “I got a feeling that Georgia State was a good place to establish this kind of new program research for me.”

After accepting the faculty appointment in the Departments of Biology and Chemistry in 2011, he dove right into the university’s culture of research and scholarly collaboration among both long-time faculty and fellow 2CI hires.

“It was very fast paced,” he said. “I was able to establish so many collaborations at Georgia State early on, and I was able to have freedom to establish interdisciplinary research. My research program has improved a lot, and I think that the quality of my research is really higher now than a few years ago.”

With more research produced – with 71 papers since he joined Georgia State – Dr. Merlin also brought nearly $5 million in external funding as a principal investigator, renewing grants from his previous position at Emory University, and receiving additional funding from the Veterans Health Administration.

He also brought collaborations from other institutions such as the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins University.

Since he first came to Georgia State, Dr. Merlin became one of the founding faculty members of the IBMS in 2014, an institute that has significantly grown thanks to internal research collaborations among 2CI hires and existing faculty at Georgia State.

He and other faculty in the Georgia State Department of Chemistry and the IBMS have also obtained patents related to treatments of colorectal cancer and inflammatory disease, and he was the lead investigator on a 2CI group on biomarkers, together with investigators from Chemistry, Mathematics and Statistics, the IBMS and the Center for Diagnostics and Therapeutics.

Through this collaborative work, his research is bringing new discoveries and advances in a field called predictive medicine.

“This involves a combination of physics, biology and biomarkers so that we can detect the disease before the disease happens,” Dr. Merlin said. “This combination has changed the way we are thinking about disease.”

He and his colleagues are also pursuing research to develop a device that could better monitor disease, in this case, intestinal bowel disease (IBD), which includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease – debilitating conditions for which existing treatments have significant side effects.

And the collaborations are also yielding scientific discoveries of biological systems that could potentially lead to more targeted treatments with fewer side effects. Along with Dr. Tim Denning, Dr. Merlin is a co-PI on a recently-awarded $1.4 million grant and as a Co-PI with Dr. Gewirtz and Denning a recently-awarded $ 1.8 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.

“This is a really unique place where the picture of collaboration compared to other universities can be a bit trickier,” Dr. Merlin said. “We don’t have collaboration just on paper; we have a real connection.”

– Jeremy Craig, Manager of Marketing & PR for the Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation
Office of the Provost
[email protected]