She was one of the first 10 students to join the Clark Scholars Program, a landmark commitment to expand access to a Georgia Tech engineering education. After this spring, all of those students will have graduated. So, Commencement closes a chapter for the College, just as it closes one for Sheriff.

Yet Sheriff’s Clark community persists. Later this year, she will start as a product manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, where several Clark Scholars from other universities also will be working.

“It’s really nice and exciting to have people you can talk about things and connect with,” said Sheriff, who is earning her mechanical engineering bachelor’s degree.

At Microsoft, Sheriff likely will work with the Surface product team, a group she became familiar with during an internship last summer.

She might not have considered exploring a career at the tech giant if not for her mentor, Kathleen Bernhard Jones, who works at the company and saw Sheriff’s potential to bridge engineering and other disciplines.

Read more of Fatima's story on the College of Engineering website.

Research scientist James Ponder and a team of Georgia Tech chemists and engineers thought they could design a transparent polymer film that would conduct electricity as effectively as other commonly used materials, while also being flexible and easy to use at an industrial scale.

They’d do it by simply removing the nonconductive material from their conductive element. Sounds logical, right?

The resulting process could yield new kinds of flexible, transparent electronic devices — things like wearable biosensors, organic photovoltaic cells, and virtual or augmented reality displays and glasses.

“We had this initial idea that we have a conductive element that we're covering with a nonconductive material, so what if we just get rid of that,” said Ponder, who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Georgia Tech and returned as a research scientist in mechanical engineering. “It's a simple idea, and there were so many points where it could have failed for different reasons. But it does work, and it works better than we expected.”

Read more about the team's flexible, highly conductive polymer on the College of Engineering website.

The world’s largest general scientific society, AAAS has been awarding the honor since 1874. With the addition of Usselman, Williams, and Graham, nearly 100 Georgia Tech professors have been recognized for their achievements. In total, the AAAS Class of 2022 features 506 individuals following in the footsteps of past honorees including sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, astronaut Ellen Ochoa, Nobel laureate Steven Chu, and computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper. 

Marion Usselman – Education 

Honored for distinguished contributions to gender equity in universities and major contributions to curriculum and teacher professional development.

CEISMC
 

Marion Usselman, a principal research scientist in the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC), arrived at Georgia Tech in 1996 with a Ph.D. in Biophysics from The Johns Hopkins University and a passion for improving education and access in typically white male-dominated STEM fields. At that time women made up just 28% of the Institute’s undergraduate population. She has spent the last 26 years working diligently to help increase that number and give the next generation of women and other historically underserved populations a true seat at the STEM table. 

As part of the Integrating Gender Equity and Reform NSF project, Usselman and her colleagues conducted an in-depth Georgia Tech institutional self-study that examined the barriers that women and minorities faced when choosing their career path, as well as the methods used in the classroom that may have influenced their choices.  The results of the study, and of many subsequent educational projects, showed Usselman that there was plenty of work to be done, particularly in the K-12 arena. 

To that end, Usselman has spearheaded the effort to reform K-12 STEM education in Georgia and nationally, leading up a CEISMC team dedicated to designing and developing educational innovations. She’s co-authored over 60 refereed journal and conference papers and brought in more than $40 million in funding as the primary writer on over 20 funded STEM-education grant proposals.  In addition, her team has created extensive curriculum materials for K-12 students and teachers, particularly in the engineering and computer science areas, and implemented many STEM-related professional learning opportunities for K-12 teachers.

“My team has spent the last 15 to 20 years designing curricular exemplars, based on well-established research on how people learn and factors that encourage a sense of belonging and identity, so that teachers can try out inclusive methods of instruction and experience success in engaging students who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields,” she said. “It is important to change teachers’ hearts and minds, but we believe that is best done by giving them something to try that works, not by lecturing. Because that is how people learn.”

Loren Williams – Biological Sciences 

Honored for distinguished contributions to the fields of biophysics and the origins and evolution of life on Earth, particularly for advancing our understanding of the evolution of the translation system.

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
 

Loren Williams was content in his work as a crystallographer, but when he began studying new ribosome structures at the turn of the century, he found a true passion for uncovering the origins of life on Earth and set out on a path that has now earned him the distinction of becoming an AAAS Fellow.

While its basic function is to produce proteins, Williams noticed that the ribosome could offer a previously unseen look into the past. While he admittedly didn’t know much about evolution at the time, Williams couldn’t shake his curiosity surrounding the similarities in bacterial and archaeal ribosomes across the span of nearly 4 billion years.

“Ninety percent of everything became boring from that point on, because all of a sudden what I was looking at was small. I and I kept going for a couple years, but in my head, I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’ I just thought, ‘OK, I don't know what to do.’ I just kept staring at the ribosome,” Williams said.

Continuing his award-winning and NASA-funded research as “a scientist in a sea of engineers at Georgia Tech,” Williams explained that the translation system unites all living things and predates LUCA — the last universal common ancestor — while serving as a molecular time machine.

“It's been frozen ever since. So, if we can understand the origins and evolution of the translation system, we are looking back before LUCA, which is really looking back to the origin of life,” he said. “In my lab over the last 15 years, we have worked out how to understand the evolution of the ribosome, which is kind of like a movie of the origin of life and we're slowly looking at it frame by frame and figuring out how to do that.”

Williams' initial interest in the structures superseded his desire to receive grants or publish papers, and at the time, he didn't see the makings of a viable research program. Nevertheless, despite some initial rejection, Williams pressed on, and now, as an AAAS Fellow can now reflect on the gamble he took. 

"I feel like I've kind of come back from the dead in a way, and it's a nice feeling because I really thought I was finished," he said. "Science is a funny business."

Samuel Graham Jr. – Engineering

Honored for developing optical/electrical methods and models to characterize thermal response/properties of wide bandgap electronics including RF and power electronics and for developing chip-embedded cooling for high heat flux operation.

George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
 

Graham is being recognized for his cutting-edge research into the thermal characterization and thermal management of gallium nitride-based wide bandgap semiconductors used in radio frequency communications, solid-state lighting, and power electronics. His work has been instrumental in numerous Department of Defense and industrial programs in the development of these technologies, and he was recently recognized with the 2022 ASME Allan Kraus Thermal Management Medal and the 2022 Hawkins Memorial Lecture in Heat Transfer at Purdue University.  

Graham served as the Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair for the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he remains a professor, while also serving as dean of the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. He holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Tech, a place that allowed him to fulfill his childhood dream.

“I am honored to be recognized as a fellow of AAAS. Moreover, I am thankful for my students and collaborators throughout my career that have made my work enjoyable and have inspired me to make an impact on technologies that will benefit society. I wish to say thank you to AAAS and am happy to support its mission to advance science for the benefit of all,” he said.

Graham also serves on several advisory boards to advance science and engineering. This includes serving as chair of the Emerging Technologies Technical Advisory Committee in the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Engineering Science Research Foundation of Sandia National Laboratories, the AT SCALE initiative at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations.

Human balance is a complicated dance, and even the most advanced robots and wearables like robotic exoskeletons have trouble replicating how our brains and bodies work together to keep us upright. A new study from researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University is taking the first step toward addressing the balance problem.

In a paper published Feb. 15 in Science Robotics, the group showed an ankle exoskeleton must react faster than our bodies to improve balance. Participants didn’t recover any more quickly when the exoskeleton delayed applying power until the same time muscles in the leg and ankle activated to restore balance.

Read about the study on the College of Engineering website.

The research, in collaboration with Zoo Atlanta, finds that an elephant’s skin doesn’t uniformly stretch. The top of the trunk is more flexible than the bottom, and the two sections begin to diverge when an elephant reaches more than 10%. When stretching for food or objects, the dorsal section of the trunk slides further forward.  

The findings could improve robotics, which today are typically built for either great strength or flexibility. Unlike an elephant’s trunk, the machines can’t do both.

Read about the study and see video from the experiments. 

“We practice for big races like this every weekend in the Burger Bowl, and put in countless hours in our simulator,” said Tanner Beard, a mechanical engineering major and vice president of racing for RotorJackets. The simulator, called Velocidrone, is run on participants’ personal computers with their controllers.

Beard was joined at the Drone Racing Championship by teammates Matt Kelsey, a computer science major; and Luke Lawver, an aerospace engineering major; with contributions from teammate Jordan Moss, an electrical engineering major. Beard also recently competed in the International Open drone race, representing RotorJackets and finishing 17th in the world.

During the academic year, RotorJackets host weekly events both in person and online and have weekend signup times for students to practice flying drones. Once a month they meet in the Invention Studio to build, repair, and troubleshoot their devices. The group also works with local schools to teach K-12 students about drones, drone racing, and drone applications.

Though the group isn’t meeting during the summer, students can still learn more about the club at rotorjackets.tech or by joining the group’s discord.

Mechanical engineering students Brayden Drury and Wesley Pergament have used those seven decades of information provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service to come up with technology that can calculate the likelihood for future disasters and what payouts may be necessary.

“Essentially, it’s like our company has been around for 70 years,” explained Drury.

Because of limits and exclusions in insurance coverage, homeowners often have to pay out of pocket in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster. Team Sola hopes their model for a data-driven supplemental insurance plan with quick payouts will change that, benefiting homeowners as soon as they need it — while also benefiting home insurance providers.

With their $20,000 check for winning the InVenture competition, Team Sola hopes to start partnering with some of America’s major insurance companies. Drury and Pergament say it will also allow for them to pull in developers to continue to enhance their modeling software.

The judges noted Team Sola’s evident passion.

“How does one get passion for insurance?” asked InVenture Prize judge Kolby Hanley, 2017 InVenture Prize winner and CEO of UltraView Archery.

“These industries are so fascinating to look at, but they can be riddled with problems,” responded Pergament. “We’re just passionate about solving a big problem that hasn’t been solved yet.”

In addition to the cash prize, Team Sola will receive a free U.S. patent filing from Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing and a spot in CREATE-X, Georgia Tech’s startup incubator.

Second place and $10,000 went to Team Foambuster, a team of mechanical engineers that has developed a handheld tool to minimize the snow-like debris created by installing external insulation finishing systems.

And for the People’s Choice Award, the viewing audience used text and web platforms to submit their votes. That $5,000 prize went to Team Reflex, which is currently testing an emergency medical drone response system to deliver lifesaving medical equipment.

“There were so many amazing pitches, and these students are so amazing,” said InVenture Prize judge Duriya Farooqui, board director of Intercontinental Hotels Group and Intercontinental Exchange.

Hanley also expressed how impressed he was by all the finalists, noting, “All of these teams are going to be successful.”  

Check out all of this year's finalist teams here.

“This is a game-changer opportunity, where a unique class of engineers from interdisciplinary backgrounds challenge the status quo as champions of innovation,” Singh said. “We each have a specific area of expertise, and without this kind of cohesive collaboration, it would be difficult to achieve our big picture goals.”

Singh is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. He heads up a multidisciplinary investigative team that includes Andrés García, executive director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech; Krishnendu Roy, director of the NSF Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies; Ahmet Coskun, assistant professor in BME; and Jeremy Boss, chair of Emory’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology.

For many life-threatening infectious diseases, like tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria, effective vaccinations are still lacking, noted Singh, a Woodruff Faculty Fellow.

“There are numerous challenges in understanding disease transmission, pathology and developing new vaccines, including a limited understanding of immune correlates of protection, identification of viable vaccine candidates, and off-target effects that must be evaluated in staged clinical trials,” he said.

So his research team aims to develop multi-organ platforms that recreate human immunological responses observed in vaccination studies.

“I’m excited about this highly innovative project involving a phenomenal research team and advanced technologies,” García said. “The engineering of complex in vitro microfluidic tissue-on-a-chip models that faithfully recapitulate functions of lymphoid tissues will have transformative impact in the field in generating new knowledge and advancing therapies.”

Wellcome Leap was established to build bold, unconventional programs and fund them at scale – programs that aim to deliver breakthroughs in human health over 5 to 10 years and demonstrate seemingly impossible results on seemingly impossible timelines.

Leap is a U.S.-based nonprofit founded by the Wellcome Trust with an initial $300 million investment and modeled on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The $50M HOPE program supports efforts to bioengineer human tissues, organoids, organs, and platforms that can be used to accelerate and scale new treatments for complex human health challenges.

Human Organs, Physiology, and Engineering (HOPE) will focus on two goals: creating a multi-organ platform that recreates human immunological responses with sufficient fidelity to double the predictive value of a preclinical trial with respect to the efficacy, toxicity, and immunogenicity of therapeutic interventions targeting cancer and autoimmune and infectious diseases; and demonstrating the advances needed to restore organ function using cultivated organs or biological/synthetic hybrid systems that double the five-year survival rate of patients on replacement therapy or awaiting organ transplantation.

“When our immune system encounters a new virus, it has a complex program in place to create highly selective, long-lived plasma cells that secrete antibodies,” Singh noted. “The technology developed through this project would enable a better understanding of those processes and potentially lead to groundbreaking new therapies.”

“In putting together Undersecretary Dabbar’s visit, we attempted to demonstrate the full range of Georgia Tech’s energy research portfolio, from basic science to industry scale testing, and our deep understanding of national security, national lab partnerships, corporate partnerships, and company startups,” Lieuwen said. “We think the tour achieved this very effectively.” All aspects of Undersecretary Dabbar’s tour were arranged with special considerations for maintaining full compliance with safety and health guidelines.

Topics of discussion included cybersecurity and energy infrastructure, carbon capture and synthetic fuels, and microgrids and electric infrastructure. At each stop along the tour, Dabbar engaged with researchers and experts to discuss their work and to see Georgia Tech’s facilities. He met with about a dozen researchers including Alexa Harter from GTRI’s Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research Laboratory; Devesh Ranjan from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; Krista Walton from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; and Salvador Palafox from NEETRAC.

In his role as undersecretary, Dabbar is the lead for technology commercialization activities for the department and its 17 national labs, as well as the Department of Energy’s principal advisor on fundamental energy research, energy technologies, and science. He also serves on the department’s Environmental Management Advisory Board. Before his appointment as undersecretary in 2017, he was the managing director for mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan, where he focused on operations, finance, and strategy in the energy sector. Dabbar holds a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

“We talk until we know what the real problem is and what possible solution might be,” says Jagoda of his decades-long avocation as AE’s Anxiety Whisperer. “It might take us awhile, but when they enter that office, they know they’ve got my attention.”

Those words characterize the instruction, the research, and, yes, the fatherly advice that Jagoda has doled out to countless students (& colleagues) over his 40+ year career at Georgia Tech. And if he has his way, it will continue into his retirement, which officially begins December 1.

The plan is for him to return as a Professor Emeritus, allowing new Jagoda Lines to form when the need arises (and the students return). Meanwhile, we thought it was about time Jeff Jagoda gave the rest of us some of the best advice he’s culled from a career (and a life) that he never expected to have.

1. Be humbled by the lives of others. You’ll learn a lot at Tech, but there’s a lot out there you’ll never know.

Both of my parents [Ruth and Mordechai Jagoda] were born in Poland, and both of them suffered the brunt of World War II. But neither of them talked about the Holocaust when I was growing up.  I was attending German schools where there were still very few Jews. They didn’t want me to feel uncomfortable. Bit by bit I found out that my father spent three years in Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp, and my mother was sent to Siberia. They met after the war in Germany, when my mother was living in a Displaced Persons Camp. That was a place you went if you had nowhere else to go. She was helping children without papers to get to Palestine.

So they didn’t talk about their experience. It’s hard to talk about your beliefs when everyone around you was killed for having them.  I just knew they wanted better for me. Now, a friend of mine who was also Jewish, he had parents who talked about their wartime experience all the time. My friend heard all of their stories, and they were terrible. What I can tell you is, he had a very hard time getting along with almost everyone else in school. I think he was haunted by what he’d heard. Years later, I heard he’d gone mad.

2. Your best advisors are the people who know you best.

If I’ve learned anything about advising, it started with my mother, in particular, who would sit and listen to me, help me to reason things out and make a decision. I remember when I told her I wanted to study history in college, she was not too happy, but she never said I couldn’t.

 Instead, she said “What will you do with a history degree? Is there anything else you are interested in?” I said “Yes, chemistry’s good. I like that.” And she said “Why don’t you study chemistry?”

From her, I learned that you don’t tell people “You have to do this” or “You can’t do that.” You explore the positives and the negatives and figure out what the options are.  My mother knew me, so she steered me in a good direction. I still  love history, but science was good, too.

As an advisor at Tech, I take as long as I need to get to know the person I’m advising because that’s going to tell me what their abilities are. I’m going to hear the answer to their own questions if I listen closely enough to what they tell me about their own lives.

Advising has given me a lot of satisfaction over the years. I developed something I call “The Kudos File”, where I save all of the notes I’ve received from students I advised, telling me how well they are doing now. I’ve been downsizing  my office and my files over the last few years, and you could easily say that this file could go. But I’ll never let it go.

3. Travel is the greatest education. Ever.

I encourage everybody to take at least one semester abroad, to see the world. As a professor at Tech, I have never tired of the opportunity to attend conferences or to meet with colleagues all over the world.  Over the last 40 years, I’ve probably been to about 20 countries. To see other countries and observe how people live is the best education there is. I learned this very early.

When I was 15, my parents sent me to live with my aunt in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I had studied Latin for a few years, and I knew German, of course, but I knew very little English. When I got there, I learned English by watching a lot of westerns on television.

The idea was that I would go to the U.S. first, and the rest of my family would follow. It was not uncommon after the War for a Jewish family to send one child ahead of everyone else. But in my case, my aunt sent me back to Germany in about a year. Apparently, I wasn’t all that good at listening to her directions. [laughs]. But I really loved the experience.

When I got back to Germany, they enabled me to go a private school in London, where I lived as a boarder with one of the teachers. Later, I would earn my degrees [in combustion physics] at the Imperial College of London, and I would do a post-doc at CNRS in Mulhouse, France. All of these experiences were tremendous. Then I came to the United States to take a job at Tech.

4. Go out of your way to meet interesting people. Then ask them lots of questions.

When I came to the United States as a teenager, my cousin told me to be careful who I associated with. She was obsessed with hanging out with the straight-A crowd, the high-achievers. It’s not that I didn’t like those people, but I was drawn to anyone who seemed interesting.  Anyone who has something to offer.

I still am.

As a teenager in Allentown, I remember there was this guy who really knew how to ride a motorcycle. I don’t think he was a straight-A student by any stretch of the imagination, but when he offered to give me a ride on his motorcycle, I went. And it was the best, most thrilling ride, ever. I could never have done what he did.

Not everyone is going to be at the top of their class or academically inclined, but everyone has some good side, some thing that they do well. Maybe it’s because I knew no one when I came to the United States that first time, but I made a point of asking people I thought were interesting to explain what they were doing or to tell me about what interested them.

I still do.

5. In spite of your best ambitions, you might end up in academia. And you might end up loving it.

I had no plans, in particular, after I earned my Ph.D. I was offered a post-doc in France, and I thought, after that, I would look for work in industry, where I knew they needed people like me to design new refrigeration or furnace technology. I wasn’t all that excited about it. I was coasting.

I was still on that post-doc when my PhD. advisor, Felix Weinberg, called me one day and said he’d be driving through Mulhouse, France on his way to Switzerland, and would I like to join him for lunch? Lunch turned into an invitation to join him in Switzerland for a few days. And that’s when he asked me.

“Have you ever thought of Georgia Tech, of teaching there?”

Well, no I hadn’t thought of Georgia Tech, or teaching I said.

“Well why don’t you go talk to them? I know two professors there – Ben Zinn and Warren Strahle—who will be at the Combustion Meeting in Manchester England…”

Well, I didn’t need any convincing to travel and the conference sounded interesting. After I met Strahle and Zinn, I was even more interested in this teaching thing. They set up an interview at Tech, which meant I was getting a free trip to the United States, so I also set up two other interviews, one at Princeton and one at LSU.

In the end, I got offers from all three, but to my father, there was only one way to go. “What’s Georgia Tech?”  he asked. “You have to go to Princeton, it’s an Ivy.”

But my experience at Tech had already convinced me that this was where I wanted to be. From the minute I stepped on campus, I felt welcomed by the faculty. When I gave a seminar in [Montgomery Knight] 317, all of the faculty were there and they were all very engaged and asking questions. I had private meetings with at least 10 of them afterwards.

After my visit, I returned to Germany for a few months to iron out details of my visa.  While I was waiting for that, I did some design work for this very well respected professor at the Technical University of Munich. And when I say respected, I mean in Germany there’s God and then there’s a chaired professor. When I told this chaired professor where I was going, he reacted a lot like my father.

“What is Georgia Tech? I’ve never heard of them….”

Well, of course, I came to Tech anyway, but the story doesn’t end there.

A couple of years ago, the Technical University of Munich decided to include not just mechanical engineering but aerospace engineering as well.  So what did they do? They sent an entourage of officials that included the minister of education for the State of Bavaria to Georgia Tech to find out how to build a tier-1 aerospace engineering school.

[Laughs]

I got to show them around, and, I guess, we answered that question: “What is Georgia Tech?”

I suppose all’s well that ends well.

Replacing Smith in her now vacated role as VFS Southern Region director is her Daniel Guggenheim School colleague, Prof. J.V.R. Prasad.

Smith is the current director of a seven-university Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence housed at Georgia Tech and competitively funded through an Army-Navy-NASA collaboration. In addition, she is a board member of the Vertical Lift Consortium, an industry-academic organization that collaborates with the US Government to accelerate development of technology for Future Vertical Lift (FVL) platforms.

The Vertical Flight Society is the world's only international technical society to focus on the advancement of vertical flight technology, encompassing rotorcraft, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), urban air mobility (UAM), and electric VTOL (eVTOL). Smith is globally recognized for her contributions and leadership in her field as a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Technical Fellow of VFS, and Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS). Her research on aeromechanics and unsteady aerodynamics has garnered numerous technical awards from NASA and VFS, as well as recognition from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). She heads up the Nonlinear Computational Aeroelasticity Lab within the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

"My primary focus will be to expand educational opportunities in Vertical Lift to fill the large number of engineers needed for this exciting era, building on our efforts diversity and inclusion, " Smith explained. "In addition, VFS will continue to advocate investment in innovation and development in both military and civilian vertical lift technologies."

Smith recently spoke at length about her vision during the Agility Prime conference.

Smith has served in multiple technical global leadership roles at VFS, including Aerodynamics Technical Chair, the annual Technology Forum Chair, and deputy technical director for Aeromechanics, as well as serving on the VFS Board of Directors. At Tech, she is well-known by generations of vertical lift scholars, having served as the faculty advisor and president of the the Atlanta Chapter for a decade.  

Founded as the American Helicopter Society in 1943, the Vertical Flight Society is the global non-profit society for engineers, scientists and others working on vertical flight technology. For more than 75 years, the Society has led technical, safety, advocacy and other important initiatives, and has been the primary forum for interchange of information on vertical flight technolog

DOE is awarding $47 million through its Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) to support 63 university-led nuclear energy research and development projects in 29 states. NEUP seeks to maintain U.S. leadership in nuclear research across the country by providing top science and engineering faculty and their students opportunities to develop innovative technologies and solutions for civil nuclear capabilities.

“Because nuclear energy is such a vital part of our nation’s energy portfolio, these investments are necessary to ensuring that future generations of Americans will continue to benefit from safe, clean, reliable, and resilient nuclear energy,” said Ed McGinnis, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for nuclear energy. “Our commitment to providing researchers with access to the fundamental infrastructure and capabilities needed to develop advanced nuclear technologies is critical.”

The awards are dispersed under three DOE nuclear energy programs: the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP), the Nuclear Energy Enabling Technologies (NEET) program, and the Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) program.

Georgia Tech’s projects are funded by the NEUP. The first is for corrosion testing of new alloys and accompanying on-line reduction oxidation measurements in the flow loops of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) eutectic alkaline metal fluoride salt mixture, specifically the molten salts lithium fluoride, sodium fluoride, and potassium fluoride (also called FLiNaK) as well as lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride (or FLiBe.)

“The structural alloys in fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactors (FHR) will be exposed to molten fluoride salt mixtures at high temperatures, which can be very corrosive depending on the alloy composition and the presence of impurities in the molten salt. It is very important to test the candidate alloys under potential FHR conditions and understand the corrosion mechanisms in order to select the right alloys to use in building the structure of a reactor,” said Preet M. Singh, principal investigator on the project from Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering.

In the second project, a modeling and simulation tool will be developed to perform highly accurate and efficient transient calculations in the FHRs.

“Accurate and efficient modeling and simulation tools are needed to support design optimization, analysis, licensing, and eventual deployment of any reactor,” said Farzad Rahnema, the project’s principal investigator and Georgia Power Company Distinguished Professor of Nuclear Engineering in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “The current tools are inadequate for modeling advanced reactors such as the FHRs because of their complex geometry and high heterogeneity. The capability to perform transient calculations with high fidelity is an important component of licensing first-of-a-kind reactors, where experimental data are lacking or scarce.”

The DOE awards are for three years.

Learn more at the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy website.

To date, there is usually a weight limit on how much a drone can carry, restricting its usefulness. But Jonathan Rogers, assistant professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, is trying to change that. He is designing, building and programming robotic drones that can link up and carry larger, heavier objects as a unit

“In my lab, we are working with multiple drones that lift and fly packages together,” said Rogers. “This involves distributing heavy lift capabilities into a number of small drone units that can then organize themselves to pick the object up.”

With exceptional portability, unobtrusive size and remote control, drones are ideal for situations that are dangerous for humans. Rogers has designed the world’s first heavy lift small drones – robots that can work together to lift and evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield or civilians from a disaster area. Theoretically, three to four man-portable robots fly out together, connect to the person, and lift them 500 yards out of harm’s way.

Each drone has eight large propellers and can fold up into a backpack for portability. The drone can lift a 65 pound object, and with three or four drones working together, a human can be lifted. Rogers explains that it’s all about thrust density, a term he invented.

“Determining how much thrust you can pack into a small area is important when you are using multiple vehicles to lift a specific object,” said Rogers. “When you pack a large amount of thrust into a small object, the laws of physics work against you, so you need more power. That’s why we only fly the soldiers about 500 yards away after they are lifted from the battlefield.”

The drones Rogers works on are part of a new field called cooperative flight control, where multiple drones connect to an object that they know very little about and move it in a stable way. Rogers has named these drones “modular vertical lift robots,” and they also have useful implications for package delivery.

Currently, Rogers and his team are working on a funded project with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to test multiple vertical lift robots that connect up to deliver supplies. The robots are programed to take into account flexible logistics by connecting to the object (payload) and determining its weight and size and how to move it in a stable way. The small robots work together as a team, known as multi agent control.

“Right now we are most concerned with ensuring the robots fly in a stable way once they analyze the payload and mass center,” said Rogers. “We are calling this autonomous flightworthiness determination (AFWD), and it’s a topic in the field that no one else has explored.”

A major challenge for AFWD and cooperative flight control is determining how the drones are going to attach to the payload. Rogers has developed a docking apparatus, so the robot vehicles can attach to the object. When a flexible payload, like a human, doesn’t have docks, Rogers is looking into using manipulators with soft gripper technology on the robots. Then the robots will have a flexible way of grasping the human.

In the next 20 to 30 years, Rogers predicts that mobile robots moving together will be employed in everyday situations. But a key hurdle remains – normalizing the technology to ensure it is compatible with and trusted by humans.

“I am really invested in creating new mechanisms and autonomy algorithms that allow robots to serve a beneficial purpose in society,” said Rogers. “The modular vehicle lift robot that can operate during disaster situations is a great example of the type of technology that can benefit people. Also, the drone docks we are designing will be a key piece of equipment that hundreds of companies can use to do their jobs better. Making an impact on society is really our goal.”

Rogers hopes to start lifting objects this summer.

“Traveling for me is all about perspective,” she said. “Georgia Tech is a melting pot. We have a large international population, and to me that is really valuable. Whether you are in a lab or in a workplace on a team, having people attack a problem from all different directions, it becomes necessary to solve a really difficult problem.”

From the color guard to robotics research to teaching and startup training, each challenge gave Leksana new skills that have only been enhanced by spending time with people from different backgrounds.

“Georgia Tech gives everybody so much capability in terms of knowledge and solutions and creating things,” she said. “We have the Invention Studio where people are down there creating things all of the time. For me, I wanted to know what we could do with all of that stuff that these really intelligent people are creating. I wanted to see where they fit in the world, and that has really pushed me to do all of traveling that I’ve been able to do.”

Leksana starts as an associate consultant in January at the Boston Consulting Group in Atlanta. Fortunately for her, the job requires her to travel up to 90 percent of the time.

The first amputee to use it, a musician who lost part of his right arm five years ago, is now able to play the piano for the first time since his accident. He can even strum the Star Wars theme song.

“Our prosthetic arm is powered by ultrasound signals,” said Gil Weinberg, the Georgia Tech College of Design professor who leads the project. “By using this new technology, the arm can detect which fingers an amputee wants to move, even if they don’t have fingers.”

Jason Barnes is the amputee working with Weinberg. The 28-year-old was electrocuted during a work accident in 2012, forcing doctors to amputate his right arm just below the elbow. Barnes no longer has his hand and most of his forearm but does have the muscles in his residual limb that control his fingers.

Barnes’ everyday prosthesis is similar to the majority of devices on the market. It’s controlled by electromyogram (EMG) sensors attached to his muscles. He switches the arm into various modes by pressing buttons on the arm. Each mode has two programmed moves, which are controlled by him either flexing or contracting his forearm muscles. For example, flexing allows his index finger and thumb to clamp together; contracting closes his fist.

“EMG sensors aren’t very accurate,” said Weinberg, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology. “They can detect a muscle movement, but the signal is too noisy to infer which finger the person wants to move. We tried to improve the pattern detection from EMG for Jason but couldn’t get finger-by-finger control.”

But then the team looked around the lab and saw an ultrasound machine. They partnered with two other Georgia Tech professors – Minoru Shinohara, Chris Fink (College of Sciences) and Levent Degertekin (Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering) — and attached an ultrasound probe to the arm. The same kind of probe doctors use to see babies in the womb could watch how Barnes’ muscles moved.

“That’s when we had a eureka moment,” said Weinberg.

When Barnes tries to move his amputated ring finger, the muscle movements differ from those seen when he tries to move any other digit. Weinberg and the team fed each unique movement into an algorithm that can quickly determine which finger Barnes wants to move. The ultrasound signals and machine learning can detect continuous and simultaneous movements of each finger, as well as how much force he intends to use.

“It’s completely mind-blowing,” said Barnes. “This new arm allows me to do whatever grip I want, on the fly, without changing modes or pressing a button. I never thought we’d be able to do this.”

This is the second device Weinberg’s lab has built for Barnes. His first love is the drums, so the team fitted him with a prosthetic arm with two drumsticks in 2014. He controlled one of the sticks. The other moved on its own by listening to the music in the room and improvising.

The device gave him the chance to drum again. The robotic stick could play faster than any drummer in the world. Worldwide attention has sent Barnes and Weinberg’s robots around the globe for concerts across four continents. They’ve also played at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and Moogfest.

That success pushed Weinberg to take the next step and create something that gives Barnes the dexterity he’s lacked since 2012.

“If this type of arm can work on music, something as subtle and expressive as playing the piano, this technology can also be used for many other types of fine motor activities such as bathing, grooming and feeding,” said Weinberg. “I also envision able-bodied persons being able to remotely control robotic arms and hands by simply moving their fingers.”

Drivers, builders, designers, engineers, executives, and even academics with ties to Georgia Tech made their mark on the worlds of stock car and drag racing.

Read the Full Story:

Georgia Tech's Racing Roots, Part 2: The Need for Speed

As dirt gave way to asphalt, and car culture captured the country’s imagination, young engineers and mechanics in Atlanta’s North Avenue shops and foundries were instantly drawn to automobiles and the pursuit of speed. 

Racing culture blossomed in and around Atlanta, and Georgia Tech was at the epicenter.

This culture would influence the origins of stock car racing and the beginnings of the National Association for Stock Car Racing (NASCAR), the most popular motorsports series in the U.S.

The tower study is a follow-up to the group’s 2014 ant raft research, which examined how the insects link their bodies in order to build waterproof structures that stay afloat for months. The ants march along until they come to an open space — the edge of the raft — then settle in to become a building block of the raft.

They do the same thing for the towers, searching for an empty spot like a car in a crowded parking lot. Once an individual ant finds one, typically at the top of the tower, she stops and braces for more ants to climb on top and go vertical.

Learn more about how they do it, why the towers are always sinking and why scientists and engineers should care about ant movements.

The study suggests that the time is consistent because of mucus. The substance covering the the large intestine is very thin for small animals and much thicker for larger ones. According to the paper, mucus allows feces to move through the intestine “like a sled sliding through a chute.”

The extra fluid allows larger animals to defecate at higher speeds than smaller animals, even though both use the same amount of pressure to relieve themselves. In other words, defecation might not be possible without this previously unknown mucus layer.

The research also found that the length of feces is double that of the rectum, which means the rectum and the colon both store feces.

The study, “Hydrodynamics of defecation,” is published in the journal Soft Matter. It covers a topic that hasn’t been heavily researched within the scientific community. Professor David Hu (also in the School of Biological Sciences) and his mechanical engineering student Patricia Yang are the lead authors. Daniel Chu, an assistant professor and colorectal surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is one of the co-authors. Georgia Tech spoke with each of them about their findings.

Why was it important to study defecation?

David Hu: Talking about, let alone studying, defecation is taboo. But that’s to the detriment of our society because we don’t have a good physical understanding of digestion or defecation.

After reading the literature, I was convinced that we could make progress in this area. We decided on an approach combining a mathematical model and numerous measurements from the zoo to provide validation to our model.

The study of the heart began in a similar fashion. Thirty years ago, there was no physics of the cardiovascular system. Now we have computer models personalized to people’s profiles. The same thing could be true for the digestive system.

One of my goals is to use physics and math to understand things that aren’t studied enough but should be.

Your lab earned a 2015 Ig Nobel Prize for Improbable Research for a published paper showing all mammals urinate for roughly the same duration of time. In what ways did this additional attention foster new or unexpected connections with industry or the research community?

Patricia Yang: That study reached further than I expected. After the paper was published, an association in Spain invited us to present at an international urology conference. The hosts remarked that “it’s difficult that a paper on functional urology is known beyond the specialist field.”  

The study also linked the science community and general audiences. We were asked to create a video lesson about the fluid mechanics of urination for MIT’s BLOSSOM program, a video series that teaches math and science lessons to high school students around the world.

We’ve also started a collaboration with a Japanese urologist to study the duration of urination for humans. This follow-up research will hopefully explain how age and gender affect the function of the urinary system.

Question: What applications does this study have for the medical community?  

Daniel Chu: As clinicians, I think we underappreciate the role of mucus within the intestinal tract. We know it’s there, but few studies have paid much attention to it. This study demonstrates a physical, and mathematical, reason why it’s there.

If mucus plays a role in normal physiology of defecation, which this study shows, then abnormalities in mucus may play a role in abnormal physiology. This possibility is intriguing and could expand our current understanding of how gastrointestinal disorders, like constipation or infectious colitis, may occur.

One line of thinking for why constipation occurs is because the nervous system of the colon is out of sync. That messes up the propulsion process. We often have to treat it with medications, like laxatives and other pro-motility agents, to essentially force the column of stool out of the body. Perhaps people who are constipated don’t have enough mucus for whatever reason. If we think that mucus is playing a role, then could we develop new treatment strategies based on medications, including enemas or oral agents, that more closely resemble mucus? These possibilities would be novel.

According to the study, a honeybee can carry up to 30 percent of its body weight in pollen because of the strategic spacing of its nearly three million hairs. The hairs cover the insect’s eyes and entire body in various densities that allow efficient cleaning and transport. 

The research found that the gap between each eye hair is approximately the same size as a grain of dandelion pollen, which is typically collected by bees. This keeps the pollen suspended above the eye and allows the forelegs to comb through and collect the particles. The legs are much hairier and the hair is very densely packed — five times denser than the hair on the eyes. This helps the legs collect as much pollen as possible with each swipe. Once the forelegs are sufficiently scrubbed and cleaned by the other legs and the mouth, they return to the eyes and continue the process until the eyes are free of pollen.

The Georgia Tech team tethered bees and used high speed cameras to create the first quantified study of the honeybee cleaning process. They watched as the insects were able to remove up to 15,000 particles from their bodies in three minutes.

“Without these hairs and their specialized spacing, it would be almost impossible for a honeybee to stay clean,” said Guillermo Amador, who led the study while pursuing his doctoral degree at Georgia Tech in mechanical engineering.

This was evident when Amador and the team created a robotic honeybee leg to swipe pollen-covered eyes. When they covered the leg with wax, the smooth, hairless leg gathered four times less pollen.

The high-speed videos also revealed something else.

“Bees have a preprogrammed cleaning routine that doesn’t vary,” said Marguerite Matherne, a Ph.D. student in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.  “Even if they’re not very dirty in the first place, bees always swipe their eyes a dozen times, six times per leg. The first swipe is the most efficient, and they never have to brush the same area of the eye twice.”

The research also found that pollenkitt, the sticky, viscous fluid found on the surface of pollen grains, is essential. When the fluid was removed from pollen during experiments, bees accumulated half as much.

“If we can start learning from natural pollinators, maybe we can create artificial pollinators to take stress off of bees,” said David Hu, a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Biological Sciences. “Our findings may also be used to create mechanical designs that help keep micro and nanostructured surfaces clean.”    

The study, “Honeybee hairs and pollenkitt are essential for pollen capture and removal,” is published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.  

The study is partially supported by the National Science Foundation (PHY-1255127). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor.

Noel, a Ph.D. mechanical engineering candidate, has just wrapped up a dizzying 12-day stretch surrounding her first ever published paper, which explained why frog tongues are sticky. Since it was released, Noel has spoken to more than a dozen reporters, including a live interview on National Public Radio (NPR). She appeared on London’s BBC TV. She even fulfilled a lifelong goal.

“I’ve read Popular Science magazine ever since I was a little girl,” said Noel. “It was a childhood dream to someday be in that publication. I never knew it would be for frog tongues.”

Her study has resulted in more than 60 stories around the world. Noel never saw it coming. 

“I just thought I would publish the article, move on to my next study, and no one would really care about frogs,” she said. 

She was wrong.

For instance, her study was published last Tuesday. That morning she had back-to-back calls with a reporter from Scientific American and the deputy science writer at The New York Times. After working an hour on campus in the Invention Studio, she spoke to The Atlantic, Washington Post, and NPR that afternoon. How did she celebrate when the paper was officially published by the journal at 7 p.m.? She taught class: ME2110 Creative Decisions and Design.

“It’s been a little overwhelming. But I think it’s an amazing experience going from one radio studio to the next, talking about my research,” Noel said. “It’s incredible how many people you can reach with such a versatile subject. I’ve had children send me emails of drawings of frog tongues because they learned something from an article. It made me feel happy that I was inspiring younger generations to maybe pursue science or a STEM career.”

Noel learned a few things of her own along the way —  tips that can also be used by fellow students with upcoming published papers who may have a chance to do media interviews.

“I’ve learned that you really have to be solid in your understanding of the core material of your research. You also have to be able to boil your results down to three sentences max using words that an eighth grader can understand.”

The media attention has quieted as the days have passed. She still hears from scientists and engineers around the world via email. Some of them hope to collaborate with Noel about lizard tongues.

“We have had three offers, one from a chemist at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., a rheologist at West Point Military academy, and a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History,” said her advisor David Hu, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “Part of this success is Alexis’ natural communication skills. She is poised, confident, and knowledgeable on the air or over a microphone.”

For now, Noel is turning her focus to the next paper: cat tongues.

“I’ve been interested in frogs and cats my whole life. They’re my favorite animals,” she said. “Now they’re the two animals I’m studying. It’s fantastic.”

Noel and 11 other students participated in a class during the fall semester that teaches principles such as webpage design, interviewing techniques, building press kits, and creating science publicity through social media. This course is funded by the Frank K. Webb Fund for Communication in Mechanical Engineering. Interested students can contact Professor Hu.

A new Georgia Institute of Technology study says the tongue’s stickiness is caused by a unique reversible saliva in combination with a super soft tongue. A frog’s saliva is thick and sticky during prey capture, then turns thin and watery as prey is removed inside the mouth. The tongue, which was found to be as soft as brain tissue and 10 times softer than a human’s tongue, stretches and stores energy much like a spring. This combination of spit and softness is so effective that it provides the tongue 50 times greater work of adhesion than synthetic polymer materials such as sticky-hand toys.

The Georgia Tech researchers filmed frogs eating crickets in super-slow motion to better understand the physics of the tongue. They also collected saliva samples and poked the tissue to measure softness.

“The tongue acts like a bungee cord once it latches onto its prey,” said Alexis Noel, a Georgia Tech mechanical engineering Ph.D. student who led the study. “It deforms itself as it pulls back toward the mouth, continually storing the intense applied forces in its stretchy tissue and dissipating them in its internal damping.”

This tissue damping, Noel said, is much like a car’s shock absorbers. The tongue’s softness also allows it to change shape during contact and immediately afterward while retracting.

The other vital component of the capturing process is the frog’s versatile saliva.

“There are actually three phases,” Noel said. “When the tongue first hits the insect, the saliva is almost like water and fills all the bug’s crevices. Then, when the tongue snaps back, the saliva changes and becomes more viscous — thicker than honey, actually — gripping the insect for the ride back.  The saliva turns watery again when the insect is sheared off inside the mouth.”

Unlike water and honey, frog saliva can change its viscosity with shear rate, much like paint. Paint spreads easily when applied, but stays firmly on the wall once the brush is removed.

“For frogs, saliva seeps easily when it hits the insect, then thickens up during retraction,” she said.

This spit switch can’t be seen in the slow-mo videos. To identify the shear rate when viscosity drops, Noel collected saliva from 18 frogs and placed samples in a rheometer, a highly sensitive device for measuring properties of fluids.

David Hu, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, is Noel’s advisor who has also studied how mosquitos fly in the rain, how dogs shake off water and why eyelashes need to be an ideal length. He says the frog study could help engineers design reversible adhesives at high speed.

“Most adhesives that have been created are stiff, especially tape,” said Hu, who is also a faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences. “Frog tongues can attach and reattach with soft, special properties that are extremely stickier than typical materials. Perhaps this technology could be used for new Band-Aids. Or it could be used to create new materials in soft manufacturing.”

The Georgia Tech team worked with Mark Mandica, the leading herpetologist at the Amphibian Foundation in Atlanta. The foundation brings together top researchers in the field of amphibian biology, conservation, and applied science to address the causes of global amphibian declines. Current research estimates that 38 percent of the world’s amphibian populations are in decline or already extinct.

The study, “Frogs use a viscoelastic tongue and non-Newtonian saliva to catch prey,” is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

More video and images are available for media.

The project is partially supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-1148903) and NSF career award PHY-1255127. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

Connally, who has headed up Georgia Power’s fossil and hydro generation operations since 2010, began his career with Southern Company in 1989 as a co-op student at Georgia Power’s Plant Yates. He has held positions of increasing responsibility in various areas, including Customer Operations, Sales and Marketing, and Power Generation at Georgia Power, Alabama Power, and Mississippi Power. 

“Gulf Power has a reputation in the utility industry of great employees, great customer service and innovative programs,” Connally said. “I look forward to joining the team and my family and I are excited about living in Northwest Florida.”  

A native of Newnan, Ga., Connally graduated in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. He completed the Goizueta Executive Education Program at Emory University in 2004 and the Southern Company Senior Leadership Development Program in 2009. He has served on the boards of the Lynn Meadows Discovery Center in Gulfport and United Way of Jackson/George counties in Mississippi.

Read More from Southern Company Pressroom.

Georgia Tech is proud to have a number of alumni as part of this distinguished group including a graduate of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering – Doug Hooker, executive director, Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC).

Hooker is the first African-American to head the ARC in its history.  The Atlanta Regional Commission is the official planning agency for the 10-county Atlanta Region, including Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry and Rockdale counties as well as the City of Atlanta and 67 other cities. In addition, Hooker has also served as the former executive director of the Georgia State Road and Tollway Authority and former commissioner of public works for Atlanta. He served on the inaugural board of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District and the Governor’s Advisory Council for the ACT and ACF River Basin Compacts.

More on Doug Hooker.

Described by ENR, “[The 2011 Newsmakers] have been chosen for their outstanding accomplishments, far exceeding what might be expected in their day-to-day duties, for injecting an original idea or new approach that would take the place of traditional practices, or for performing some special service that benefits the industry and the public.”

As an ’81 graduate of Georgia Tech, Brent’s career as a mechanical engineer began in the construction industry. He worked in a variety of positions ranging from Mechanical/Electrical Coordinator to Senior Project Manager for companies including: Blount Construction, Clark Construction and Skanska. While gaining experience, he also gained insight into the common problems that plagued the industry, such as safety, communication and teamwork issues, poor industry image, and stress and burnout, which often resulted in costly business consequences. Brent soon realized that rather than just being a part of the construction industry; he wanted to improve it. He wanted to find solutions to these common problems and to help create safer, more efficient, more collaborative workplaces. This desire led Brent to find his passion for mentoring and coaching construction companies and their employees.

In 2002, Brent founded Brent Darnell International, a company devoted to teaching “soft skills” and emotional intelligence to the technical industries. He has since been fortunate enough to work with thousands of people in over 70 companies from 15 countries worldwide. Whether a company experiences a breakdown in communication, lack of teamwork, or poor stress management, Brent’s unique skill-set enables him to coach and mentor its employees to help get back on track and work to their highest potential.

In receiving ENR’s award, Brent Darnell is joined by 24 other influential newsmakers. Most noteworthy is that within this group of outstanding men and women being honored for their success is a past participant of one of Brent Darnell’s very own coaching and training programs.

In addition to coaching and public speaking, Brent has also authored a series of books that aim to turn so-called “tough guys” into exceptional leaders within the industry. These include: Communication and Presentation Skills for Tough Guys; Relationship Skills for Tough Guys; Stress Management, Time Management and Life Balance for Tough Guys; and The Tough Guy Survival Kit which combines all three books within the series.

 “It’s an honor and privilege to be included in this year’s list of Top 25 Newsmakers by ENR,” Said Brent Darnell. “I am even more grateful for the experiences and people along the way that have helped to make it all possible.”

At its November 2011 meeting, the IEEE Board of Directors elevated Professor Yogendra Joshi to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2012, with the following citation: for contributions to microfabricated cooling devices.

IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation. 

Congratulations to Dr. Joshi on this most important achievement.

It seems odd that school bus logistics, hydraulic excavators, or titanium implants would have much to do with fostering a relationship between SAIC and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Odd, but true: those topics were among the 100-plus papers submitted this year for the Georgia Tech Student Paper Contest, supported by SAIC for more than 20 years.

“The student paper competition plays an important role in building the collaborative association we have with Georgia Tech that is being fostered by the Strategic University Alliance program,” said SAIC Senior Vice President Amy Alving, who gave the keynote speech at this year’s contest awards dinner, held recently in Atlanta, Ga. “It illustrates our dedication to fostering science, technology, engineering, and math careers, demonstrates our commitment to technical excellence, and provides a forum whereby students, faculty, and administrators are exposed to the innovative work and talented people at SAIC.”

More than 100 papers were submitted for this year’s competition, from which 11 winners were selected. First held in 1989, the competition represents one of the longest-running, corporate-sponsored events for recognizing outstanding research at Georgia Tech.

“The large number of entries that we have every year reflects the high regard that students and faculty have for winning an SAIC award,” said SAIC Vice President Jad Batteh, who directs the competition.   

In addition to giving SAIC the chance “to recognize the breadth and quality of research at a great university,” Batteh noted that the competition gives participants the opportunity to learn more about SAIC. “Based on number of entries, with a faculty advisor for every entry, we estimate that more than 200 members of the Georgia Tech community were exposed to SAIC as a result of this competition,” he said, “The 45 Georgia Tech-affiliated attendees at the awards banquet also got extensive exposure to the expertise and innovation within SAIC, as well as tangible evidence of our commitment to technical excellence.”

13 Researchers Garner 11 Awards

A panel of judges — including SAIC scientists and Georgia Tech faculty — evaluated entries based on originality or uniqueness of the work, significance of the results, and effectiveness of the presentation.

Winning papers dealt with such subjects as drag-induced lift in granular media — how objects move through sand and gravel — and the characterization of the disturbance field in a transversely excited swirl-stabilized flame, a research effort that could yield turbines that operate more effectively and emit fewer harmful chemicals.

“This competition was a great opportunity to share my research with professionals outside my field in a direct and understandable way,” said Rolando Gittens, who won an award for his research into cell growth in bone and dental implants.

“The communication skills fostered in events like this are necessary for science and technology research to have the utmost impact on society. Receiving the Best Poster Award is a great honor and is further motivation to continue working on problems that affect us all,” he added.

Mark Elton, honored for his research in the graphic interfaces used by operators of hydraulic manipulators like excavators or cement mixers, echoed that sentiment. “It was great to meet SAIC employees and other faculty and students at the banquet. I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of work represented, and it was a pleasure to be encouraged in my research by Dr. Alving.”

Relationship Yields Benefits for Both Parties

SAIC’s relationship with Georgia Tech isn’t limited to the contest: the company provides internships and scholarships, and supports a handful of research efforts, including a collaboration to develop a health information technology degree program at the university.

SAIC and Georgia Tech appear pleased with the results of the long-standing collaboration.

“The Georgia Tech strategic vision and plan published in 2010 underscore the importance of strategic, collaborative alliances in support of our educational and research mission,” said Steve Cross, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research. “Now in its 22nd year, our collaboration with SAIC is an exemplar of the kind of relationships we value and upon which we depend in order to support our students and to address challenging research problems.”

He added, “As I have worked directly with SAIC for over 25 years, I personally appreciate both the commitment and experience SAIC brings to [Georgia] Tech to the benefit of our students and faculty.”

Mike Macedonia, an SAIC vice president, remarked, “We have been steadily building this relationship with Georgia Tech, and the student paper competition is an integral part. I look forward to continuing our work with the university, and am eager to see the new technologies we can develop and possibly bring to market.”

22nd Annual SAIC - Georgia Tech Student Paper Competition Winners
November 8, 2011

Airfoil Effect in Sand: Drag Induced Lift in Granular Media,
Yang Ding & Nick Gravish, Dr. Daniel I. Goldman

Calibration of Hybrid SCE-CSSM Analytical Model for Piezocone Penetration in Clays, Fawad Sulaman Niazi, Dr. Paul W. Mayne

Characterization of the Disturbance Field in a Transversely Excited Swirl-Stabilized Flame, Jacqueline O'Connor, Dr. Timothy C. Lieuwen

Comparison of Human-Machine Interfaces Designed for Novices Teleoperating Multi-DOF Hydraulic Manipulators, Mark Elton,
Dr. Wayne J. Book

Constant Tip-Surface Distance with Atomic Force Microscopy via Quality Factor Feedback, Lin Fan, Dr. Todd Sulchek

Genomic Fluidity: An Integrative View of Gene Diversity within Microbial Populations, Andrey Kislyuk, Dr. Joshua S. Weitz

Graphene Oxide-Polyelectrolyte Nanomembranes,
Dhaval Kulkarni, Dr. Vladimir Tsukruk

Gwinnett County Public Schools: Improvements in Bus Logistics,
Kathleen Hendrix (Representing Senior Design Team), Dr. Julie Swann

Quantitative Assessment of the World Health Organization Interagency Emergency Health Kit, Evan Saltzman, Seonghye Jeon, & Samina Jamil, Dr. Julie Swann

The Effects of Combined Micron-/Submicron-scale Surface Roughness and Nanoscale Features on Cell Proliferation and Differentiation, Rolando A. Gittens, Dr. Barbara Boyan

The Motion Grammar for Physical Human-Robot Games,
Neil T. Dantam, Dr. Mike Stilman

Das' Research Engineer and former doctoral student Dr. Dajun Yuan is the lead author. Co-authors include Suman Das, Jeffrey Hendricks, Andres Lasagni, and David Martin.

According to Dr. Gary May, Dean of the College of Engineering, “This is a prestigious honor and he is deeply deserving. Srinivas has won numerous awards for his research and scholarship. In addition, he has demonstrated a commitment to translate his expertise into real-world applications. The designation of Dean’s Professor is not only for his achievement, but because his leadership serves as a testament to the College of Engineering’s commitment to excellence.”

Criteria for the designation of Dean's Professor include outstanding scholarship, dedication to education, and excellence in service at Institutional and national/international levels.  Special considerations are given to those who exhibit a commitment to applications of engineering to improve society.  Nominations are submitted by College of Engineering school chairs, and an ad hoc committee is appointed to evaluate the nominees’ credentials and ultimately make a recommendation to the dean.  The Dean’s Professor designation carries with it an annual discretionary fund for a five-year period to enhance professional development.

Dr. Garimella was nominated by Dr. Bill Wepfer, Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair and Professor of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Wepfer states, “Srinivas is an outstanding advisor and mentor to his many undergraduate and graduate students.  He leads by example and his commitment to excellence.  He built and developed the Sustainable Thermal Systems Laboratory in the wilderness years when energy was not a high Federal funding priority and now he is an ARPA-E rock star.  Srinivas is a great example of how hard work, excellence, and persistent dedication pays off!”

Dr. Garimella began at Tech in August 2003 as an Associate Professor and Director of the Sustainable Thermal Systems Laboratory.  Prior, he was an Associate Professor at Iowa State University, an Assistant and Associate Professor at Western Michigan University, a Research Scientist at Battelle Memorial Institute, and a Senior Engineer at General Motors.

Dr. Garimella conducts research in the area of sustainable energy systems, such as absorption and vapor compression heat pumps, natural refrigerant space-conditioning systems, and automotive climate control/propulsion cooling systems.  His research also includes phase-change in micochannel and compact heat exchangers, heat and mass transfer in binary mixtures, and supercritical/transcritical fluid flow and heat transfer.

Dr. Garimella holds a Bachelors of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, a Masters of Science and Ph.D. from Ohio State University.

The new curriculum was the result of a year-long effort undertaken by the School’s Undergraduate Committee.   The committee, chaired by Dr. Marc Smith, was made up of 14 professors, 2 students, and 4 ex officio members, including Dr. Al Ferri, the School’s Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies.  The committee determined that in an effort to develop pathways for the next generation of engineers, a call for curricular change was indeed needed.

The field of mechanical engineering is transforming with the expansion of the discipline’s boundaries, the rapid technological innovation, and an increased need to attend to global issues.  Mechanical engineers are increasingly called upon to work on multidisciplinary teams and to find innovative solutions to the problems facing society.  Students still need a broad grounding in the fundamentals, but the curriculum must also provide a “professional practice stem,” which affords them experience in combining their engineering knowledge with open-ended problem solving, innovation, creativity, sustainability, global focus, and systems integration, as well as communication skills, teamwork, leadership, and management.

Dr. Ferri comments, “The committee’s intent was to modify the curriculum to provide enough flexibility and course offerings so that students can choose their own individual path to the BSME degree.  I think the committee accomplished that with their recommendation and the ME faculty overwhelmingly agreed.”

The new curriculum retains most of the foundational courses that are needed for Georgia Tech graduates to step into their traditional roles in industry, research, product development, and systems design.  From there, however, there are two paths that the student can choose – the breadth option or the specialization option.  The breadth option provides students with 5 free electives (15 credit hours) that can be used to pursue wide-ranging interests.  Significantly, the 5 free electives can be used by students to complete a certificate or minor in a vast array of subjects from math and applied sciences, to sociology, public policy, languages, economics, and psychology.   The specialization or “concentration” option provides a major depth experience in some sub-discipline of ME.  For example, students can choose to specialize in areas such as thermal and energy systems, biomechanics, materials, design and manufacturing, or nuclear and radiological engineering.

The flexibility of the new curriculum reflects many of the objectives voiced in the Institute’s and the College of Engineering’s strategic plans.  Both options increase the total curriculum credits from 126 to 129, but also add a choice for breadth or depth in or out of ME.  Dr. Bill Wepfer, Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair and Professor, states "Our curriculum change, with its flexibility, aligns with the ASME roadmap which aims to enable students to develop understanding of mechanical engineering fundamentals but also offer greater strength in context and realization of design, a better systems perspective, and the possibility of focus in an area of interest whether it be in engineering or in a completely different field.  To my knowledge we are the first of the large-enrollment mechanical engineering programs to embark down this path and I am confident this will better prepare our graduates for success in a multi-disciplinary world."

The next step in getting this curriculum approved is the Institute’s Undergraduate Studies' support.

Dr. Wade has more than 20 years of experience with DIII-D, the last seven with General Atomics as the program’s Director of Experimental Science Division.  He assumed his new position on March 12, 2012.

Dr. Wade’s experience includes award-winning research collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. While acting as the Senior Research Scientist at Oak Ridge, he provided the Woodruff School with a testimonial, in which he recalled how a book on fusion energy written by Dr. Weston Stacey inspired him to come to Georgia Tech in pursuit of his graduate degree.

Dr. Wade is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and is well respected in the international fusion community.

The winning major of the inaugural competition, organized by the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, was the nuclear and radiological engineering program from the George W. Woodruff School.

NRE took the top prize in the Skyscraper competition and egg drop contest and placed second in both the paper airplane contest and film canister rocket competition. Other activities included a comedy night, chalking competition, Engineers Week Fair and charity food drive.

On April 11 professor Bojan Petrovic and student Christopher Warren accepted NRE's award on behalf of their major. A plaque will be displayed in the College of Engineering in honor of their achievement and a trophy will be housed by NRE until they defend their title during next year's Engineers week.

"It's impressive that nuclear engineering, which is one of our smaller degree programs, was able to compete so well and win the competition," said Gary May, dean of the College of Engineering.

"Every year we're excited about our students participating in National Engineers Week. It's a special time of the year at Georgia Tech and as the largest producer of engineers in the country we're very happy to see so many of our students getting involved in the activities."

A national program, Engineers Week is part of many corporate and government cultures and is celebrated on every U.S. engineering college campus. Engineers Week 2011 celebrated a 60th anniversary (1951-2011).