A report published recently in the Journal of Controlled Release describes a technique for administering contraceptive hormones through special backings on jewelry such as earrings, wristwatches, rings or necklaces. The contraceptive hormones are contained in patches applied to portions of the jewelry in contact with the skin, allowing the drugs to be absorbed into the body.

Initial testing suggests the contraceptive jewelry may deliver sufficient amounts of hormone to provide contraception, though no human testing has been done yet. A goal for the new technique is to improve user compliance with drug regimens that require regular dosages. Beyond contraceptives, the jewelry-based technique might also be used for delivering other drugs through the skin.

“The more contraceptive options that are available, the more likely it is that the needs of individual women can be met,” said Mark Prausnitz, a Regents Professor and the J. Erskine Love Jr. chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Because putting on jewelry may already be part of a woman’s daily routine, this technique may facilitate compliance with the drug regimen. This technique could more effectively empower some women to prevent unintended pregnancies.”

This proof-of-concept research was supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under a subcontract funded by FHI 360.

Contraceptive jewelry adapts transdermal patch technology that is already used to administer drugs that prevent motion sickness, support smoking cessation, and control the symptoms of menopause, but have never been incorporated into jewelry before. Contraceptive patches are also already available, but Prausnitz believes pairing them with jewelry may prove attractive to some women – and allow more discreet use of the drug delivery technology.

“There is a lot of experience with making and using conventional transdermal patches,” he said. “We are taking this established technology, making the patch smaller and using jewelry to help apply it. We think that earring patches can expand the scope of transdermal patches to provide additional impact.” 

Postdoctoral Fellow Mohammad Mofidfar, Senior Research Scientist Laura O’Farrell and Prausnitz tested the concept on animal models, first on ears from pigs. Test patches mounted on earring backs and containing the hormone levonorgestrel were also applied to the skin of hairless rats. To simulate removal of the earrings during sleep, the researchers applied the patches for 16 hours, then removed them for eight hours. Testing suggested that even though levels dropped while the earrings were removed, the patch could produce necessary amounts of the hormone in the bloodstream.

The earring patch tested by the researchers consisted of three layers. One layer is impermeable and includes an adhesive to hold it onto an earring back, the underside of a wristwatch or the inside surface of a necklace or ring. A middle layer of the patch contains the contraceptive drug in solid form. The outer layer is a skin adhesive to help stick to skin so the hormone can be transferred. Once in the skin, the drug can move into the bloodstream and circulate through the body.

If the technique ultimately is used for contraception in humans, the earring back would need to be changed periodically, likely on a weekly basis.

The contraceptive jewelry was originally designed for use in developing countries where access to health care services may limit access to long-acting contraceptives such as injectables, implants and IUDs. However, Prausnitz says the technology may be attractive beyond that initial audience. “We think contraceptive jewelry could be appealing and helpful to women all around the world,” said Prausnitz.

The researchers tested patches adhered to earring backs, about one square centimeter in area, and placed them tightly on the skin of the test animals. Earring backs and watches may be most useful for administering drugs because they remain in close contact with the skin to allow drug transfer. The dose delivered by a patch is generally proportional to the area of skin contact.

“The advantage of incorporating contraceptive hormone into a universal earring back is that it can be paired with many different earrings,” Prausnitz noted. “A woman could acquire these drug-loaded earring backs and then use them with various earrings she might want to wear.”

Though transdermal drug-delivery patches have been available since 1979, testing would be required to determine whether the earring patch is safe and effective. In addition, research would be required to determine whether the concept would be attractive to women in different cultures.

“We need to understand not only the effectiveness and economics of contraceptive jewelry, but also the social and personal factors that come into play for women all around the world,” Prausnitz said. “We would have to make sure that this contraceptive jewelry concept is something that women would actually want and use.”

The technique could potentially be used to deliver other pharmaceuticals, though it would only be suitable for skin-permeable drugs that require administration of quantities small enough to fit into the patches. 

“We think there are uses beyond contraceptive hormones, but there will always be a limitation that the drug has to be effective with a low enough dose to fit into the limited space in the patch,” Prausnitz said. “It also should be a drug that would benefit from continuous delivery from a patch and that is administered to a patient population interested in using pharmaceutical jewelry.”

The earring patch is designed to add another contraceptive option for women. “Pharmaceutical jewelry introduces a novel delivery method that may make taking contraceptives more appealing,” he added. “Making it more appealing should make it easier to remember to use it.”

This work was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of FHI 360, USAID or the United States Government.  This research was supported by USAID cooperative agreement AID-OAA-15-00045 under a subcontract funded by FHI 360 as a proof-of-concept study (https://www.fhi360.org/projects/envision-fp).

CITATION: Mohammad Mofidfar, Laura O’Farrell and Mark R. Prausnitz, “Pharmaceutical jewelry: Earring patch for transdermal delivery of contraceptive hormone,” (Journal of Controlled Release, 2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jconrel.2019.03.011

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“Plagiarism cases make up 38 percent of all cases we process, and we know there are some cases we never hear,” said Bonnie Weston, director of the Office of Student Integrity (OSI). 

Tech’s policy on plagiarism is straightforward. It states that all cases need to be reported to OSI, and then students who want to challenge the accusation may do so.

But that’s where the simplicity ends. So you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we’ve asked Weston and a few of your Tech colleagues for some insight into how they’ve dealt with plagiarism on campus. Read on for their strategies.

Why Do Students Plagiarize?

At Tech, there are two primary reasons for plagiarizing. Some students do it because they consider the class unimportant, as it isn’t one of their core classes. The other major reason is lack of time.

“Most of the students I see plagiarizing are trying to get everything done within their packed schedules,” said Andy Frazee, associate director of the Writing and Communication Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. “They’re stressed, tired, and think they can’t get it done in time, so they copy someone else’s work.”

David Smith, senior lecturer in the College of Computing, noted that non-computer science students often view his classes as a formality, and some fail to learn anything because of this. These students copy work done by others or ask others for help with their programming assignments and fail to learn the programming skills they need to succeed.

“Every semester, I’ll get students whose failure to do their own work causes them to have to come back and retake my class,” Smith said. “I had one student have to repeat my class several times, because he refused to do his own homework, and had no idea how to solve the problems placed before him on the tests.”

How Do You Spot It?

According to Frazee, the first question any professor should ask himself when presented with suspicious work is, “Does this answer the question I’ve asked?” Plagiarizers often take their material from sources where the question answered doesn’t match the one being asked by the professor. So, a paper or answer that fails to fit the question is a warning sign of plagiarism, Frazee added.

Another sign is sudden changes in the spacing or fonts in a student’s work. So, for example, if the font size or type isn’t consistent, this can indicate that information was copied and pasted from another document, Frazee said.   

Many professors use plagiarism checking software, such as Turnitin, especially when it comes to work submitted online. These “cheat catchers” — a term that Smith uses to describe the software — will let professors know if portions of essays or homework were copied. However, Smith acknowledges the limitations of these services.

“We first introduced a cheat catcher in our computer science classes in 2000,” Smith said. “But, the result was that students progressively learned how to get around the program. They weren’t learning anything, and those we caught faced severe academic penalties.”

What Can You Do to Prevent It?

Just one instance of plagiarism can have a tremendous impact on a student’s academic career. For example, it’s unlikely that the student will ever be able find teaching assistant positions or internships on campus, Smith said. For this reason, he does all he can to try and prevent plagiarism from occurring. 

One way he accomplishes this is by basing his tests (worth 45 percent of his grades) off his homework, which is only worth 15 percent. Students who cheat on the homework usually fail his courses as a result.

“Just waiting for plagiarizers to get caught and then punishing them doesn’t work,” Smith said. “I advocate a two-pronged approach, dissuading people from cheating through incentives, as well as punishing plagiarizers after they’re caught. There’s no room for negotiation once a student is caught, so it’s essential to keep as many students as possible from trying in the first place.”

Weston reminds all professors to include a copy of the Student Honor Code at the beginning of their syllabi and to go over the correct formatting for citations and references. It is her hope that this clarification can prevent cases of ignorant plagiarism and prevent many of the cases that come to OSI.

And to help mitigate the dangers of time crunches, Frazee has a solution.

“You have to be willing to be a little flexible,” Frazee said. “While setting deadlines is important, you should make it clear to your students that you can be approached if work is piling up. If you’re willing to give an extra day or two to complete an assignment, it can encourage students to write their own work.”

For more information about dealing with plagiarism at Tech, visit http://osi.gatech.edu. Also, in an effort to safeguard academic integrity and prevent plagiarism, the Office of Graduate Studies now offers a limited number of iThenticate plagiarism detection licenses for use by dissertation advisors. For details, visit http://www.grad.gatech.edu/iThenticate. 

“Postdocs are welcome to stop by anytime, even if it’s just to say ‘hello,’” said Jana Stone, director of Postdoctoral Services. “I’m also happy to meet at various cafes around campus, so please send me an email if you want to set up a time to chat.”

Postdoctoral Services is located in the suite across from the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Faculty Development in room 111C. 

Pat McKenna, vice president for Legal Affairs and Risk Management, and Robert Connolly, chief of the Georgia Tech Police Department, shared guidance from the University System of Georgia (USG) on the law and answered questions from the community. 

The law states that weapons must be carried in a concealed manner, “in such a fashion that does not actively solicit the attention of others, and is not prominently, openly, and intentionally displayed except for purposes of defense of self or others.” The law applies to licensed Georgia gun owners who have obtained a permit to carry a concealed handgun and those from states with reciprocal gun laws.

Weapons are not to be carried in buildings or property used for intercollegiate athletic events, specifically stadiums, gymnasiums, and similar facilities. (For Georgia Tech, this includes the Campus Recreation Center.) This exemption applies to these facilities at all times, not only when athletic events are taking place.

Weapons will be allowed in tailgating areas outside of the sports facility, and in student recreation centers and similar facilities not used for intercollegiate games. 

Weapons will not be allowed in faculty, staff, or administrative offices, including office suites, but will be allowed in hallways or common areas adjacent to an office that are not a part of the office or suite. Similarly, weapons are not allowed in preschool or childcare spaces, including any enclosed outdoor facilities separated by controlled access, but will be allowed in hallways, common lobby areas, or spaces adjacent to preschool or childcare spaces that are outside of the controlled access point and outside spaces that are not enclosed.

Guidance issued by the USG on May 24 states, “It will be the responsibility of those licenseholders who choose to carry handguns on campus to know the law and to understand where they can go while carrying. Institutions will not provide gun storage facilities or erect signs outside restricted areas.”

With the new law in place, dispatchers or officers will gather additional information when receiving calls about an individual with a weapon. Those making reports may be asked what type of weapon the individual has, whether the individual is displaying the weapon or has it drawn, and what else the individual is doing at the time to help officers respond accordingly.

GTPD will hold additional information sessions in the future and will also conduct evaluations of spaces to determine how the law applies and how to make the area more secure. Submit an evaluation request at police.gatech.edu/campuscarry. Additional information will continue to be shared there, as well as by the USG at usg.edu/hb280.

“I am proud to continue the critical work of the Office of Graduate Education and Faculty Development,” said Ferri. “The vice provost role is a distinct opportunity to unite schools across campus in support of our students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty, and create a thriving culture of educational innovation.”

Ferri comes to the vice provost position after nearly 30 years of advancing positions of leadership within the faculty. For the last 11 years, she has served as the associate chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in both undergraduate and graduate affairs capacities. She is also the current co-chair of the Commission on Creating the Next in Education.

“Professor Bonnie Ferri’s long history at Georgia Tech means she brings extensive experience as an administrator, leader, and researcher,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs and the K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “She’s also proven herself as a consummate champion of excellence in teaching and educational innovation. That experience and enthusiasm will be invaluable as she assumes the role of vice provost.”

The duties of the vice provost include ensuring the quality of graduate education; working on behalf of the well-being of graduate students, postdoctoral students, and faculty; supporting faculty development and the educational enterprise; and managing the hiring, promotion, and tenure process for faculty. The vice provost also oversees the Office of Graduate Studies, the Office of Faculty Affairs, the Office of Postdoctoral Services, and the Center for Teaching and Learning.

The selection of the vice provost followed an internal search initiated this past spring and led by Paul Kohn, vice provost for Enrollment Services, and an applicant review team. 

Leslie N. Sharp, associate vice provost for Graduate Education and Faculty Development, is serving as interim vice provost until Ferri officially assumes the role. 

Several female Georgia Tech faculty and staff members served as presenters and mentors, as well as faculty members from Emory University and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. In addition to work-life balance, the speakers addressed the varying expectations at different institutions, developing mentors, becoming a published author, teaching, and obtaining research funding.

“This workshop was important because there are not many events that focus on the topic of work-life balance,” said Nancy Healy, director of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network Education and Outreach Office in the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology. “Women at Georgia Tech need role models.” 

The Future Faculty Workshop was the eighth event in a series started by Tim Swager of Massachusetts Institute of Technology seven years ago. Georgia Tech previously hosted one in the series in 2013, but this was the first Future Faculty Workshop that focused on women and work-life balance. 

“I am hoping to pursue a faculty position, and this workshop was helpful in addressing how you can be successful while taking time for yourself and negotiating what you want,” said Denise Okafor, Ph.D. student in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Some takeaways from the day included how to manage expectations, such as setting reasonable response times to communications; balancing a passion for your work with a priority for self-care; and considering why you have chosen academia — are you in it to get tenure, or for all that this long-term career entails?

In total, 28 female graduate students and 17 female postdoctoral fellows attended the 2015 workshop, representing the Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, and Sciences. 

“It was rewarding to see so many women considering careers in academia,” said Rosario Gerhardt, executive director for Institute research and collaborations at Institute Diversity and organizer of the workshop. “The event’s focus on women came out of discussions from the previous Future Faculty Workshop held at Georgia Tech in 2013, when several participants asked if we would consider topics on work-life balance.” 

Funding for the event came from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Clare Boothe Luce Program, which supports women in fields that continue to be underrepresented. In the past two academic years, two Ph.D. students from Georgia Tech — Sarah Cannon in the College of Computing and Alexandra Long in the College of Engineering — were also supported by the Clare Boothe Luce Program.

"The addition of CETL to our office increases our capacity to encourage the professional development of faculty members, in their teaching, research, and service roles,” said Susan Cozzens, vice provost for Graduate Education and Faculty Development. “So, to better describe the office’s scope of work, we’ve changed our name to reflect the full range of support faculty members need.”

The office will now be known as the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Faculty Development (VPGEFD). VPGEFD includes the following units: Graduate Studies, Faculty Affairs, Postdoctoral Services, and CETL.

If you have any questions regarding the name change, please contact Amelia Pavlik, VPGEFD’s communications specialist, at pavlik@gatech.edu.

“Last year's festival thoroughly eclipsed my expectations,” said Paul Goldbart, dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Sciences, of the 2014 Atlanta Science Festival (ASF). “It’s one thing to nudge along an existing program and even improve it here and there. It’s quite another to make a whole science festival where there wasn’t one — and to have some 30,000 people from our community engage in it.”

It didn’t matter that it was the first-ever ASF. Those 30,000 attended more than 100 events at 50 venues over eight days.

Building on last year’s momentum, from March 21 to 28, ASF organizers and co-founders — Emory University, Georgia Tech, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber — will have events on offer for those of all ages interested in exploring the worlds of science and technology.

Read the full story about the 2015 Atlanta Science Festival.

“I was a student, always on the go, without much time for reflection,” Yildiz said. “I was an active person in terms of exercising — running, climbing, playing volleyball — but, after a while, I noticed I needed to pause and calm my mind and do things that were more restorative and relaxing physically.”  

She decided to try yoga while also meditating more frequently with her yoga teachers.

“I realized there were a lot of benefits to meditation, not just physically but emotionally and mentally,” said Yildiz, who has a Ph.D. in underwater acoustics from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and is now a Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow studying biomedical imaging.

As a scientist, Yildiz is interested in how and why mind-body practices affect health and well-being. She is expanding her research into understanding the underlying mechanisms related to the benefits of such practices, and she has been learning about the tools, such as the MRI and fMRI, that will allow her to conduct the scientific research for imaging of the brain and spine.

A Yoga-Alliance registered yoga and meditation teacher, Yildiz has been teaching since 2012 and recently started a weekly meditation class at Tech’s Campus Recreation Center. The class, which is suitable for all levels of experience, is designed to teach participants how to relieve stress, achieve deep relaxation, gain breath and body awareness, be fully present and alive in the moment, and achieve greater mental clarity and a peaceful state of being.

“Meditation calms the mind,” said Yildiz. “Studies have shown that we have approximately 60,000 thoughts a day; 90 percent are the same thoughts we had the day before. Meditation helps us gain awareness and cultivate mindfulness. It also teaches us how to inspect the quality of our thoughts, so we can learn to promote those thoughts that are positive and helpful to our growth.”

Yildiz draws an analogy between meditation practice and the ocean: “The surface may be agitated and embroiled in emotions, but there is great calm deep down below. And that is where we want to dive in. Once you find that calmness within you, you can’t give it back,” she said.

Mindfulness Tips

For those who cannot attend her mediation class, Yildiz’s tips include:

- Start with a few 2-minute practices each day: Sit still, lower your eyes, and observe your breath for two minutes before starting your day, prior to breakfast/lunch/dinner, before turning on your car, and during your commute if you take public transportation.

- Focus on your feet when angry: Shifting your focus to your feet helps to “ground” you.

Yildiz is planning to teach yoga and meditation classes in fall 2015. Stay tuned.

Staff and faculty are encouraged to review current elections and consider future options and changes. This year, University System of Georgia (USG) health care options are the same, and there are minimal changes to plans. However, premiums have increased again as the USG attains an equal, defined employer contribution across all plans — the result of a gradual move toward this model over the past several years.

USG will offer the following benefit choices for 2017:

• USG Critical Illness plan.
• USG Accident plan.
• USG Hospital Indemnity plan.
• USG Legal plan.

To take advantage of any of these benefits, you must enroll during Open Enrollment. If you don’t enroll for 2017 benefits, your 2016 coverage will continue at 2017 rates. Also, if you would like to have a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) for 2017, you must enroll during Open Enrollment — even if you had one the previous year. 

More complete information about plan designs, premiums, and voluntary benefit options will be available on or around Oct. 3 at ohr.gatech.edu or usg.edu/hr/benefits. A detailed summary booklet will also be mailed to each employee’s home in late October.

The benefits team has scheduled information sessions (see timeline below) for those with questions or in need of in-person assistance. The annual Benefits Fair is scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 2, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Student Center Ballroom. Employees are also welcome to attend benefits fairs at any other USG institution. See usg.edu for upcoming dates. 

Georgia Tech is again partnering with the USG’s Shared Services Center to provide individualized support to employees by phone, including expanded hours. Representatives will be available Oct. 31 – Nov. 11 between 7:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. The Call Center will also remain open until 8 p.m. on the last two days of Open Enrollment.

Animals analogous to the mudskipper would have used modified fins to move around on flat surfaces, but for climbing sandy slopes, the animals could have benefitted from using their tails to propel themselves forward, the researchers found. Results of the study, reported July 8 in the journal Science, could help designers create amphibious robots able to move across granular surfaces more efficiently – and with less likelihood of getting stuck in the mud.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office and the Army Research Laboratory, the project involved a multidisciplinary team of physicists, biologists and roboticists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Clemson University and Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to a detailed study of the mudskipper and development of a robot model that used the animal’s locomotion techniques, the study also examined flow and drag conditions in representative granular materials, and applied a mathematical model incorporating new physics based on the drag research.

“Most robots have trouble moving on terrain that includes sandy slopes,” said Dan Goldman, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. “We noted that not only did the mudskippers use their limbs to propel themselves in a kind of crutching motion on sand and sandy slopes, but that when the going got tough, they used their tails in concert with limb propulsion to ascend a slope. Our robot model was only able to climb sandy slopes when it similarly used its tail in coordination with its appendages.”

Based on fossil records, scientists have long studied how early land animals may have gotten around, and the new study suggests their tails – which played a key role in swimming as fish – may have helped supplement the work of fins, especially on sloping granular surfaces such as beaches and mudflats.

“We were interested in examining one of the most important evolutionary events in our history as animals: the transition from living in water to living on land,” said Richard Blob, alumni distinguished professor of biological sciences at Clemson University. “Because of the focus on limbs, the role of the tail may not have been considered very strongly in the past. In some ways, it was hiding in plain sight. Some of the features that the animals used were new, such as limbs, but some of them were existing features that they simply co-opted to allow them to move into a new habitat.”

With Ph.D. student Sandy Kawano, now a researcher at the National Institute for  Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Blob’s lab recorded how the mudskippers (Periopthalmus barbaratus) moved on a variety of loose surfaces, providing data and video to Goldman’s laboratory. The small fish, which uses its front fins and tail to move on land, lives in tidal areas near shore, spending time in the water and on sandy and muddy surfaces.

Benjamin McInroe was a Georgia Tech undergraduate when he analyzed the mudskipper data provided by the Clemson team. He applied the principles to a robot model known as MuddyBot that has two limbs and a powerful tail, with motion provided by electric motors. Information from both the mudskipper and robotic studies were also factored into a mathematical model provided by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

“We used three complementary approaches,” said McInroe, who is a now a Ph.D. student at the University of California Berkeley. “The fish provided a morphological, functional model of these early walkers. With the robot, we are able to simplify the complexity of the mudskipper and by varying the parameters, understand the physical mechanisms of what was happening. With the mathematical model and its simulations, we were able to understand the physics behind what was going on.”

Both the mudskippers and the robot moved by lifting themselves up to reduce drag on their bodies, and both needed a kick from their tails to climb 20-degree sandy slopes. Using their “fins” alone, both struggled to climb slopes and often slid backward if they didn’t use their tails, McInroe noted. Early land animals likely didn’t have precise control over their limbs, and the tail may have compensated for that limitation, helping the animals ascend sandy slopes.

The Carnegie Mellon University researchers, who have worked with Goldman on relating the locomotion of other animals to robots, demonstrated that theoretical models developed to describe the complex motion of robots can also be used to understand locomotion in the natural world.

“Our computer modeling tools allow us to visualize, and therefore better understand, how the mudskipper incorporates its tail and flipper motions to locomote,” said Howie Choset, a professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “This work also will advance robotics in those cases where a robot needs to surmount challenging terrains with various inclinations.”

The model was based on a framework proposed to broadly understand locomotion by physicist Frank Wilczek – a Nobel Prize winner – and his then student Alfred Shapere in the 1980s. The so-called “geometric mechanics” approach to locomotion of human-made devices (like satellites) was largely developed by engineers, including those in Choset’s group. To provide force relationships as inputs to the mudskipper robot model, Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Rieser and Georgia Tech graduate student Perrin Schiebel measured drag in inclined granular materials.

Information from the study could help in the design of robots that may need to move on surfaces such as sand that flows around limbs, said Goldman. Such flow of the substrate can impede motion, depending on the shape of the appendage entering the sand and the type of motion.

But the study’s most significant impact may be to provide new insights into how vertebrates made the transition from water to land.

“We want to ultimately know how natural selection can act to modify structures already present in organisms to allow for locomotion in a fundamentally different environment,” Goldman said. “Swimming and walking on land are fundamentally different, yet these early animals had to make the transition.”

The project also represents a combination of physics, biology and engineering.

“Professor Goldman and his collaborators are combining physics and engineering prototyping approaches to understand the physical principles that allow animals to move in different environments,” said Krastan Blagoev, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Physics. “This novel approach to living organisms promises to bring to biological sciences higher predictive power and at the same time uncover engineering principles that we have never imagined before.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the project also included co-first author Henry Astley, a Georgia Tech postdoctoral researcher when the project was done, and Chaohui Gong, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the NSF Physics of Living Systems program through grants PHY-1205878, PHY-1150760, CMMI-1361778; the Army Research Office through grant W911NF-11-1-0514, and the Army Research Laboratory MAST CTA program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office or the Army Research Laboratory. The Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance also supported this work.

CITATION: Benjamin McInroe, et al., “Tail use improves soft substrate performance in models of early vertebrate land locomotors,” (Science, 2016).

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By developing electrochromic polymer materials in a range of primary and secondary colors and combining them in specific blends, the researchers have covered the color spectrum – even creating four shades of brown, a particularly difficult color combination. The materials could be used to make sunglasses that change from tinted to clear in a matter of seconds, at the press of a button. Other uses could include window tinting, signage and even greeting cards that change color through the application of low-voltage electrical current.

Supported by BASF, the research is reported in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. The research was done in the laboratory of John Reynolds, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemisty and the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“We’ve demonstrated the ability to create virtually any color we want by mixing different electrochromic polymers, just like mixing paint,” said Anna Österholm, a research scientist in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the paper’s first author. “Using a simple coating method or even inkjet printing, we can create films that change color with the application of a voltage.”

The many colors that have been developed by Reynolds’ group over the years include magenta, cyan, yellow, orange, blue and green polymers that can be dissolved in common solvents. In addition, blends of these polymer solutions can be predictably mixed to target specific colors.

To demonstrate the capabilities, the researchers created brown lenses for sunglasses using a five-layer sandwich of materials, including a film of the electrochromic material, a charge storage layer and a UV-curable electrolyte, with a cathode and anode layer on either side.

The lenses can be switched between a colored and colorless state by applying a brief pulse of electrical current and do not need a continuous power supply. To maintain the colorless state, a brief refresh pulse needs to be applied approximately every 30 minutes; however, the colored state can be stable for up to several days. The materials can switch from about 10 percent transmittance to 70 percent transmittance – and back – in a few seconds.

The brown shades are created by combining cyan and yellow primary colors with orange and periwinkle-blue secondary colors.

Photochromic sunglasses, which darken in response to light using a silver halide reaction, are already on the market. But many of these lenses respond to ultraviolet wavelengths that are filtered out by automobile windshields, require several minutes to transition – and can’t be controlled by users. The passive switching time can be problematic for pilots, drivers, security officers or others who move quickly between light and dark environments.

“In contrast, by using electrochromic polymers, we can create devices that by pushing a button, can be converted from dark to clear,” said Österholm. “They are completely user-controlled, and it doesn’t matter whether they are being used indoors or outdoors, in a vehicle or an aircraft.”

The electrochromic materials rely on a reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction triggered by the application of an electrical potential provided by a simple coin battery: a positive one volt causes the glasses to be clear, while a minus one volt switches to the color. “Essentially, we are just charging and discharging the device, which is what causes the color change,” explained Eric Shen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The electrochromic materials represent years of work by the Reynolds Laboratory to synthesize polymers whose repeat-unit structures provide the desired palette of colors. Because they can be dissolved in the same solvents, additional colors can be created by combining specific quantities of the primary and secondary colors.

“Anything that you would want to have change color at the push of a button would be an application for these,” said Shen. “We have shown that we can switch them on and off thousands of times, and that we can shine strong light on them without causing degradation of the color.”

The researchers have used simple spray and blade-coating techniques to create films of the colorful materials. They now are using ink-jet printing to create patterns and mix the polymers to create colors.

“The ink-jetting is very versatile when you want to make patterns or very fine features with these materials,” Shen said. “The fact that the polymers are so soluble makes it quite easy to process them using anything that would spread an ink.”

In addition to the researchers already mentioned, the paper’s co-authors include Justin Kerszulis and Rayford Bulloch from Georgia Tech, Michael Kuepfert from BASF in Tarrytown, New York; and Aubrey Dyer from Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia.

CITATION: Anna M. Österholm, et al., “Four Shades of Brown: Tuning of Electrochromic Polymer Blends Toward High-Contrast Eyewear,” (ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2015). http://www.dx.doi.org/10.1021/am507063d

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

To some, mentoring is a formalized one-on-one relationship with a senior advisor; to others, it’s casual conversations, relationships that form over time, or short bursts of well-timed advice.

People Want to Help

When Anne Pollock (LMC) took her first faculty position at Tech nearly seven years ago, she asked a senior faculty member she admired to be her mentor—but he declined. Rather than let this be the end of her pursuit of mentorship, she took it as a learning experience.

“You can’t take things too personally when you ask for help,” she said. She has since pursued informal mentoring relationships with a number of colleagues, each of whom is helpful in different ways, depending on experience or expertise. 

Despite declining a formal mentoring relationship, the senior faculty member later provided Pollock with valuable tips on teaching preparation, proving one of her tenets of mentorship: People want to share their insights.

Pollock has also benefited from being the one mentoring. She advises postdoctoral fellows and has offered advice to others who are starting out on their academic trajectories.

“It’s intellectually stimulating and keeps you thinking strategically about your own work,” she said. “If I’m talking to postdocs about their next publication or how they are developing their careers, it makes me think about my own, too.”

The fellows she advises don’t work in her same academic space, but she can still provide feedback on their endeavors. Similarly, formal mentor relationships don’t necessarily need to be with someone in the same area of expertise. Common ground can be found in a number of areas, and mentors should not be trying to make their mentees follow the same paths they chose. 

“There are many routes to excellence, and mentorship is more useful if we consider the individual’s trajectory,” Pollock said. 

Outside of junior-senior faculty relationships, Pollock believes relationships with staff have been essential to her success as well because of staff members’ institutional and operational knowledge.

Though Pollock hasn’t had a formal mentor, she has gotten useful feedback in annual reviews. She believes there is value in having a combination of both informal and formal arrangements. Informal settings can be better for individual projects or tasks. Formal settings can be less personal, and, therefore, provide the opportunity for more objective feedback and the “brass tacks” that are sometimes needed for progress. 

“For formal relationships, it helps mentors to have some structure of what it is they’re supposed to be covering or discussing,” she said. “It shouldn’t be just grousing or just cheerleading.”

Many Paths for Success

The School of Literature, Media, and Communication recently adopted a mentorship structure that lets junior faculty choose their mentors from a pool of senior faculty who have stated their interest in mentoring.

“New faculty are often at the bottom of the ‘food chain,’ and this empowers them by leaving some meaningful choices to them,” said Richard Utz, professor and chair in the school. They still discuss the selection with Utz, who can provide input on whether the selection is a good fit. 

Utz encourages faculty to look to those outside their specialty area to increase collaboration, inclusion, and interdisciplinary endeavors. Still, he recognizes that formal mentoring is not for everyone.

“Some new faculty might actually prefer not to be mentored, seeing the program as a burden more than an advantage,” he said. “In all these discussions, it’s of great importance that new faculty succeed in finding their own place in their new unit, and they should have a say in what happens during the mentoring process.”

No matter the format, both mentors and mentees seem to come to the table with the same sentiment: They want to get better.

“Everyone can be more excellent,” Pollock said.

But the liquid jets sometimes form a helical wave. And that was intriguing to Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, an associate professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

By controlling the viscosity and speed of the secondary liquid surrounding the jets, a research team led by Fernandez-Nieves has now figured out how to convert the standard chaotic waveform to the stable helical form. Based on theoretical modeling and experiments using a microfluidic device, the findings could help improve industrial processes that are used for fiber formation and electrospray.

The research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Seville in Spain, was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It was reported Sept. 8, 2014, in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“We are developing an understanding of the basic coupling between hydrodynamic and electric fields in these systems,” said Fernandez-Nieves. “The issue we examined is fundamental physics, but it could potentially lead to something more interesting in fiber generation through electro-spinning.”

In conventional industrial processes, tiny metal needles apply an electric field as they eject the polymer-containing solution. In the laboratory, the researchers used a glass-based microfluidic device to create the jets so they could more closely examine what was happening. Using a conductive liquid, ethylene glycol, allowed them to apply an electrical field to produce electrified jets.

“When you charge these polymer solutions, the jets themselves move out of axis, which creates a chaotic phenomenon known as whipping,” Fernandez-Nieves explained. “This off-axis movement causes the jet to abruptly move in all directions, and in the industrial world, all that motion seems to be beneficial from the standpoint of making thinner fibers.”

The researchers experimented with many variables as their liquid jets emerged into a co-flowing secondary liquid inside the microfluidic device. Those variables included the applied electrical field, the flow rate of the ejected liquid and the secondary liquid, the viscosities of the liquids, the needle diameters and the physical geometry of microfluidic device.

While producing a whipped jet in a viscous dielectric material – polydimethylsiloxane oil – the researchers were surprised to see the chaotic motion switch over to a steady-state helical structure.

“We were able to stabilize the structure associated with the whipping behavior and found that the stable structure is a helix with a conical shape,” said Fernandez-Nieves. “You can picture it as a conical envelope, and inside the envelope you have a helix. Once the viscosity of the outer liquid is sufficient, you stabilize the structure and get this beautiful helix.”

Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow Josefa Guerrero used a high-speed, microscope-based video camera operating at 50,000 frames per second to study the waveforms emerging from the experimental jets, which were less than five microns in diameter. The video allowed precise examination of the waveforms produced when the liquid flowed out of the glass needle and into the second liquid flowing around it.

Working with collaborators Javier Rivero-Rodriguez and Miguel Perez-Saborid at the University of Seville, the Georgia Tech team – Fernandez-Nieves, Guerrero and former postdoctoral fellow Venkata R. Gundabala – used hydrodynamics theory to help understand what they were seeing experimentally.

“By developing the model, we were able to balance the importance of the different forces in the experiment,” explained Fernandez-Nieves. “The helix was part of the solutions in the model and it reproduced some aspects of the experimentally observed helices.”

Once the jets were stabilized by the viscous secondary liquid, the properties of the helix were controlled by the electrical charge. In the experiment, the researchers applied approximately 1,000 volts to generate the jets.

“We learned that the outer fluid plays a major role in stabilizing the structure of the jets,” Fernandez-Nieves added. “Once the structure is stable, the details of the properties of the helical structure depend on the charge.”

Ultimately, the stable jets break up into spherical droplets. The researchers have not yet formed fibers with their experimental setup.

In future work, Fernandez-Nieves hopes to study other waveforms that may be produced by the system, and evaluate how controlling the liquid jets could improve industrial techniques used in fiber production and electrospray processes that generate clouds of droplets.

“We are interested in trying to map out those different behaviors,” he said. “For us as physicists, this is interesting because it allows us to explore, address and measure things that nobody could look at before in the way we can today. We are anxious to understand the applied impact.”

CITATION: Josefa Guerrero, et al., “Whipping of electrified jets,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award CBET-0967293. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the officials views of the National Science Foundation.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Assistance: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986) or Brett Israel (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) (404-385-1933).

Writer: John Toon

Trainees will be part of the Atlanta BEST program for 2 years, where they will receive:

• leadership training
• learn about the business and legal side of biomedical research
• gain valuable self-awareness
• gain insight into possible career options that fit career goals and personal values
• access a powerful network of professionals in a variety of fields

The expected time commitment in the first year is about 1-3 hours a week, with optional workshops and events throughout their time in the program. In the second year, informational interviews and internships will be set up. Internships are flexible and will vary by trainee.

Find out more at an information session:

• At Georgia Tech: 1-2pm, Thursday, June 12, 2014; Parker H. Petit Institute of Biotechnology Building, Suddath Room (1128)
• At Emory: 1-2pm, Friday, June 20, 2014; Emory School of Nursing, Room 276 (1520 Clifton Rd NE, 30322)

Under the new system, all Georgia Tech employees will fall under one of three classifications: academic faculty, research faculty, and staff. Definitions of these designations can be found at http://facultygovernance.gatech.edu/ASAFGF2014-042214-A-Attach2a.pdf.

Titles falling under the academic faculty designation will include varying levels of professor, professor of the practice, academic professional, archivist, librarian, lecturer and senior lecturer, and instructor. Also included in this category will be the president, provost, vice provosts, executive vice president for research, executive vice president for administration and finance, college deans, dean of the libraries, dean of students, school chairs, and the registrar.

Research faculty will include varying levels of regents researcher, research associate, research engineer, research scientist, research technologist, and the new title of extension professional. Others to be included are the president, provost, executive vice president for research, executive vice president for administration and finance, and director – research (as the term is used for GTRI lab directors).

Those with titles including the terms “temporary” or “visiting” – or having other limited-term appointments – will not be eligible to participate in faculty governance. Those holding only adjunct appointments or other honorary titles will not be considered members of the faculty.

Employees whose classification is affected by the redefinition will be notified prior to July 1, and there will be an option to appeal the removal of a job title from faculty status. Appeals will address only the status of particular job titles, not individual circumstances. Those who are currently designated as general faculty and whose classification is changed to non-faculty will continue to receive their current rate of leave accrual and will be permitted to complete their terms on faculty standing committees.

Jeanne Balsam, chair of the faculty’s Statutes Committee, explained that the motivation for overhauling the faculty definitions was twofold: the term “general faculty” is not widely understood at other institutions of higher learning, and over the years job titles outside the realm of traditional faculty have been added to the general faculty, primarily to provide faculty-specific benefits packages for certain positions.

The new system calls for the formation of an Academic Faculty Senate and a Research Faculty Senate; the combination of these two groups will comprise the Faculty Senate, which is expected to have a meeting schedule similar to the existing General Faculty Assembly. Also called for is the creation of a Staff Advisory Council and a Postdoctoral Association to provide a voice for those two constituencies, as well as a new standing committee of the faculty addressing the needs of postdoctoral associates and visiting faculty.

Now the office is launching a website featuring resources for postdoctoral fellows and faculty mentors.

“The website will be a one-stop-shop for information regarding policies, career development resources, benefits, grants and fellowships, and mentoring,” said Jana Stone, who started last September as the first manager of the Office of Postdoctoral Services.

“We want the website — and the Office of Postdoctoral Services — to be a resource for postdoctoral fellows and faculty,” Stone said. “Incoming postdocs can learn about what to expect at Georgia Tech, current postdocs can learn about career opportunities and how to apply for grants and fellowships, and faculty mentors can review best practices.”

The Office of Postdoctoral Services, which is under the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Faculty Affairs, is charged by the Office of the Provost to invest in the culture of postdoctoral fellows, also called “postdocs,” to help build their skills so that they can move on to rewarding permanent positions. A postdoc holds a doctoral degree, is in a temporary position pursuing research with a faculty mentor, and is acquiring the professional skills needed for career advancement. Of the 355 postdocs at Tech, half are in the College of Engineering and one-third are in the College of Sciences.

“The excitement from around the campus about the creation of the postdoc office has been striking,” said Susan Cozzens, vice provost of Graduate Education and Faculty Affairs. “Postdocs are key to the success of many of our research areas. To attract the best, we need to offer a strong range of career development opportunities and favorable conditions of work. We want our postdoctoral scholars to move into productive career pathways and become ambassadors who build Georgia Tech’s international reputation.”

In addition to launching and maintaining a new website, the Office of Postdoctoral Services has several other projects underway, including:

• Collaborating with the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning to offer a Tech to Teaching workshop based on the principles of learner-centered teaching.
• Creating a road map of activities for postdocs to follow, from the initial conversation to career development.
• Writing a strategic plan that will address postdocs’ concerns identified in the Campus Climate Survey and a 2011 survey of postdocs.

“We’re looking for other opportunities to collaborate across campus and also with other institutions and organizations,” said Stone, who is vice-chair of the National Postdoctoral Association’s 2014 meeting. “We welcome all suggestions that will help us improve the postdoctoral experience at Georgia Tech.”

The K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award is an award given by NIH to postdoctoral scientists to support their transition into an independent faculty appointment. This award provides support for a one- to two-year postdoctoral mentored phase and a successive three-year independent phase as a principal investigator. The main objective of this grant is to support promising scientists in the early stages of their career and accelerate their transition to an independent research position.

This competitive award is one of the few available for non-U.S. citizens and is a great complement for prospective faculty candidates. Current faculty members of the Georgia Tech community who have won this award include Dr. Brandon Dixon (Mechanical Engineering) and Dr. Matthew Torres (Biology).

After completing undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM) and working in industry for a couple of years, Adriana moved to the United States from her native Mexico to pursue a graduate degree at Georgia Tech. She completed her Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering under the supervision of Dr. Sven Behrens, working on stimulus-responsive microcapsules and emulsions. She is now a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Hang Lu’s lab, where she and others work on integrated engineering systems to perform high-throughput experiments with the nematode C. elegans to answer biological questions that cannot be addressed with conventional methods. Tools developed in the Lu lab, including microfluidics, machine learning and hardware automation, allow unbiased quantitative multidimensional characterization of micron-sized synaptic sites in large animal populations.

The mission of the Office of Postdoctoral Services is to enhance the experience of postdoctoral fellows, also known as “postdocs”. A postdoc holds a doctoral degree, is in a temporary position pursuing research with a faculty mentor, and is learning the professional skills necessary for his or her next career stage. Currently, there are 355 postdocs at Tech, with half in the College of Engineering and a third in the College of Sciences.

Tech’s first manager of the Office of Postdoctoral Services, Jana Stone, started her position on Sept. 3.

“This is an exciting time for Georgia Tech,” observes Susan Cozzens, vice provost of Graduate Education and Faculty Affairs. “Our postdoc community is growing and remains a critical component of a strong and vibrant research institution. I am looking forward to working with Dr. Stone and the postdocs to enhance postdoctoral services, career development, and sense of belonging at Georgia Tech.”

Stone began advocating for postdocs during her own postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and continued in her next position coordinating outreach programs at Duke University. She also works with the National Postdoctoral Association where she is vice-chair of the organization's 2014 meeting.

“Our goals for the new office are to build a sense of community among postdocs across the Institution and to develop policies and programming that fit our postdocs’ needs," Stone said. "So far, everyone I’ve met on campus has been incredibly supportive of these efforts."

To celebrate the opening of the office and to recognize Tech’s hardworking postdocs and mentors, the Office of Postdoctoral Services will be hosting a picnic for postdocs on Oct. 16.

Several countries have developed awards that offer early career scholars research opportunities.  These awards are similar to postdoctoral research awards, so scholars within five years of completing a doctoral program should pay special attention to those as well.

Postdoctoral/early career grants present an excellent opportunity for recently minted scholars to deepen their expertise, to acquire new skills, to work with additional resources and to make connections with others in their fields. Scholars will be expected to engage with graduate students in the host country and to be involved with host university training in cutting edge research in their specializations.

Grantees without institutional affiliation in U.S. may be eligible to apply for $2,500 funding to attend a professional conference.

Visits http://www.cies.org/us_scholars/us_awards/catalog/2014-2015/POSTDOC/ for more information or contact us directly at scholars@iie.org

Current Status of OPT STEM

On December 22, 2015 DHS requested additional time from the District Court to review the 50,000+ comments on the proposed STEM OPT rule and ensure a sufficient time for a final rule to be published with required training of personnel. On January 23^rd the District Court approved the stay DHS requested through May 10, 2016. DHS has advised they are anticipating submitting a final rule by March 11, 2016. USCIS has continued to process I-765 applications for STEM OPT as normal and issued EAD work permits with expirations based on the 17 month period available. When there is new information to share, the OIE will include it on the OIE STEM FAQ website.  The OIE encourages students who want to seek legal council to vet the attorney carefully and consider using an attorney associated with AILA by searching the Find and Immigration Lawyer link and reading the FAQ to ensure you properly vet legal council.  

But a new study from a Georgia Tech-Cornell University team shows that the research faculty path isn’t the only reason students pursue a postdoc.

In a survey of nearly 6,000 doctoral students in a broad range of fields, more than a third of the students with plans to pursue postdocs said they had more interest in careers outside of academic research.

The finding is surprising because it challenges the notion that postdoctoral research is a stepping stone primarily for research faculty positions, said Henry Sauermann, associate professor at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business.

“There’s this common belief that Ph.D. students pursue a postdoc because they want to have a faculty career,” Sauermann said. “The answer is it’s much more complex.”

Although more than 60 percent of survey respondents rated a research-oriented faculty position as one of their most attractive career paths, more than one-third rated other careers as more attractive, including research in government, established firms or startups, as well as teaching and other non-research careers.

The results of the research were published in May in the journal, Science. The work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

“For a lot of these Ph.D.s, the postdoc is an opportunity to consider other options and explore other career paths,” said Michael Roach, the co-author of the paper and an assistant professor in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University.

“It’s an easy natural next step for them, and it gives them flexibility to keep that academic option open,” Roach said.

Sauermann and Roach were prompted to look into the motivations of students pursuing postdocs because of what they saw as an imbalance between the number of postdoc researchers and the number of research-oriented faculty jobs at colleges and universities across the country.

“Many people believe that students don’t know what the market looks like and that this is why they hope to get a faculty position and do a postdoc,” Sauermann said. “We wanted to understand what was going on inside students’ minds as they were making these decisions.”

They surveyed Ph.D. students beginning in 2010 at 39 research-intensive universities in the United States. The students were surveyed again in 2013 after many had already begun a postdoc or entered other full-time positions.

The respondents were also asked to estimate how likely it is for them to get a tenure-track position within five years after finishing their Ph.D. While the respondents were knowledgeable about the limited availability of faculty positions in general, some appeared to be overly optimistic about their own chances of getting a faculty position, Sauermann said.

The study highlights the need for more data on students’ career preferences in order to compare graduates’ career goals to their actual career transitions, Sauermann said. More data is needed to determine also how useful a postdoc is for non-academic careers, he added.

While students need to consider career plans early, they also need better information to understand the various career paths and their job prospects, Sauermann said. Such information should come from academic advisers, professional organizations or career development programs.

“In a lot of the conversations I’ve had, Ph.D. students start the program because they have a passion for research,” Roach said. “Although more information about career paths is unlikely to dissuade Ph.D.s from starting the program, it would be extremely valuable to Ph.D. students as they consider whether to do a postdoc.”

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SMA1262270. 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 National Science Foundation.

CITATION: Henry Sauermann and Michael Roach, "Why pursue the postdoc path?", (Science, May 2016).

Human Resources offers regular presentations through their Be Well series that offers a wealth of information on using benefits for maternity leave. The team held its most recent session on this topic in September. 

Athena Jones, leave management specialist for Human Resources, provided an overview of options available for Tech employees, emphasizing that the Institute fully supports parents taking time to bond with their new children.

Below is a primer, but the full presentation is available for view at ohr.gatech.edu/be-well-presentations.

The Right to Leave

Employees are protected while taking leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). FMLA was designed to give employees the right to time off and return to their same or equivalent job following medical leave. In the case of pregnancy, it provides for 12 weeks of leave in a 12-month window for a birth or adoption. Employees must have been employed for 12 months or worked 1,250 hours during the previous year to be eligible. 

Beyond FMLA protecting employees’ right to leave, there are two primary methods for Tech employees to receive compensation while on leave. Both are options for either pregnancy or adoption. One uses short-term disability along with sick and vacation time, and the other only uses a combination of sick and vacation leave. (For adoption, only vacation time is used.)

The Short-Term Disability Route

For employees who have enrolled in Tech’s short-term disability plan through MetLife, they may use short-term disability during maternity leave. Short-term disability coverage kicks in following a 14-day elimination period, during which time employees are charged sick leave for work days. 

Short-term disability coverage pays out 60 percent of an employee’s gross salary for six weeks following a natural delivery or eight weeks after a cesarean delivery. Both those time frames include the elimination period, meaning employees receive short-term disability payments for either four or six weeks, respectively.

Following that time, employees can use vacation leave or unpaid leave through the remainder of their FMLA time.  

Those enrolled in short-term disability are not required to file a claim and use the coverage for maternity leave if they have sick and vacation time they prefer to use instead.

When using short-term disability:

• Employees do not receive a Tech paycheck.
• Employees are billed through the Bursar’s Office for health care premiums (still at the Tech employee rate), since they are not being deducted via paycheck.
• Disability plan deductions and spending account deductions are stopped.

Employees may apply for short-term disability coverage during open enrollment but may not be eligible if they are already pregnant. For those who enrolled as new employees, Jones advises keeping the coverage as a safeguard, should they choose to use it for maternity in the future.

Using Sick and Vacation Time

For employees not enrolled in or not choosing to use short-term disability benefits, they can use sick time for up to six weeks for a natural delivery or eight weeks for a cesarean, then use vacation time until they return to work. Sick time may also be used for doctor appointments, sick children, or complications with pregnancy. 

When using sick or vacation time for leave:

• Employees continue to receive their Tech paycheck with benefits deductions.
• Disability plan deductions and spending account deductions continue.

Don’t Forget the Forms

Following a birth, Tech employees who want to add their new child to their benefits should submit a Family Status Change Form within 30 days of birth.  

Employees will also need to complete an FMLA Return to Work Form, which needs to be completed by a physician or include a note on a doctor’s letterhead confirming that the employee is cleared to return to work. This form must be submitted to Georgia Tech Human Resources before any work is resumed, including teleworking. 

While teleworking is an option, Jones emphasized that employees are not required to telework during their leave. 

“If you want to, your position is amenable to it, and your manager and doctor agree, you may begin teleworking and go to a reduced FMLA schedule,” she said. Hours worked remotely would not count against FMLA time.

Given the nature of pregnancy and child delivery, Jones emphasized that plans can, and often do, change. Working remotely or starting back part-time may be good options but should be discussed in detail between employees and managers.  

“Communication is critical for any type of leave, especially if you are gradually coming back,” she said. 

Each employee’s case may be different, and Jones is open to discussing options with any employee who anticipates taking leave. She can be reached at 404-385-2377 or athena.jones@ohr.gatech.edu.  

For its second spring 2017 session, the Language Institute is offering three six-week courses: Reading Club, Speaking/Listening, and Idioms and Vocabulary in Television. All classes are $100.

Brief course descriptions are included below. For complete information and to apply, visit the Language Institute website.

Reading Club

High Intermediate to Advanced

March 13 to May 3 (Mondays and Wednesdays, 10 – 11:30 a.m.)

Students will read a short novel, short stories, and news articles. They will discuss characters, themes, and ideas with their classmates and make connections to the broader world. Students are expected to read regularly outside of class and to come to class prepared to discuss the readings.

Speaking/Listening

High Intermediate to Advanced

March 14 to May 4 (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 – 11:30 a.m.)

Students will listen to an audiobook to improve their listening skills, and they will discuss the book using newly acquired vocabulary to improve their speaking skills. They will also listen to other selected assignments, such as TED talks or news interviews.

Idioms and Vocabulary in Television

Beginner to Intermediate

March 14 to May 4 (Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon — 1:30 p.m.)

Students will develop speaking and listening skills in English, focusing on vocabulary, while learning about American culture via the medium of television. The class will watch and analyze two or three genres of television programs, possibly including comedies, dramas, and news shows.

The Language Institute is located in the Biltmore at 151 Sixth Street N.W. Full course descriptions are available here.

To assist, we’ve created a web page full of information and resources about the FLSA Final Rule:

http://ohr.gatech.edu/flsa 

Please continue to refer to this page for details, as we will update it as information is released. The University System of Georgia’s official response – released yesterday – is posted there, as well.

Institute Communications linked to the page and content in today’s Daily Digest. The web page is also easily accessed as a menu item in the main navigation under Benefits & Compensation.

Georgia Tech and the other University System of Georgia (USG) schools have completed the transition of certain employees to non-exempt (or overtime-eligible) status.

Because of the uncertain nature of this situation, the University System of Georgia has provided the following guidance:

• Georgia Tech’s more than 800 employees converted to non-exempt status (i.e., hourly or overtime-eligible) as a result of the review of current job descriptions will remain in that status.
• Employees in an exempt role who were slated to receive a salary increase to raise them to the minimum as required by the challenged law will still receive the increase (effective Dec. 1).
• In rare circumstances, some employees may be converted back into exempt status. These employees will be contacted by Georgia Tech Human Resources (GTHR) in the upcoming months as more is known about the status of the rule change.

As part of the FLSA initiative, GTHR’s examination of job descriptions and conversion of employee statuses was important to better align with federal law and the University System of Georgia’s position classification system. The progress we have made in that area will continue as we explore new ways to better define the work and roles of our people.

Additional information regarding the status of the FLSA Final Rule can be found at www.ohr.gatech.edu/flsa.

“There’s already a treatment – insulin injections – but it’s not a cure, and in the long term, patients can still have secondary complications that can impact the quality of their lives,” says Weaver, a postdoc in the lab of Andrés García at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “So, one reason for researching islet transplantation is to try and develop a long-term cure for people with type 1 diabetes.” 

The other reason hits a bit closer to home. Her husband, Atlanta attorney Oren Snir, has type 1 diabetes. So when it comes to her work, “he is the lens that I look through,” says Weaver, whose clear-eyed focus on a disease that affects about 1.25 million Americans is bringing her some well-earned recognition.

Recently, Weaver was awarded an JDRF (formerly known as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) Postdoctoral Fellowship. The award supports Weaver’s full-time research over three years, providing for the transition from postdoctoral fellow to, ideally, an independent, faculty-level post.

“This is a very competitive award, and Jessica is a perfect fit for it,” says García, the Rae and Frank H. Neely Chair in Mechanical Engineering and Regents’ Professor of Mechanical Engineering (and also director of the interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program). “She truly is dedicated to developing engineering solutions for the treatment of type 1 diabetes.”

Additionally, Weaver was selected as the Young Investigator Award winner for the upcoming Regenerative Medicine Workshop at Hilton Head (March 1-4), where her research presentation will highlight a different aspect of her research, while still keeping the focus tight on type 1 diabetes, formerly known as juvenile diabetes.

“When you have a loved one that you want to help, you think in terms of translatability. You want to develop something that works really, really well, because the stakes are high.”

Each year, about 40,000 people in the United States, mostly children and young adults, are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The disease is characterized by the body’s inability to produce insulin, a hormone used to get glucose from the bloodstream into the cells of the body.

Islets are clusters of cells in the pancreas that make insulin. In islet transplantation, cells are taken from a donor pancreas and delivered to a diabetic recipient, where the implanted islets make and release insulin, ending the need for daily insulin injections, effectively ending the disease.

That’s the hope anyway. There are some issues.

“We’ve proven the feasibility over the last 20 years that you can transplant insulin-secreting cells into patients,” Weaver says. “But one of the challenges is, they don’t last very long. And if you’re using a donated organ to deliver cells to a patient, you want it to last, to work long term.”

The bioengineers in García’s lab are using biomaterials-based strategies to improve the long-term survival of these islet grafts. The key is protecting the transplanted cells from the body’s immune system, so part of Weaver’s JDRF-sponsored research involves trying to eliminate the need for immunosuppressants.

Keeping these precious islet cells from a donor organ alive depends on a number of factors. One that Weaver is exploring in detail for her Junior Investigator research presentation involves investigating ideal transplantation sites.

“This technique has been around for about 20 years, and the site they use for transplant has been the portal vein of the liver. That location has demonstrated the feasibility of restoring normal blood glucose,” Weaver says.

Unfortunately, it’s also a hostile transplant site, like trying to storm a fortified beachhead, with predictable results. Islets delivered through the portal vein survive a median of 35 months, according to Weaver.

“A main factor is that around 60 percent of the islets are immediately killed,” she says. “They go into the blood stream and are entrapped in the narrowing vasculature of the liver. Shoved into these tiny blood vessels, they experience stresses they don’t receive in their native environment.”

Using García’s hydrogel platform, Weaver and colleagues can explore multiple transplantation sites, simultaneously. It’s critical to find the optimum site because currently, using the liver portal vein comes with a very high cost. 

The islet cells used in this procedure come from a donated human pancreas, “and what happens when using the liver site is, sometimes it takes two to four pancreata to restore normal blood glucose,” says Weaver, who has been on this track for nine years – as an undergraduate researcher and then as a grad student at the University of Miami.

“Our goal is to get it down to a single pancreas donation per single recipient,” she says. “We want to make sure we can get the most cells from that one organ into the patient and ensure their survival.”

It sounds simple, but she knows how complicated it is. Nine years of research, among other things, have taught her that. And she understood early on how dear are the natural tools she is trying to harness for the good of millions, or the good of one in particular. This became clear one day when she was still an undergrad back in Florida, shortly after she and her future husband started dating.

“We received a donation of some human islet cells to study, from a pancreas that couldn’t be transplanted for one reason or another,” she recalls. “I remember holding those cells, those precious human cells in my hand and thinking to myself, ‘this is all he needs. If only I could take these home give them to him.’”

That may be when the research moved beyond the abstract, becoming abundantly practical, because every time she cures an animal subject in one of her studies the work becomes a little more profound, a little more urgent.

“When you have a loved one that you want to help, you think in terms of translatability,” Weaver says. “You want to arm the clinical community with the best possible options. You want to develop something that works really, really well, because the stakes are high.”

 “You have some undergrads who have never even touched a pipette before, and then you have some who have spent a lot of time researching in a lab,” says Shannon Hill, a mentor in the Petit Undergraduate Research Scholarship program. “You’re not sure who you’ll be dealing with.”

 And that’s sort of the point of becoming a Petit Scholar mentor – the opportunity to learn how to work with anyone. This is preparation for whatever may come next.

“Working with different personalities and backgrounds and learning styles only improves your people skills, your ability to patiently train people,” says Hill, a post-doctoral fellow who works in the lab of Raquel Lieberman with Petit Undergraduate Scholar Michelle Kwon. “Michelle had no lab experience, but she’s a great learner and has picked up everything we’ve taught her very quickly, quicker than most.”

Hill, who earned her Ph.D. in physics from the University of South Florida, believes that the ability to work with anyone who walks through that door, or sits down in the classroom, will make her a better professor one day. And it’s something she’s been aware of throughout her educational career. 

While this is her first experience in the Petit Scholars program, she’s mentored 15 students during her time as a post-doc and a graduate student and learned early on that no two student researchers are alike. With Kwon, she got lucky.

“Michelle is motivated to go beyond what my expectations are,” says Hill, who wants to be a professor with a lab of her own at some point. “She sees what needs to be done, and she does it. As a mentor, regardless of your student’s skill sets and experience level, your job is to help make their projects better, to help them move forward. Progress looks different for different people.”

For Hill, the college experience began with an interest in what she calls, “the medical side of things, and then I fell in love with physics.”

And then she met Martin Muschol, a professor who would become her Ph.D. thesis advisor. He introduced her to biophysics, “and that helped bridge my two interests together,” she says.

It was through the mentorship of Muschol and Dr. Chad Dickey at the University of South Florida Health Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute that Hill ultimately found her way to her current work at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“Dr. Muschol was responsible for my training and the nature of my thesis project, which was very interdisciplinary,” she says. “And my doctoral work included a collaboration with Dr. Dickey, who eventually introduced me to Dr. Lieberman, suggesting the two of us would be a great fit.”

Hill’s research focuses on how the body uses proteins to sustain itself and she wants to know, “when these proteins become misfolded, how does that relate to disease pathology.” 

An offshoot of Hill’s research, Kwon’s project is entitled, "Engineering mutant myocilin for a more thermally stable protein." It’s the kind of project that probably typifies the Petit Scholar experience.

“There’s longevity to the program, which is great, because it’s an entire year of research, which is a big commitment for an undergrad,” says Lieberman, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “It also requires quite a commitment from the mentors, who put in a lot of effort, because it takes a long time to get someone trained and up to speed to do anything advanced in the laboratory.”

In Lieberman’s experience, Petit Scholars who have worked in her lab have been authors on research papers and were intimately involved in the discoveries that emerged.

“They were able to see the results of their work,” Lieberman says. “And it goes both ways. Our mentors are able to see their students’ progress. Someone like Shannon, who will continue in science and a career that will probably include leadership and running a lab, this kind of exposure is extremely helpful. I know that it’s been helpful in my career.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience 

“But there weren’t a lot of resources to explore other ideas,” says Nicosia. “I knew people were doing cool stuff out there, but didn’t really have a sense of what other careers would be available to me.”

Nicosia, beginning his fourth year in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (a collaboration of Georgia Tech and Emory University), still doesn’t know what he wants to do with the rest of his life, but now he feels like he has more options, and he has the Atlanta BEST program to thank for that.

BEST (Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training) is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded program for biomedical-related Ph.D. students and postdocs who want to explore career options.

Several years ago, the NIH became concerned that the long training time combined with a declining percentage of Ph.D. graduates obtaining academic positions would make biomedical research a less attractive career.

“Historically, after your Ph.D. you got a postdoc position, then you became a faculty member somewhere, and that was it,” says Tamara Hutto, the Atlanta BEST program manager. “But now we are graduating way more Ph.D.s than there are faculty jobs available. Faculty positions just aren’t opening up fast enough. Also, our trainees have a wide variety of interests and skills that add value and are critical to sustaining the broader biomedical ecosystem here in the U.S.”

The BEST program was launched in 2013 to experiment with programming and initiatives on a variety of campuses around the U.S. to figure out ways to enhance PhD training preparation and opportunities for the current and future biomedical workforce.  The Emory/Georgia Tech partnership was among the first 10 recipients of the NIH BEST awards (later, NIH funded more institutions so that there are now 17 awardees that comprise the NIH BEST Consortium).

The Atlanta BEST program has several aims:

• Expose trainees to a broad variety of career pathways and career development approaches.

• Provide trainees deep immersion in a specific career pathway beyond academic science.

• Better equip faculty at Emory and Georgia Tech to support and train grad students and postdoctoral fellows for the 21^st century workforce.

Ultimately, NIH wants to identify best practices developed through the BEST Consortium and disseminate them to other institutions.

One cohort of 20 to 30 trainees per year is admitted into the Atlanta BEST program. The fourth cohort begins this fall. Trainees spend two years in the program, during which they go through a series of workshops and experiences that include:

• A variety of self-assessments to determine an individual’s interests, bringing awareness to preferred work environments and styles.

• Hands-on, practical career and professional development workshops.

• Exploration of career options through speakers, networking, informational interviews, resources, BEST staff and faculty, and part-time internships.

• Leadership training, with a nod toward communication skills, team building, peer mentoring, emotional intelligence, and conflict management.

• A commercialization series to learn the basics of patent and business law, and technology transfer.

“What we’re learning is, there is no one size fits all – what works at Georgia Tech may not work at Emory, and vice versa. Also, what works for one trainee, may not work for another,” Hutto says. “So we’re trying a lot of different things and tweaking them as we talk with, and get feedback from, trainees and faculty on both campuses.”

The one component that is working very well across the board, according to Hutto, is the cohort model, “because it means the trainees are working with each other, building community, mentoring their peers.”

Georgia Tech student Alyson Colin is particularly interested in that mentoring part, and sees herself as a good resource for her lab group (she works in the lab of Amit Reddi, researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and assistant professor the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry).

“Hopefully I can use what I’ve learned and pass it on to my colleagues, friends, and other graduate students in the program,” says Colin, in her fourth year pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Colin feels well prepared for work as an academic researcher. If only that was her career choice. She was the first grad student to join Reddi’s lab after he arrived at Georgia Tech and set up shop.

“I have a good idea of what it takes to start up a lab by seeing, first hand, the sacrifices and dedication it takes,” she says. “I feel like the Ph.D. experience gives us a clear picture of how to build a career in academia. But I want to discover what the industry and government sectors look like.”

After three years as a Ph.D. student and now with exposure to the BEST program, Colin says her dream job would be, “something like 25 percent research and 75 percent outreach and communication.”

She likes sharing what she’s learned and sees a future in which she prefers lectures to labs, so she’s pursued a variety of teaching assistant opportunities and volunteers at the Georgia Aquarium, “where I can interact with the public and tell them cool things about chemistry, such as how a sea anemone stings you. I find that I’m the happiest when I’m communicating and discussing science. I love sharing my enthusiasm with others and seeing their light bulbs come on.”

Nicosia is also interested in the communication part of the equation.

“I really like writing, and the challenge of communicating effectively with both peers and a lay audience,” says Nicosia, who works in the lab of Petit Institute researcher Wilbur Lam, assistant professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering in the Coulter Department. “There’s a whole breadth of career options in that area, communicating science to the general public, medical and science writing, even interpreting research to members of Congress and other policy makers.”

He’s also developed a growing interest in technology transfer and is even considering a job that previously never occurred to him: medical science liaison, the person in a medical device or pharmaceutical company who establishes peer-peer relationships with physicians, “the people who are actually using the products,” says Nicosia, who has developed better career clarity.

“I feel like I’ve broadened my horizons,” he says. “Like I’ve got more agency now regarding my career decisions.”

Atlanta BEST Program

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

The top prize of $25,000 in this national competition was awarded to a team comprising Joshua Gomberg, Ph.D. student in MSE, Andrew Medford, a post doc in ME, and Prof. Kalidindi. The team was awarded the prize for their project titled, “Structure-based Energy Models from Simulated Al Grain Boundary Datasets.”  The team took data previously documented and reported by M.A. Tschopp, S.P. Coleman, and D.L. McDowell (see Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation, 4 (2015) 1-14)  provided open access from a NIST Repository, and extracted a practically useful, low computational cost, metamodel to capture the relationship between the atomic structure of grain boundaries and their associated grain boundary energy.   Medford will be joining the ChBE School as a faculty member in spring 2017.  The team will be present their award-winning work at a special session during Materials Science & Technology 2016, Oct. 24-27 in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

One of the runner-up prizes of $5,000 in this national competition was awarded to a team comprising Xinyi Gong, Ph.D. student in MSE, Ahmet Cecen, Ph.D. student in CSE, Evdokia Popova, a post-doc in ME, Kalidindi, and researchers Theron Rodgers and Jonathan Madison from Sandia National Laboratory. The prize was awarded a project undertaken under the recently established GT-SNL Academic Alliance for a project titled, “Extraction of Process-Structure Linkages from Simulated Additive Manufacturing Microstructures Using a Data Science Approach.”  The team employed a data science technique to capture and express the correlations between processing conditions and resulting microstructure in low-dimensional, computationally efficient forms that support multiscale materials and process design.

“This would not have happened without the thought leadership and capabilities built by a concerted vision for materials data science and informatics and e-collaboration by the Institute for Materials,” Kalidindi said.  “Programs such as FLAMEL and IDEAS:MD³ have emerged and were built to advance Georgia Tech’s capabilities to first-in-class, as evidenced by results of this competition.

The competition focused on seeking novel uses of accessible digital data to advance Materials Science and Engineering knowledge to accelerate the transition to industrial applications. Entries were submitted between July 2015 and March 2016, and the winners were notified in May 2016.

Medford and Gomberg had been working together on methods for analyzing molecular dynamics simulations and grain boundary energies. During that time, Gomberg developed “some really interesting techniques” according to Medford.

“When we learned about the data challenge, we decided to apply these approaches to an open data set to see how they performed. The results turned out great, and I think the strength of the approach is the balance between the simplicity of the techniques and the remarkable accuracy of the predictions,” he said.  “This is the perfect type of competition — it incentivizes sharing approaches in this emerging area and helps researchers in the field get some independent feedback on their techniques.”

Sponsors of the prize stated that the challenge stemmed from a determination that materials science and engineering data had not yet been exploited to its full potential because of its complexity and big data attributes. This complexity stands to provide rich insights if the mysteries the data hold can be unraveled.

To advance the goals of the U.S. Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), the AFRL solicited innovative approaches to solve materials science and engineering problems primarily through the analysis of publicly accessible digital data. Areas of particular interest included discovery of new materials to meet an application need, or development of a new model describing processing-structure-property relationships in either a structural (load bearing), functional (electrical, optical or magnetic), or multifunctional material.”

Emphasis was placed on the use of existing and accessible data sources, novelty of the approach, and validation of results.  The goal was to leverage advanced computational and data science techniques to solve challenges associated with discovery, development, and production of new materials.

Dr. David McDowell, executive director of Institute for Materials, said the award “bears the fruit of investment in Georgia Tech’s national and international leadership position in materials data science and informatics, a major direction in 21^st century materials science.”   

He added, “This leadership role in materials data science is a value-added capability developed with IMat support to provide competitive advantages for Tech’s materials research and education.  IMat’s strategy, realized through cross-cutting proposal support and research program development, includes seed funding that incorporates these advances in materials data science and informatics into the toolkits of our core research strengths in areas such as materials for catalysis, composite materials, polymers, and potentially many other domains.”

For more about the challenge, visit the official web site. Click here to learn more about the Institute for Materials’ leadership within the Materials Genome Initiative.

For 27 years, Georgia Tech’s Focus Program has brought high-achieving students from diverse backgrounds to campus. The annual graduate recruitment weekend is held during the observance and celebration of the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.

This month, 192 underrepresented minority students and postdocs attended, representing 81 colleges and universities from 32 states and four countries.

“Our Latinx applications to the Focus Program increased this year, and our attendance of Focus Scholars from Puerto Rico almost doubled compared to 2017,” said Sybrina Atwaters, assistant director for outreach initiatives at OMED: Educational Services, a unit of Institute Diversity’s Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion.

The three-day program includes opening and closing dinners; President’s Dinner; campus tours; department and lab visits; and panel discussions on graduate admissions, fellowships, scholarships, mentoring, and student and alumni experiences.

S. Gordon Moore Jr., the Center’s executive director, told Focus Program participants during the President’s Dinner, “Georgia Tech seeks excellence. You are not here as an underrepresented minority; you are here because you are one of the best students in the country.”

Approximately 47 percent of the 2018 Focus Program participants, who will graduate this May, have applied to graduate programs at Georgia Tech, and 37 percent received application fee waivers. Compared to last year, participant applications to Georgia Tech’s graduate programs have increased 17 percent.

“You have to believe in yourself. The Focus Program helped everyone believe that we could earn graduate degrees,” remarked Gabriela Lopez, an undergraduate student at New York University.

Since its inception, more than 3,000 students from a wide array of colleges and universities have participated in the program. Some 300 former Focus Scholars are among the Georgia Tech alumni who have earned master’s and doctoral degrees. Focus Scholars is a component of the program designed to inform juniors and seniors about the benefits of earning an advanced degree. Additionally, numerous Focus Fellows are members of Georgia Tech’s engineering faculty. Focus Fellows encourages diverse doctoral students to consider an academic career.

“The program’s level of success is due to the support of the Institute’s administration, faculty, staff, and students – with generous support from corporate sponsors like Intel,” added Atwaters.

Currently, Georgia Tech awards more doctoral degrees in engineering to all racial/ethnic minority students,¹ and more undergraduate degrees in engineering to women,² than any other school. 

To learn more about the Focus Program, visit www.focus.gatech.edu.

¹ Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

² American Society for Engineering Education

The meeting is for and by early-career scientists addressing the broad questions of astrobiology: How did life start? Where else does life exist? How could humans search for life outside Earth?

AbGradCon 2018 brings to the fore Georgia Tech’s standing in astrobiology research and education. Georgia Tech leads in training scientists who will direct space exploration in the 21st century.

Organizers

George Tan chairs the organizing committee. He is a Ph.D. student of Amanda Stockton, in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Working with Tan were more than a dozen other Ph.D. students or postdoctoral researchers.

Organizers expect 96 attendees: 72 from the U.S. and 24 from overseas, Tan says. They come from nine countries: Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, United Kingdom, and United States.  

The program includes an evening for the public, which features Astronaut Lawrence DeLucas.

“We have a big astrobiology community at Tech. This is the perfect opportunity for us to network with students and postdocs with similar interests. I also learned a lot about planning conferences,” says Adriana Lozoya. She is a Ph.D. student of Nicholas Hud, in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Hud is also a member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB).

“It’s been a great experience getting all the moving parts to work to make this conference exciting and worthwhile for all attendees,” says Marcus Bray. He is a Ph.D. student of Jennifer Glass, in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Glass is also an IBB member. 

Funding

Major funding for the meeting came from the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Other sponsors are:

•  ACS Earth and Space Chemistry
• Earth-Life Science Institute
• Georgia Tech Astrobiology
• Georgia Tech College of Sciences
• Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology
• John Templeton Foundation
• Nature Publishing Group
• Simons Foundation

“We can’t thank our sponsors enough,” Tan says. “Their generosity markedly enhanced our ability to prepare the best possible program and accommodate close to a hundred participants.”

“I look forward to the many informal discussions over the week,” says Rebecca Rapf. She is a postdoctoral researcher with Kevin Wilson at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. “I’m sure they will lead to productive collaborations and long-term friendships with people who will be our peers throughout our careers.”

Presenting students have produced their comics as a part of a special-topics English 1102 course taught by Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow Leah Misemer. A first-year writing instructor, Misemer wants to impress upon her students the value of different types of literary styles, including comics and graphic novels.

“A number of organizations and professionals — from the UN, to doctors and the journal Nature, to social activists — have started to realize the value of comics for communicating a message to a broad audience,” said Misemer. “Part of the appeal is that people are more likely to read a comic than an essay, but it's more than that. The ability to layer images and text in multiple ways provides an efficient way to communicate a message that easily captures ambiguities and tensions that can be difficult to convey in written text alone.”

For the class, students worked with local community organizations to highlight issues relevant to Atlanta. The course is offered in partnership with Serve-Learn-Sustain. Through the partnership, Misemer was able to coordinate the class with the Center for Sustainable Communities and the Grove Park Foundation, two Atlanta-based nonprofits.

“I encourage students to be active citizens by identifying and helping to solve problems in their communities, and the Atlanta focus helped localize the issues,” said Misemer. “The comics we read as models discussed cities like Chicago, Paris, New York, and Tokyo, but I wanted students to apply those lessons to a place relevant to them.”

Comics on display include a work by students Bianca McAlister, Maria Carrizo, Meghan Vierheilig, and Abhay Iyer about the sustainable development programs initiated by Center for Sustainable Communities president Gary Harris.

Misemer will offer similar courses in the future. Her Fall 2018 course will focus on “graphic medicine” — comics or graphic novels for use in public health. The course will be specifically focused on raising mental health awareness.

In fact, Misemer’s course is just one of many novel learning opportunities available to undergraduates. Other English 1102 courses offered this semester included Harry Potter and the Material Object, Haunted Americas, and Food Literacy in Atlanta.

In total, 10 comics will be on display for patrons to explore. In addition to their comics, students will present work highlighting innovative combinations of text and images using low tech tools provided by Tech Library's Communication Through Arts program. Students will be present at the exhibition to discuss their work, and the comics will remain on display after the exhibition ends.

The exhibition will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18, on the third-floor of Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons near the center stairwell.

In announcement Thursday, Sept. 6, at the University of Alberta, Canada’s Minister of Science and Sport, Kirsty Duncan, presented 167 new Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships and 70 Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships, a total investment of $34.85 million, to a group of Canada’s brightest doctoral and postdoctoral students who are working to make discoveries in the health sciences, natural sciences and engineering, as well as the social sciences and humanities.

“Our greatest hope lies with the ambitions of the next generation of Canada’s researchers,” said Duncan, who was representing Minister of Health Ginette Petitpas Taylor at Thursday’s announcement. “Their curiosity and desire to collaborate will lead to new medical treatments, health care programs, and social innovations. Our government is proud to support them as they gain the skills and experienced needed for the jobs of tomorrow.”

Horslen, a Canadian citizen who earned his PhD from the University of British Columbia, is co-advised by Tim Cope, also a professor in the Coulter Department and, like Ting, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.

“This is the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowship awarded by Canadian funding agencies, and I’m extremely honored that my application was accepted,” said Horslen, whose fellowship title is “How current movement shapes future sensory feedback: A multiscale investigation of how changing muscle mechanics affects muscle spindle sensor feedback and control of standing balance.”

The fellowship will allow Horslen to pursue novel research in the Coulter Department.

“It has the potential to have huge impact on my field of sensorimotor control of movement,” said Horslen, who joined the Coulter Department in February 2017. “We are re-evaluating our understanding of how muscle spindles sense of body movement and how we use this information to keep ourselves upright and avoid falling down.”

It’s the kind of work that could require a rewriting of neurosciences textbooks, according to Horslen, and affect how engineers approach the problem of building prosthetics that actually “feel.”

Collaboration between Coulter Department labs will continue to be a cornerstone of Horslen’s postdoctoral training – he works closely with Ting and Cope to anchor a research program integrating human balance behavior and central nervous system electrophysiology.

Additionally, Horslen’s work incorporates the expertise of neuromechanics and movement sciences experts in Emory’s Rehabilitation Medicine and Neuroscience programs, as well as Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences and Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

“I hope to lay the groundwork here at BME to becoming a knowledge leader in sensorimotor research,” said Horslen, who added, “the strong research environment in BME, as well as the superb postdoc training resources at both Emory and Georgia Tech were important factors in my application’s success.”

The scholarship and fellowship programs are administered by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and funded by three different Canadian agencies: CIHR, NSERC, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

In a statement following Thursday’s event, CIHR chief Taylor added, “We are giving researchers, students, and fellows the foundation they need to achieve their dreams and come up with the innovations that will drive the economy and solve the challenges of our time.”

Meanwhile in Kentucky, James Boehm is part of an experiment by AT&T. The company is testing a device to enable Boehm – who has been blind since he was 13 – to experience the eclipse. The set-up includes a soundtrack, which “voices” the changes in temperature and brightness as the moon’s shadow covers the sun. That accompaniment came from researchers in the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab.

That story leads the first season of the College of Sciences’ podcast. The people who made the 2017 eclipse-watching party possible now offer another treat: ScienceMatters, a podcast celebrating discoveries and achievements – the “Wow” and “Aha” moments – of Georgia Tech scientists and mathematicians.

Season 1 is now available at sciencematters.gatech.edu. 

Continue here for the full story.

Massive whale sharks headline the Ocean Voyager exhibit at Georgia Aquarium.  Its tiniest residents are the ones that concern Nastassia Patin. Patin is a postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of Frank Stewart. Stewart is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a member of Georgia Tech's Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Patin's research interests are microbial ecology, environmental microbiology, chemical ecology, metagenomics. Episode 4 describes her findings after studying the microbiome of the Ocean Voyage exhibit at Georgia Aquarium.  What she’s learning may help keep all aquariums clear and healthy.

Take a listen at sciencematters.gatech.edu.

Enter to win a prize by answering the question for Episode 4:

What is the name of the Georgia Aquarium sea turtle mentioned in Episode 4?

Submit your entry by 11 AM on Monday, Sept. 17, at sciencematters.gatech.edu. Answer and winner will be announced shortly after the quiz closes.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology engineered a molecular matrix, a hydrogel, to deliver muscle stem cells called muscle satellite cells (MuSCs) directly to injured muscle tissue in patients whose muscles don’t regenerate well. In lab experiments on mice, the hydrogel successfully delivered MuSCs to injured, aged muscle tissue to boost the healing process while protecting the stem cells from harsh immune reactions.

The method was also successful in mice with a muscle tissue deficiency that emulated Duchene muscular dystrophy, and if research progresses, the new hydrogel therapy could one day save the lives of people suffering from the disease.

Inflammatory war zone

Simply injecting additional muscle satellite cells into damaged, inflamed tissue has proven inefficient, in part because the stem cells encounter an immune system on the warpath.

“Any muscle injury is going to attract immune cells. Typically, this would help muscle stem cells repair damage. But in aged or dystrophic muscles, immune cells lead to the release a lot of toxic chemicals like cytokines and free radicals that kill the new stem cells,” said Young Jang, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences and one of the study’s principal investigators.

Only between 1 and 20 percent of injected MuSCs make it to damaged tissue, and those that do, arrive there weakened. Also, some tissue damage makes any injection unfeasible, thus the need for new delivery strategies. 

“Our new hydrogel protects the stem cells, which multiply and thrive inside the matrix. The gel is applied to injured muscle, and the cells engraft onto the tissues and help them heal,” said Woojin Han, a postdoctoral researcher in Georgia Tech’s School of Mechanical Engineering and the paper’s first author.

Han, Jang and Andres Garcia, the study’s other principal investigator, published their results on August 15, 2018, in the journal Science Advances. The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases of the National Institutes of Health funded the research.

Hydrogel: watery nets

Hydrogels often start out as water-based solutions of molecular components that resemble crosses, and other components that make the ends of the crosses attach to each other. When the components come together, they fuse into molecular nets suspended in water, resulting in a material with the consistency of a gel. 

If stem cells or a drug are mixed into the solution, when the net, or matrix, forms, it ensnares the treatment for delivery and protects the payload from death or dissipation in the body. Researchers can easily and reliably synthesize hydrogels and also custom-engineer them by tweaking their components, as the Georgia Tech researchers did in this hydrogel. 

“It physically traps the muscle satellite cells in a net, but the cells also grab onto chemical latches we engineered into the net,” Han said.

This hydrogel’s added latches, which bond with proteins protruding from stem cells’ membranes, not only increase the cells’ adhesion to the net but also hinder them from committing suicide. Stem cells tend to kill themselves when they’re detached and free-floating. 

The chemical components and the cells are mixed in solution then applied to the injured muscle, where the mixture sets to a matrix-gel patch that glues the stem cells in place. The gel is biocompatible and biodegradable.

“The stem cells keep multiplying and thriving in the gel after it is applied,” Jang said. “Then the hydrogel degrades and leaves behind the cells engrafted onto muscle tissue the way natural stem cells usually would be.”

Stem cell breakdown

In younger, healthier patients, muscle satellite cells are part of the natural healing mechanism.

“Muscle satellite cells are resident stem cells in your skeletal muscles. They live on muscle strands like specks, and they’re key players in making new muscle tissue,” Han said.

“As we age, we lose muscle mass, and the number of satellite cells also decreases. The ones that are left get weaker. It’s a double whammy,” Jang said. “At a very advanced age, a patient stops regenerating muscle altogether.”

“With this system we engineered, we think we can introduce donor cells to enhance the repair mechanism in injured older patients,” Han said. “We also want to get this to work in patients with Duchene muscular dystrophy.”

“Duchene muscular dystrophy is surprisingly frequent,” Jang said. “About 1 in 3,500 boys get it. They eventually get respiratory defects that lead to death, so we hope to be able to use this to rebuild their diaphragm muscles.”

If the method goes to clinical trials, researchers will likely have to work around the potential for donor cell rejection in human patients.

Also READ: Punching Cancer with RNA Knuckles Wrapped in Hydrogel

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The following researchers coauthored the paper: Shannon Anderson, Mahir Mohiuddin, Shadi Nakhai, and Eunjung Shin from Georgia Tech; Isabel Freitas Amaral, and Ana Paula Pêgo from the University of Porto in Portugal, and Daniela Barros from Georgia Tech and the University of Porto. The research was funded by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (awards # R21AR072287 and R01AR062368). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Writer: Ben Brumfield

The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2021, might be able look far enough back into the early Universe to see a galaxy hosting a nascent massive black hole. Now, a simulation done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has suggested what astronomers should look for if they search the skies for a DCBH in its early stages.

The first-of-its-kind simulation, reported September 10 in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests that direct formation of these black holes would be accompanied by specific kinds of intense radiation, including X-rays and ultraviolet emission that would shift to infrared by the time they reach the telescope. The black holes would also likely spawn massive metal-free stars, a finding that was unexpected.

The research was supported by NASA, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, the Southern Regional Education Board and two Hubble theory grants.

“There are supermassive black holes at the center of many large galaxies, but we haven’t been able to observe the way they form or how they got that large,” said Kirk S. S. Barrow, the paper’s first author and a recent Ph.D. graduate of Georgia Tech’s School of Physics. “Scientists have theorized that these supermassive black holes could have formed at the birth of a galaxy, and we wanted to turn these theoretical predictions into observational predictions that could be seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.”

DCBH formation would be initiated by the collapse of a large cloud of gas during the early formation of a galaxy, said John H. Wise, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics and the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics. But before astronomers could hope to catch this formation, they would have to know what to look for in the spectra that the telescope could detect, which is principally infrared.

The formation of a black hole could require a million years or so, but to envision what that might have looked like, former postdoctoral researcher Aycin Aykutalp – now at Los Alamos National Laboratory – used the National Science Foundation-supported Stampede Supercomputer at the University of Texas at Austin to run a simulation focusing on the aftermath of DCBH formation. The simulation used physics first principles such as gravity, radiation and hydrodynamics.

“If the galaxy forms first and then the black hole forms in the center, that would have one type of signature,” said Wise, who is the Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics. “If the black hole formed first, would that have a different signature? We wanted to find out whether there would be any physical differences, and if so, whether that would translate into differences we could observe with the James Webb Space Telescope.”

The simulations provided information such as densities and temperatures, and Barrow converted that data into predictions for what might be observed through the telescope – the light likely to be observed and how it would affected by gas and dust it would have encountered on its long journey to Earth. “At the end, we had something that an observer could hopefully see,” Barrow said.

Black holes take about a million years to form, a blip in galactic time. In the DCBH simulation, that first step involves gas collapsing into a supermassive star as much as 100,000 times more massive than our sun. The star then undergoes gravitational instability and collapses into itself to form a massive black hole. Radiation from the black hole then triggers the formation of stars over period of about 500,000 years, the simulation suggested.

“The stars of this first generation are usually much more massive, so they live for a shorter period of time,” Wise said. “In the first five to six million years after their formation, they die and go supernova. That’s another one of the signatures that we report in this study.”

After the supernovae form, the black hole quiets down but creates a struggle between electromagnetic emissions – ultraviolet light and X-rays trying to escape – and the black hole’s own gravity. “These cycles go on for another 20 or 30 million years,” Wise said.

Black holes are relatively common in the universe, so the hope is that with enough snapshots, astronomers could catch one being born, and that could lead to a new understanding of how galaxies evolve over time.

Star formation around the DCBH was unexpected, but in hindsight, it makes sense, Barrow said. The ionization produced by the black holes would produce photochemical reactions able to trigger the formation of the stars. Metal-free stars tend to be larger than others because the absence of a metal such as iron prevents fragmentation. But because they are so large, these stars produce tremendous amounts of radiation and end their lives in supernovae, he said.

“This is one of the last great mysteries of the early universe,” Barrow said. “We hope this study provides a good step toward figuring out how these supermassive black holes formed at the birth of a galaxy.”

This research was supported by a Southern Regional Education Board doctoral fellowship, a LANL LDRD Exploratory Research Grant 20170317ER, National Science Foundation (NSF) grants AST-1333360 and AST-1614333, Hubble theory grants HST-AR-13895 and HST-AR-14326, and NASA grant NNX-17AG23G. 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 sponsoring organizations.

CITATION: Kirk S. S. Barrow, Aycin Aykutalp & John H. Wise, “Observational signatures of massive black hole formation in the early Universe,” (Nature Astronomy, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0569-y

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Facilities such as electric power networks, manufacturing operations and water purification plants are among the potential targets for malicious actors because they use programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to open and close valves, redirect electricity flows and manage large pieces of machinery. Efforts are underway to secure these facilities, and helping operators become more skilled at detecting potential attacks is a key part of improving security.

“The goal is to give operators, researchers and students experience with attacking systems, detecting attacks and also seeing the consequences of manipulating the physical processes in these systems,” said Raheem Beyah, the Motorola Foundation Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This system allows operators to learn what kinds of things will happen. Our goal is to make sure the good guys get this experience so they can respond appropriately.”

Details of the simulator were presented August 8 at Black Hat USA 2018, and August 13 at the 2018 USENIX Workshop on Advances in Security Education. The simulator was developed in part by Atlanta security startup company Fortiphyd Logic, and supported by the Georgia Research Alliance.

The simulated chemical processing plant, known as the Graphical Realism Framework for Industrial Control Simulations (GRFICS), allows users to play the roles of both attackers and defenders – with separate views provided. The attackers might take control of valves in the plant to build up pressure in a reaction vessel to cause an explosion. The defenders have to watch for signs of attack and make sure security systems remain operational.

Of great concern is the “man-in-the-middle” attack in which a bad actor breaks into the facility’s control system – and also takes control of the sensors and instruments that provide feedback to the operators. By gaining control of sensors and valve position indicators, the attacker could send false readings that would reassure the operators – while the damage proceeded. 

“The pressure and reactant levels could be made to seem normal to the operators, while the pressure is building toward a dangerous point,” Beyah said. Though the readings may appear normal, however, a knowledgeable operator might still detect clues that the system has been attacked. “The more the operators know the process, the harder it will be to fool them,” he said.

The GRFICS system was built using an existing chemical processing plant simulator, as well as a 3D video gaming engine running on Linux virtual machines. At its heart is the software that runs PLCs, which can be changed out to represent different types of controllers appropriate to a range of facilities. The human-machine interface can also be altered as needed to show a realistic operator control panel monitoring reaction parameters and valve controller positions.

“This is a complete virtual network, so you can set up your own entry detection rules and play on the defensive side to see whether or not your defenses are detecting the attacks,” said David Formby, a Georgia Tech postdoctoral researcher who has launched Fortiphyd Logic with Beyah to develop industrial control security products. “We provide access to simulated physical systems that allow students and operators to repeatedly study different parameters and scenarios.”

GRFICS is currently available as an open source, free download for use by classes or individuals. It runs on a laptop, but because of heavy use of graphics, requires considerable processing power and memory. An online version is planned, and future versions will simulate the electric power grid, water and wastewater treatment facilities, manufacturing facilities and other users of PLCs.

Formby hopes GRFICS will expand the number of people who have experience with the security of industrial control systems.

“We want to open this space up to more people,” he said. “It’s very difficult now to find people who have the right experience. We haven’t seen many attacks on these systems yet, but that’s not because they are secure. The barrier for people who want to work in the cyber-physical security space is high right now, and we want to lower that.”

Beyah and Formby have been working for several years to increase awareness of the vulnerabilities inherent in industrial control systems. While the community still has more to do, Beyah is encouraged.

“Several years ago, we talked to a lot of process control engineers as part of the NSF’s I-Corps program,” he said. “It was clear that for many of these folks then, security was not a major concern. But we’ve seen changes, and lots of people are now taking system security seriously.”

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The snail damages coral by sucking fluid from it like a tick, and may have been ignored because it camouflages itself on reefs and doesn’t move around to leave obvious signs of its attack. In experiments done directly on Fiji Island reefs, scientists quantified the impact of the snails, and found that snail attacks could reduce the growth of Porites cylindrica coral by as much as 43 percent in less than a month.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology conducted the research and reported it July 26 in the journal Ecological Applications. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Teasley Endowment to Georgia Tech.

“Once the reefs are down and nearly out, these snails are piling on,” said Mark Hay, a Regents and Teasley professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences. “The Porites coral is kind of the last man standing, the last hope for some of these reefs coming back, and they are the ones these snails selectively prey on. As you get fewer and fewer corals, the snails focus on the fewer and fewer of these colonies that remain. This is part of the downward spiral of the reefs.”

In areas protected from fishing, Postdoctoral Fellow Cody Clements never found more than five of the creatures – whose scientific name is Coralliophila violacea – on a single coral colony. But on degraded reefs where fishing was permitted, he found hundreds of the snails on some declining coral colonies, as much as 35 times more than colonies in the protected areas. To assess the damage, he devised an experiment to measure how the snails affected coral growth.

On the reefs near Votoa Village on Fiji’s Coral Coast, Clements isolated coral branches and attached snails to them. After a period of 24 days, he compared the growth of snail-infested coral branches to comparable branches that had no snails. During that three-week period, the predators reduced coral growth by approximately 18 to 43 percent, depending on snail size.

“A single snail can do a considerable amount of damage,” Clements said. “They are sucking the juice out of the coral. If you have a lot of snails feeding on a single coral colony, it can be very hard for the colony to thrive.”

In coral ecosystems, fish help keep many predators and seaweeds under control. For that reason, fishing is forbidden in marine protected areas to maintain species diversity. To confirm their suspicions that overfishing was related to the snail problem, Clements tethered individual snails to reefs in a paired protected and unprotected areas.

When they returned to examine the experiment, they found that snails in the protected areas had been eaten, and evidence left behind suggested they had been consumed by triggerfish and other species with teeth able to crack the snail shells. Predation of the snails was 220 percent higher in the marine protected areas compared to unprotected areas with few remaining fish, they found.

“From the predation evidence, it looked like the fish were eating the snails,” said Clements. “It seemed like the main element driving the difference was the protection status of the area where the snails were tethered.”

One unexpected finding was that the shells of larger snails had been taken over by hermit crabs. “The hermit crabs were very direct about getting the shells that they wanted,” Hay said. “This may or may not be ecologically important on a large scale.”

The study began with an accidental discovery while Clements was working on another project in a heavily degraded reef area. “I was fragmenting branches from colonies and noticed these snails,” he said. “I wondered why I had never seen them before, then I started looking around and noticed they were everywhere.”

The snail shells are covered with marine growth, so they’re difficult to see – unless you know what to look for, Clements said. During the research, Clements removed more than 2,000 of the snails with needle-nosed pliers.

The Porites coral often provides the foundation for reefs, and is considered one of the most hardy species because it is less susceptible to disease, less attractive to crown-of-thorns sea stars, and more resistant to damage from seaweeds. For that reason, researchers believe it may provide a way for reefs to recover if conditions improve. Unfortunately, that coral is also a favorite for the small snail.

The findings reinforce a lesson Hay and Clements have been working to explain for years.

“Protecting coral reef areas and keeping food webs intact is really important to maintaining these communities,” Hay said. “Overfishing takes a lot of key species out of the communities so that all you have left is the marine equivalent of cockroaches and dandelions. Taking out the fish takes away the functions the fish have been providing to the community.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under award OCE 0929119, the National Institutes of Health under award 2 U19 TW007401-10, and the Teasley Endowment to the Georgia Institute of Technology.

CITATION: Cody S. Clements and Mark E. Hay, “Overlooked coral predators suppress foundation species as reefs degrade, (Ecological Applications, 2018). https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eap.1765

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A study published August 17 in the journal Science shows that in fire ant colonies, a small number of workers does most of the digging, leaving the other ants to look somewhat less than industrious. For digging nest tunnels, this less busy approach gets the job done without ant traffic jams – ensuring smooth excavation flow. Researchers found that applying the ant optimization strategy to autonomous robots avoids mechanized clogs and gets the work done with the least amount of energy.

Optimizing the activity of autonomous underground robots could be useful for tasks such as disaster recovery, mining or even digging underground shelters for future planetary explorers. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Physics of Living Systems program, the Army Research Office and the Dunn Family Professorship.

“We noticed that if you have 150 ants in a container, only 10 or 15 of them will actually be digging in the tunnels at any given time,” said Daniel Goldman, a professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We wanted to know why, and to understand how basic laws of physics might be at work. We found a functional, community benefit to this seeming inequality in the work environment. Without it, digging just doesn’t get done.”

By monitoring the activities of 30 ants that had been painted to identify each individual, Goldman and colleagues, including former postdoctoral fellow Daria Monaenkova and Ph.D. student Bahnisikha Dutta, discovered that just 30 percent of the ants were doing 70 percent of the work – an inequality that seems to keep the work humming right along. However, that is apparently not because the busiest ants are the most qualified. When the researchers removed the five hardest working ants from the nest container, they saw no productivity decline as the remaining 25 continued to dig.

Having a nest is essential to fire ants, and if a colony is displaced – by a flood, for instance – the first thing the ants will do upon reaching dry land is start digging. Their tunnels are narrow, barely wide enough for two ants to pass, a design feature hypothesized to give locomotion advantages in the developing vertical tunnels. Still, the ants know how to avoid creating clogs by retreating from tunnels already occupied by other workers – and sometimes by not doing anything much at all. 

To avoid clogs and maximize digging in the absence of a leader, robots built by Goldman’s master’s degree student Vadim Linevich were programmed to capture aspects of the dawdling and retreating ants. The researchers found that as many as three robots could work effectively in a narrow horizontal tunnel digging 3D printed magnetic plastic balls that simulated sticky soil. If a fourth robot entered the tunnel, however, that produced a clog that stopped the work entirely.

“When we put four robots into a confined environment and tried to get them to dig, they immediately jammed up,” said Goldman, who is the Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. “While observing the ants, we were surprised to see that individuals would sometimes go to the tunnel and if they encountered even a small amount of clog, they’d just turn around and retreat. When we put those rules into combinations with the robots, that created a good strategy for digging rapidly with low amounts of energy use per robot.”

Experimentally, the research team tested three potential behaviors for the robots, which they termed “eager,” “reversal” or “lazy.” Using the eager strategy, all four robots plunged into the work – and quickly jammed up. In the reversal behavior, robots gave up and turned around when they encountered delays reaching the work site. In the lazy strategy, dawdling was encouraged.

“Eager is the best strategy if you only have three robots, but if you add a fourth, that behavior tanks because they get in each other’s way,” said Goldman. “Reversal produces relatively sane and sensible digging. It is not the fastest strategy, but there are no jams. If you look at energy consumed, lazy is the best course.” Analysis techniques based on glassy and supercooled fluids, led by former Ph.D. student Jeffrey Aguilar, gave insight into how the different strategies mitigated and prevented clog-forming clusters.

To understand what was going on and experiment with the parameters, Goldman and colleagues – including Will Savoie, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student, Research Assistant Hui-Shun Kuan and Professor Meredith Betterton from the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder – used computer modeling known as cellular automata that has similarities to the way in which traffic engineers model the movement of cars and trucks on a highway.

“On highways, too few cars don’t provide much flow, while too many cars create a jam,” Goldman said. “There is an intermediate level where things are best, and that is called the fundamental diagram. From our modeling, we learned that the ants are working right at the peak of the diagram. The right mix of unequal work distributions and reversal behaviors has the benefit of keeping them moving at maximum efficiency without jamming.”

The ability to avoid clumping seems to meet a need that many systems have, Betterton noted. “The ants work in a sweet spot where they can dig quickly without too many clogs. We see the same physics in ant digging, simulation models, and digging by robots, which suggests that for groups of animals that need to excavate, avoiding clogs is crucial.”

The researchers used robots designed and built for the research, but they were no match for the capabilities of the ants. The ants are flexible and robust, able to squeeze past each other in confines that would cause the inflexible robots to jam. In some cases, the robots in Goldman’s lab even damaged each other while jostling into position for digging.

The research findings could be useful for space exploration where tunnels might be needed to quickly shield humans from approaching dust storms or other threats. “If you were a robot swarm on Mars and needed to dig deeply in a hurry to get away from dust storms, this strategy might help provide shelter without having perfect information about what everybody was doing,” Goldman explained. 

Beyond the potential robotics applications, the work provides insights into the complex social skills of ants and adds to the understanding of active matter. 

“Ants that live in complex subterranean environments have to develop sophisticated social rules to avoid the bad things that can happen when you have a lot of individuals in a crowded environment,” Goldman said. “We are also contributing to understanding the physics of task-oriented active matter, putting more experimental knowledge into phenomenon such as swarms.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research included Michael Goodisman, associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation through grant numbers PoLS-0957659, PHY-1205878 and DMR-1551095 as well as a grant W911NF-13-1-0347 from the Army Research Office, and the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative. 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 National Science Foundation or Army Research Office.

CITATION: J. Aguilar, et. al., “Collective clog control: optimizing traffic flow in confined biological and robophysical excavation,” (Science 2018).

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Among the differences are increased expression of genes responsible for antibiotic resistance, the bane of drugs currently used to treat a wide range of infections. The new research could help scientists understand how to draw more accurate conclusions from their laboratory work – and provide doctors with better information on treating bacterial infections.

“Bacteria in human infections are often tolerant of antibiotics, but when we culture them outside the human they are highly susceptible,” said Marvin Whiteley, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-director of the Emory-Children’s Cystic Fibrosis Center. “In this paper, we show that several genes important for antibiotic tolerance are highly induced in humans compared to our laboratory and mouse modeling systems. There appears to be something unique in the human that is promoting resistance.”

What might be causing that difference remains a mystery, though bacteria are known to be affected by their environment. Understanding how bacterial genes and their expression levels differ in humans could allow researchers to search for laboratory conditions that better mimic the human conditions – and provide better guidance for the use of antibiotics.

“Understanding which antibiotic resistance genes are highly expressed in humans may inform our therapeutic decisions on antibiotic usage,” said Whiteley, who holds the Bennie H. & Nelson D. Abell Chair in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Georgia Tech and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. “For instance, one might predict antibiotic resistance of an infecting community from gene expression data without the need for culturing microbes in the clinical lab.”

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and the Lundbeck Foundation. In addition to the Georgia Tech researchers, the research team included scientists at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the University of California, and several clinical and research organizations in Denmark.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an important pathogen that threatens immunocompromised people, including those with cystic fibrosis, diabetes and obesity. It is a major hospital-acquired infection, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention characterizes multi-drug resistant strains of the bacteria as a serious threat.

In their research, the scientists analyzed RNA sequencing data from both human clinical infections and laboratory experiments. The human samples were obtained from collaborating clinicians, who took the samples directly from patients and put them into a chemical that preserved their RNA for later processing. The laboratory experiments studied different strains of the bacterium under a variety of growth conditions, from antibiotic treatment to competition with other bacteria.

The researchers also included previously published in vitro and mouse experiment data from the Whiteley laboratory and other research teams. Data analysis techniques included a machine learning approach known as Support Vector Machines, which was used to distinguish between gene expression profiles of samples taken from human and in vitro sources.

“We saw high expression in several genes notorious for antibiotic resistance, including genes that encode efflux pumps that extrude antibiotics from the cell as well as an enzyme that degrades certain antibiotics, such as ampicillin,” said Daniel Cornforth, a research scientist in Whiteley’s laboratory and the paper’s first author. “There were also less studied antibiotic resistance genes, including three related to zinc transport that our previous work has identified as critical antibiotic resistance determinants that were also highly expressed in the human patients.”

Though the research focused only on a single troublesome pathogen, Whiteley believes the results could have broader implications. “We actually know very little about bacteria behaviors during human infection and most model systems cannot replicate most aspects of human infection. I expect that this work would be generalizable to other bacteria.”

By identifying how bacteria behave differently in humans compared to standard laboratory settings, the work could provide a foundation for additional study with more samples and different types of infection.

“The key takeaway from this work is that now microbiologists can perform transcriptomics on bacterial populations in a range of human infections, so we can better understand what bacteria are actually doing in these clinical infections,” said Cornforth. “We can also determine where our laboratory models succeed and where they fail in mimicking these infection environments.”

This study was funded by National Institutes of Health Grant R01GM116547-01A1, a Human Frontiers Science grant, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Grant WHITEL16G0, Lundbeck Foundation Grant R204-2015-4205 and Lundbeck Foundation Grant R105-A9791, and by Cystic Fibrosis postdoctoral Fellowships CORNFO15F0 and IBBERS16F0.

CITATION: Daniel Cornforth, et al., “Pseudomonas aeruginosa transcriptome during human infection,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717525115

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have engineered a chemical trap that exhaustively catches what are called glycoproteins, including minuscule traces that have previously escaped detection.

Glycoproteins are protein molecules bonded with sugar molecules, and they’re very common in all living things. Glycoproteins come in myriad varieties and sizes and make up important cell structures like cell receptors. They also wander around our bodies in secretions like mucus or hormones.

But some glycoproteins are very, very rare and can serve as an early signal, or biomarker, indicating there’s something wrong in the body – like cancer. Existing methods to reel in glycoproteins for laboratory examination are relatively new and have had big holes in their nets, so many of these molecules, especially those very rare ones produced by cancer, have tended to slip by.

Cancerous traces

“These tiny traces are critically important for early disease detection,” said principal investigator Ronghu Wu, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “When cancer is just getting started, aberrant glycoproteins are produced and secreted into body fluids such as blood and urine. Often their abundances are extremely low, but catching them is urgent.”

This new chemical trap, which took Georgia Tech chemists several years to develop and is based on a boronic acid, has proven extremely effective in lab tests including on cultured human cells and mouse tissue samples.

“This method is very universal,” said first author Haopeng Xiao, a graduate research assistant. “We get over 1,000 glycoproteins in a really small lab sample.”

In comparison tests with existing methods, the chemical trap, a complex molecular construction reminiscent of an octopus, captured exponentially more glycoproteins, especially more of those trace glycoproteins.

Wu, Xiao and Weixuan Chen, a former Georgia Tech postdoctoral researcher, who was also first author of the study alongside Xiao, published their results in the journal Nature Communications. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Boronic bungles

For chemistry whizzes, here’s a short summary of how the researchers made the octopus. They took a good thing and doubled then tripled down on it.

Those who recall high school chemistry class may still know what boric acid is, as do people who use it to kill roaches. Its chemical structure is an atom of boron bonded with three hydroxyl groups (H₃BO₃).

Boronic acids are a family of organic compounds that build on boric acid. There are many members of the boronic acid family, and they tend to bond well with glycoproteins, but their bonds can be less reliable than needed.

“Most boronic acids let too many low-abundance glycoproteins get away,” Wu said. “They can catch glycoproteins that are in high abundance but not those in low abundance, the ones that tell us more valuable things about cell development or about human disease.”

Benzoboroxole octopus

But the Georgia Tech chemists were able to leverage the strengths of boronic acids to develop a glycoprotein capturing method that works exceptionally well.

First, they tested several boronic acid derivatives and found that one called benzoboroxole strongly bound with each sugar component on the glycopeptide. (“Peptide” refers to the basic chemical composition of a protein.)  

Then they stitched many benzoboroxole molecules together with other components to form a "dendrimer," which refers to the resulting branch- or tentacle-like structure. The finished large molecule resembled an octopus ready to go after those sugar components.

In its middle, similarly positioned to an octopus's head, was a magnetic bead, which acted as a kind of handle. Once the dendrimer caught a glycoprotein, the researchers used a magnet to grab the bead and pull out their chemical octopus along with its ensnared glycopeptides (e.g. glycoproteins).

“Then we washed the dendrimer off with a low pH solution, and we had the glycoproteins analyzed with things like mass spectrometry,” Wu said.

Cancer treatments?

The researchers have some ideas about how medical laboratory researchers could make practical use of the new Georgia Tech method to detect odd biomolecules emitted by cancer, such as antigens. For example, the chemical octopus could improve detection of prostate-specific antigens (PSA) in prostate cancer screenings.

“PSA is a glycoprotein. Right now, if the level is very high, we know that the patient may have cancer, and if it’s very low, we know cancer is not likely,” Wu said. “But there is a gray area in between, and this method could lead to much more detailed information in that gray area.”

The researchers also believe that developers could leverage the chemical invention to produce targeted cancer treatments. Immune cells could be trained to recognize the aberrant glycoproteins, track down their source cancer cells in the body and kill them.

The research’s potential for science goes far beyond its possible future medical applications.

The fields of genomics and proteomics have made great strides. Following in their footsteps, this new molecular trap could advance the study of the rising field of glycoscience.

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ALSO read: Cancer-killing T-cells switched on via remote control

Georgia Tech’s Johanna Smeekens coauthored the research paper. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (CAREER award CHE-1454501), and the National Institutes of Health (R01GM118803). Findings and any opinions are those of the authors’ and not necessarily of the funding agencies.

Darch observes the conversations of bacteria, which take place via molecules they release into the environment and are sensed by other bacteria. In Darch’s experiments, completed messages are marked by the red-to-green change in the color of the bacterium sensing the molecule.

By sending and receiving extracellular signals, bacteria sense their neighbors. When enough bacteria are in the conversation, things happen. Sometimes it leads to changes in virulence or ability to establish an infection. The phenomenon is called quorum sensing.

Yet little is known about how quorum sensing proceeds during infection “Much of what is known about quorum sensing,” Darch says, “comes from studies of large populations of bacteria in an environment that does not compare with the natural infection site.” In infections, for example, bacteria are often found in small, dense clusters, called aggregates. “It’s really important for us as scientists to think about what bacterial growth looks like in an infection,” Darch says.

In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Darch, Whiteley, and colleagues describe for the first time how close bacteria need to be to “talk” with each other in an environment similar to an infection. Their findings could reveal new ways to disrupt bacterial signaling and provide other targets to treat infections.

The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Human Frontiers Science, and the Welch Foundation.

Cystic Fibrosis Model

The study uses an environment similar to the chronic infection of the cystic fibrosis (CF) lung.

CF is a genetic disease that causes buildup of sticky mucus in the lung. The viscous setting CF creates makes the organ prime real estate for disease-causing bacteria. Among the most prevalent of these in the CF lung is Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

P. aeruginosa infections pose a huge problem because they are resistant to many antibiotics and are difficult to treat. Often P. aeruginosa infection is what causes death among patients with CF.

The team used a synthetic CF sputum media (SCFM2), based on the makeup of lung secretions from patients. In nutritional content and physical form, the medium is similar to sputum from the lung. Importantly, P. aeruginosa forms aggregates in SCFM2 that are similar in size to those observed in CF lung tissue.

3-D Printed Bacteria

To begin to answer the question “How close do you have to be to talk to your neighbor?” the team collaborated with Jason Shear at the University of Texas, Austin. The Shear Lab had developed a micro-3D-printing platform that could be used to engineer the growth of bacteria to mimic infections.

Bacteria are not uniformly distributed in infections. “Instead we see bacterial aggregates that vary in size and can be separated by large distances,” Whiteley says. “We needed an experimental method to engineer these types of infection landscapes in the lab.”

Using Shear’s micro-3D-printing platform, the team printed bacterial aggregates of exact positions and sizes.

A typical experiment starts by enclosing one producer cell in a picoliter-sized trap, using micro-3D-printing. After multiple cell divisions, the population fills the volume of the trap. Then SCFM2-containing aggregates of responder cells are overlaid the porous trap.

They observe the one-way flow of signals from aggregates in a trap (producers) to aggregates outside receiving signals (responders). They could see the response of completed conversations by responders changing color from red to green.

Implications for Cystic Fibrosis

“We found that bacterial aggregates slightly larger than those in CF lung – containing about 2,000 cells – were not large enough to signal to other aggregates,” Darch says.

Prior to this study, it was thought that bacterial signaling could occur over extended distances. However, in the CF lung, small populations of bacteria are scattered across a large volume and separated by large distances. Aggregates are unlikely to “talk” to each other. 

It took aggregates containing at least 5,000 cells to successfully send signals to neighbors as far away as 176 micrometers. “These aggregates are around five times the size of the average aggregate observed in CF lung tissue” Darch says “From these data, communication is likely confined within an individual aggregate rather than being a population-wide phenomenon”.

Among CF patients who are at least 20 years old, 80% are infected with P. aeruginosa. “Infection with P. aeruginosa remains a significant clinical problem in immunocompromised patients, particularly those with CF,” Darch says. “Understanding better how bacteria communicate has the potential to find ways of disrupting the communication and potentially diminishing bacterial virulence.”

“The study provides benchmark data for how quorum sensing might proceed in an environment similar to the CF lung,” says Whiteley, who is a member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “In different settings, where P. aeruginosa and other bacteria exist as aggregates of different sizes, communication may look different. Future studies will involve experimental and modeling work to further examine the spatial parameters of quorum sensing in CF and other infections, such as a chronic wound.”

Figure Caption

(Left) Rendered confocal laser-scanning micrograph of a micro-3D-printed trap (red)  surrounded by P. aeruginosa aggregates responding to quorum-sensing signals (green) in a synthetic CF sputum media (SCFM2).

(Right) Rendered confocal laser-scanning micrograph of responding (green) and non-responding (red) P. aeruginosa aggregates formed in a synthetic CF sputum media (SCFM2).

The scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Stanford University who led the new study hope in the future to see if some behaviors are indeed genetic programs and if gene regulation is clicking off neuronal firing patterns in real time to create behavior.

“We’re not there yet, but we’re beginning to get a handle on gene regulation patterns that drive the neuronal patterns,” said Todd Streelman, professor and chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences and also its chair, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “We were able to see that there’s a clear connection between gene expression and behavior.”

Better understanding autism

The research also may contribute to a better understanding of autism because the genes behind the fish behavior have human cousins that are implicated in autism spectrum disorder. And some typical autism behaviors like “stacking,” in which a child compulsively arranges objects into neat rows or towers, have parallels in how the fish, called cichlids, repetitively pile up sand to make symmetrical formations.

But for now, the researchers explored male cichlids trying to attract a mate in Lake Malawi in Africa and found that the regulation of specific genes and associated repetitive behavior occurred nearly hand-in-glove, a novel discovery.

They published their results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute on Aging, and the National Institute of General Medicine, all part of the National Institutes of Health.

Dig my castle

Let’s start with the behavior then go to the matching gene regulation:

Boy cichlids knock themselves out building stuff out of sand to impress girl fish ready to mate. Most of the cichlid species’ guys build a pit, or crater, and other species build a castle.

Both pits and castles are known as “bowers” and require the male fish to swim in the same circular way, scooping up sand in one place and spitting it out somewhere else. 

The difference is that the pit builders scoop up the sand from inside their swimming pattern and deposit it outside, leaving a hole in the middle of the bower with a raised rim surrounding it that makes the bower resemble a crater. Castle builders scoop the sand from outside the circle and deposit it inside. That creates a raised structure in the middle of the bower, making it resemble a volcano. 

Turning him on

“A switch goes on once the females become reproductively active. Suddenly, the males begin scooping and spitting thousands of times to build their structure,” said Zachary Johnson, a postdoctoral researcher in Streelman’s Lab. Johnson was a co-author on the new study and Streelman a co-principal investigator.

Scooping and spitting are so incessant that two-inch fish shovel up two-foot-wide structures: pit bowers for some species, castle bowers for others. The difference serves in attracting the right mate.

“Various species make their pits and castles in a common area, and structures have to be very specific, so the right female species can see, ‘This is the guy that I want’ compared to the other guys from other species that build the other thing. And she then has to pick the specific guy she wants from her own species,” said Chinar Patil, a co-first author of the study and a graduate research assistant in Streelman’s lab.

Cross-breeding cichlids

Now for the gene regulation part:

To observe the genes connected to either of these building behaviors, researchers have cross-mated pit-building species with castle-building species to make hybrid cichlids that have both sets of genes. These hybrids have delivered a lucky surprise.

The hybrid fish performed both behaviors neatly in sequence: first the pit making, then the castle making, always in that order.

“That’s amazing,” Johnson said. “You might expect hybrid behavior to be jumbled, or take on some intermediate form. Instead, they perform one species-specific behavior and then transition to performing the other species-specific behavior.”

Bower genes power up

This is useful to research because the hybrids have one full copy of genes from the pit parent and one from the castle parent. The cleanly separated behaviors have allowed for matching each behavior with increased and decreased activation in either set of genes in the fish’s brains.

The Georgia Tech and Stanford researchers were able to clearly match pit gene activation with pit behavioral mode as well as castle gene activation with castle behavioral mode.

“A lot of genes in the pit copy got up-regulated while the fish was in pit-making mode and the castle copy got up-regulated during castle-making mode,” Patil said. The genes and the behavior got visibly “turned on” and “tuned in” in tandem.

The difference in expression of either pit vs. castle genes was less of an absolute click-clack-on-off switch and more like inching one set of levers down on an audio mixer while tuning up the other set to a dominant level. 

Gene-behavior evolution

This was the study’s big achievement, which almost sounds like genes directly creating behavior, but that’s unconfirmed as of yet and could be the topic of future studies.

The study also brought new insights into genetic evolution in tandem with behavioral evolution, about which little is known. The genetic component may center around gene regulation in response to what’s going on in the animal’s environment in this case when females are ready to mate.

Pit making appears to be the evolutionarily older and better-established bower building behavior, and castle making is widely accepted as being the newer evolutionary development. But pit and castle species have very similar genomes, so where’s the evolutionary change?

When the team sequenced the DNA of pit and castle species, it was differences in regulatory genes that stuck out, and many up-regulated specific other genes connected to the respective bower building behaviors when mating time hit. It appeared the evolution of the regulatory genes was linked to the evolution of the behavior.

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Read MORE: On genetics of neuroscience and behavior

The following researchers also co-authored this study: Ryan York, Hunter Fraser and Russel Fernald of Stanford University; Kawther Abdilleh and Patrick McGrath of Georgia Tech; Mathew Conte of the University of Maryland; and Martin Genner of the University of Bristol. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (grant R01NINDS034950), the National Institute on Aging (grant R21AG050304), and National Institute of General Medicine (grants R01GM101095, 2R01GM097171-05A1, R01GM114170). Findings, conclusions, opinions, and recommendations in the material are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies.

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Writer: Ben Brumfield

Though the cell is in the lab, it has high potential to someday electrically power homes and perhaps cars, say the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology who led its development. In a new study in the journal Nature Energy the researchers detailed how they reimagined the entire fuel cell with the help of a newly invented fuel catalyst.

The catalyst has dispensed with high-priced hydrogen fuel by making its own out of cheap, readily available methane. And improvements throughout the cell cooled the seething operating temperatures that are customary in methane fuel cells dramatically, a striking engineering accomplishment.

Methane fuel cells usually require temperatures of 750 to 1,000 degrees Celsius to run. This new one needs only about 500, which is even a notch cooler than automobile combustion engines, which run at around 600 degrees Celsius.

That lower temperature could trigger cascading cost savings in the ancillary technology needed to operate a fuel cell, potentially pushing the new cell to commercial viability. The researchers feel confident that engineers can design electric power units around this fuel cell with reasonable effort, something that has eluded previous methane fuel cells.

‘Sensation in our world’

“Our cell could make for a straightforward, robust overall system that uses cheap stainless steel to make interconnectors,” said Meilin Liu, who led the study and is a Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. Interconnectors are parts that help bring together many fuel cells into a stack, or functional unit.

“Above 750 degrees Celsius, no metal would withstand the temperature without oxidation, so you’d have a lot of trouble getting materials, and they would be extremely expensive and fragile, and contaminate the cell,” Liu said.

“Lowering the temperature to 500 degrees Celsius is a sensation in our world. Very few people have even tried it,” said Ben deGlee, a graduate research assistant in Liu’s lab and one of the first authors of the study. “When you get that low, it makes the job of the engineer designing the stack and connected technologies much easier.”

The new cell also eliminates the need for a major ancillary device called a steam reformer, which is normally required to convert methane and water into hydrogen fuel.

Liu, deGlee, co-first author Yu Chen, who is a postdoctoral researcher in Liu’s lab, and co-first author Yu Tang of the University of Kansas, published the results of their research on October 29, 2018. Their work was funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), both in the U.S. Department of Energy. It was also funded by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Chemistry.

‘Distributed generation’

The research was based on a type of fuel cell with high potential for commercial viability, the solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). SOFCs are known for their versatility in fuels they can use.

If it goes to market, though the new cell might not power automobiles for a while, it could land sooner in basements as part of a more decentralized, cleaner, cheaper electrical power grid. The fuel cell stack itself would be about the size of a shoebox, plus ancillary technology to make it run.

“The hope is you could install this device like a tankless water heater. It would run off of natural gas to power your house,” Liu said. “That would save society and industry the enormous cost of new power plants and large electrical grid expansions.”

“It would make homes and businesses more power independent,” Liu said. “That kind of system would be called distributed generation, and our sponsors want to develop that.”

Homemade hydrogen

Hydrogen is the best fuel for powering fuel cells, but its cost is exorbitant. The researchers figured out how to convert methane to hydrogen in the fuel cell itself via the new catalyst, which is made with cerium, nickel and ruthenium and has the chemical formula Ce_0.9Ni_0.05Ru_0.05O_2, abbreviated CNR.

When methane and water molecules come into contact with the catalyst and heat, nickel chemically cleaves the methane molecule. Ruthenium does the same with water. The resulting parts come back together as that very desirable hydrogen (H₂) and carbon monoxide (CO), which the researchers surprisingly put to good use.

“CO causes performance problems in most fuel cells, but here, we’re using it as a fuel,” Chen said.

Making electricity

H₂ and CO continue on to further catalyst layers that make up the anode, the part of the fuel cell that yanks off electrons, making the carbon monoxide and hydrogen positively charged ions. The electrons travel via a wire - creating the electricity flow - toward the cathode.

There, oxygen, which is very electron-hungry, sucks up the electrons, closing the electrical circuit and becoming O^2- ions. Ionized hydrogen and oxygen meet and exit the system as water condensation; the carbon monoxide and oxygen ions meet to become pure carbon dioxide, which could be captured.

For the energy produced, fuel cell technology creates far, far less carbon dioxide than combustion engines.

In some fuel cells, the water in the initial reactions must be introduced from the outside. In this new fuel cell, it’s replenished in the last reaction phase, which forms water that cycles back to react with the methane.

Catalysts converge

The new catalyst, CNR, manufactured by research collaborators at the University of Kansas, is the outer layer of the anode side of the cell and doubles as a protectant against decay, extending the life of the cell. CNR has strong cohort catalysts in inner layers and on the other side of the cell, the cathode.

On the cathode end, oxygen’s reaction and movement through the system are usually notoriously slow, but Liu’s lab has recently sped it up to raise the electricity output by using what’s called nanofiber cathodes, which Liu’s lab developed in a prior study. (A tailored double perovskite nanofiber catalyst enables ultrafast oxygen evolution.)

“The structures of these various catalysts, as well as the nanofiber cathodes, all together allowed us to drop the operating temperature,” Chen said.

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Also read: Turbocharging Fuel Cells with a Multifunctional Catalyst

The following people coauthored the research: Bote Zhao, Lei Zhang, Seonyoung Yoo, Kai Pei, Jun Hyuk Kim and Yong Ding of Georgia Tech; Yuechang Wei and Franklin Feng Tao of the University of Kansas, and Ziyun Wang and P. Hu of The Queen’s University of Belfast. The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy under the following agencies and programs: Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) REBELS program (award DE-AR0000502), and SECA Core Technology Program (award DE-FE0031201), the Catalysis program of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences (grant DE- SC0014561). It was also funded by the Division of Chemistry of the National Science Foundation (award 1462121). Any results, conclusions, and opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies.

DOI: 10.1038/s41560-018-0262-5

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-660-1408), ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

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“I didn’t expect this,” said Petit Institute researcher Frank Stewart, principal investigator of a study led by the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The microbial communities are seeded from microbes coming from the animals and their food in an aquarium that does not tap into the ocean. But these looked like natural marine microbial communities.”

That’s happy news for the thousands of creatures who live in Georgia Aquarium’s Ocean Voyager, the largest indoor oceanic exhibit in the United States. Watch the video and read the story in Georgia Tech’s Research Horizons right here.

Pharmaceutical companies use cell-based assays, a combination of living cells and sensor electronics, to measure physiological changes in the cells. That data is used for high-throughput screening (HTS) during drug discovery. In this early phase of drug development, the goal is to identify target pathways and promising chemical compounds that could be developed further – and to eliminate those that are ineffective or toxic – by measuring the physiological responses of the cells to each compound. 

Phenotypic testing of thousands of candidate compounds, with the majority “failing early,” allows only the most promising ones to be further developed into drugs and maybe eventually to undergo clinical trials, where drug failure is much more costly. But most existing cell-based assays use electronic sensors that can only measure one physiological property at a time and cannot obtain holistic cellular responses. 

That’s where the new cellular sensing platform comes in. “The innovation of our technology is that we are able to leverage the advance of nano-electronic technologies to create cellular interfacing platforms with massively parallel pixels,” said Wang. “And within each pixel we can detect multiple physiological parameters from the same group of cells at the same time.” The experimental quad-modality chip features extracellular or intracellular potential recording, optical detection, cellular impedance measurement, and biphasic current stimulation. 

Wang said the new technology offers four advantages over existing platforms:

Multimodal sensing: The chip’s ability to record multiple parameters on the same cellular sample gives researchers the ability to comprehensively monitor complex cellular responses, uncover the correlations among those parameters and investigate how they may respond together when exposed to drugs. “Living cells are small but highly complex systems. Drug administration often results in multiple physiological changes, but this cannot be detected using conventional single-modal sensing,” said Wang.

Large field of view: The platform allows researchers to examine the behavior of cells in a large aggregate to see how they respond collectively at the tissue level.

Small spatial resolution: Not only can researchers look at cells at the tissue level, they could also examine them at single-cell or even sub-cellular resolution.

Low-cost platform: The new array platform is built on standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies, which is also used to build computer chips, and can be easily scaled up for mass production.

Wang’s team worked closely with Hee Cheol Cho, associate professor and the Urowsky-Sahr Scholar in Pediatric Bioengineering, whose Heart Regeneration lab is part of the Wallace Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. They used neonatal rat ventricular myocytes and cardiac fibroblasts to illustrate the multi-parametric cell profiling ability of the array for drug screening. The recent results were published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Lab on a Chip on August 31, 2018. 

Monitoring cellular responses in multi-physical domains and holistic multi-parametric cellular profiling should also prove beneficial in screening out chemical compounds that could have harmful effects on certain organs, said Jong Seok Park, a post-doctoral fellow in Wang’s lab and a leading author of the study. Many drugs have been withdrawn from the market after discoveries that they had toxic effects on the heart or liver, for example. This platform should enable researchers to comprehensively test for organ toxicity and other side effects at the initial phases of drug discovery.  

The experimental chip may be useful for other applications, including personalized medicine – for example, testing cancer cells from a particular patient. “Patient to patient variation is huge, even with the same type of drug,” said Wang. The cellular interface array could be used to see which combination of existing drugs would give the best response and to find the optimum dose that is most effective with minimum toxicity to healthy cells. 

The chip is capable of actuation as well as sensing. In the future, Wang said that cellular data from the chip could be uploaded and processed, and based on that, commands for new actuation or data acquisition could be sent to the chip automatically and wirelessly. He envisions rooms and rooms containing culture chambers with millions of such chips in fully automated facilities, “just automatically doing new drug selection for us,” he said. 

Beyond these applications, Wang noted the scientific value of the research itself. Integrated circuits and nanoelectronics are some of the most sophisticated technology platforms created by humans. Living cells, on the other hand, are complex products produced through billions of years of natural selection and evolution. 

“The central theme of our research is how we can leverage the best platform created by nature with the best platform created by humans,” he said. “Can we let them work together to create hybrid systems that achieve capabilities beyond biology only or electronics only systems? The fundamental scientific question we are addressing is how we can let inorganic electronics better interface with organic living cells.” 

These researchers also participated in the related studies: Doohwan Jung, Adam Wang, Taiyun Chi, Sensen Li and Moez K. Aziz from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech; and Sandra I. Grijalva and Michael N. Sayegh from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and ECCS CCSS Program, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship grant numbers DGE-1148903 and DGE-1650044, Office of Naval Research, and Semiconductor Research Corporation SSB roadmap consortium. 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 funding agencies.

CITATION: Jong Seok Park, et al., “Multi-parametric cell profiling with a CMOS quad-modality cellular interfacing array for label-free fully automated drug screening,” (Lab Chip 2018). DOI: 10.1039/c8lc00156a

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (john.toon@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: Kenna Simmons

The researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology made the chemical medley in the lab to closely mimic membraneless organelles, mini-organs in cells that are not contained in a membrane but exist as pools of watery solutions, or puddles. And their model demonstrated how, with just a few ingredients, the organelles could carry out fine-tuned biological processes.

The researchers published the results of their study in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces for the September 26, 2018 issue. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Science and by the National Science Foundation.

A quick look at membraneless organelles should aid in understanding the research’s significance.

What are membraneless organelles?

Organelles that are pools of watery solutions and not objects with membranes are a fairly recent discovery. A prime example is the nucleolus. It resides inside of the cell’s nucleus, which is an organelle that does have a membrane.

In the past, researchers thought the nucleolus disappeared during cell division and reappeared later. In the meantime, researchers have realized that the nucleolus has no membrane and that during cell division it gets diffused the way water bubbles do in vinaigrette dressing that has been shaken up.

“After cell division, the nucleolus comes back together as a single compartment of fluid,” said Shuichi Takayama, the study’s principal investigator and a professor in the Wallace E. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Membraneless organelles can be made up of a few different aqueous solutions, each with different solutes like proteins or sugar or RNA or salt. Differences in the thermodynamics of the solutions, that is, how their molecules bounce around, keep them from merging into a single solution.

Instead, they phase separate the way oil and water do, even after intermingling. But there’s no oil in this case.

“They’re all waters,” Takayama said. “They just don’t mix with each other because they have different solutes.”

What lifelike processes did the synthetic experiment demonstrate?

During intermingling, important things happen. The nucleolus, for example, is vital to DNA transcription. But the synthetic set-up, a collection of watery solutions made by the study’s first author, Taisuke Kojima, carried out a simpler series of reactions that demonstrated how membraneless organelles could process sugar.

“We had three phases of solutions that each held different reactants,” Kojima said. “It was like a ball with three layers: an outer solution, an intermediate solution, and a core solution. Glucose was in the outer layer; an enzyme, glucose oxidase, was in the second layer, and horseradish peroxidase was in the core along with a colorimetric substrate that gave us a visible signal when the last reaction we were looking for occurred.”

The glucose in the outer layer interfaced with the glucose oxidase in the second layer, which catalyzed the glucose to hydrogen peroxide. It landed in the second layer and interfaced with the horseradish peroxidase in the core layer, which catalyzed the hydrogen peroxide along with the compound that turns colors, which changed the color of the core layer.

“This type of cascading reaction is what one would expect to see membraneless organelles perform,” Takayama said.

The cascade even transported each reaction product from one compartment to the next, something very typical in biological processes, like organs digesting food or an organelle processing molecules.

What can a surprise discovery teach us?

Part of the reaction took the researchers by surprise, and it resulted in a novel discovery.

“When researchers think about membraneless organelles, we often think that the reactions inside them are more efficient when their enzymes and substrates are in the same compartment,” Takayama said. “But in our experiments, that actually slowed the reaction down. We said, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’”

“When the substrate is in the same place where the product of the reaction also builds up, the enzyme sometimes gets confused, and that can impede the reaction,” said Kojima, who is a postdoctoral researcher in Takayama’s lab. “I was pretty surprised to see it.”

Kojima put the enzymes and substrate into separate solutions, which interfaced but did not merge to a single solution, and the reaction in his synthetic organelle worked efficiently. This showed how unexpected subtleties may be fine-tuning organelle chemistry.

“It was a Goldilocks regime, not too much contact between substrate and enzyme, not too little, just right,” Takayama said.

“Sometimes, in a cell, a substrate is not abundant and may need to be concentrated in its own little compartment and then brought into contact with the enzyme,” Takayama said. “By contrast, some substrates can be very abundant in the nucleus, and it might be important to partition them off from enzymes to get just enough contact for the right kind of reaction.”

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Also read: Buzzing Cancer Drugs into Malignancies in the Brain

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Science (grant R01 GM12351) and by the National Science Foundation (grant CBET 0939511). Findings, opinions, and conclusions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the NIH.

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-660-1408), ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

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Having bacterial cooties in common with anemones may help the clownfish cozily nest in anemones’ venomous tentacles, a weird symbiosis that life scientists - including now a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology - have tried for decades to figure out. The marine researchers studied how populations of microbes shifted on clownfish who mixed and mingled with fish-killing anemones.

“It’s the iconic mutualism between a host and a partner, and we knew that microbes are on every surface of each animal,” said Frank Stewart, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences. “In this particular mutualism, these surfaces are covered with stuff that microbes love to eat: mucus.”

Swabbing mucus 

Clownfish and anemones swap lots of mucus when they rub. So, the researchers brought clownfish and anemones together and analyzed the microbes in the mucus covering the fish when they were hosted by anemones and when they weren’t.

“Their microbiome changed,” said Zoe Pratte, a postdoctoral researcher in Stewart’s lab and first author of the new study. “Two bacteria that we tracked in particular multiplied with contact with anemones.”

“On top of that, there were sweeping changes,” said Stewart, the study’s principal investigator. “If you looked at the total assemblages of microbes, they looked quite different on a clownfish that was hosted by an anemone and on one that was not.” 

The researchers chased 12 clownfish in six fish tanks for eight weeks to swab their mucus and identify microbes through gene sequencing. They published their results in the journal Coral Reefs. The research was funded by the Simons Foundation. 

Questions and Answers

Here are some questions and answers about the experiment, which produced some amusing anecdotes, along with fascinating facts about anemones and clownfish. For example, fish peeing on anemones makes the latter stronger. Clownfish change genders. And it was especially hard to catch one fish the researchers named “Houdini.”

Does this solve the mystery about this strange symbiosis?

No, but it’s a new approach to the clownfish-anemone conundrum.

“It’s a first step that’s asking the question, ‘Is there part of the microbial relationship that changes?’” Stewart said. The study delivered the answer on the clownfish side, which was “yes.”

An earlier hypothesis on the conundrum held that clownfish mucus was too thick to sting through. Current ideas consider that mucus swapping also covers the clownfish with anemone antigens, i.e. its own immune proteins, or that fish and fish killer may be exchanging chemical messages.

“The anemone may recognize some chemical on the clownfish that keeps it from stinging,” Stewart said. “And that could involve microbes. Microbes are great chemists.”

Going forward, the researchers want to analyze mucus chemistry. They also don’t yet know to what extent the microbes on the fish change because of bacteria the fish gleans from the anemone. It’s possible the fish mucus microbiome just develops differently on the fish due to the contact.

What do anemones normally do to fish?

Kill them and eat them. 

“The anemone evolved to kill fish. It shoots little poison darts into the skin of a fish to kill it then pull it into its mouth,” Stewart said. “The clownfish gets away with living right in that.”

By the way, the tentacles are not harmful to people.

“If you touch an anemone, it feels like they’re sucking on your finger,” Pratte said. “Their little harpoons feel like they’re sticking to you. It doesn’t hurt.”

What do the anemones and clownfish get out of the relationship?

For starters, they protect each other from potential prey. But there’s lots more. Some clownfish even change genders by living in an anemone.

“When they start being hosted, the fish make a big developmental switch,” Stewart said. “The first fish in a group that establishes itself in an anemone in the wild transitions from male to female, grows much bigger and becomes the dominant member of the group.”

She is then the sole female in a school of smaller male mates.

Anemones appear to grow larger and healthier, partly because the clownfish urinate on them.

“When the fish pee, algae in the anemone take up the nitrogen then secrete sugars that feed the anemone and make it grow,” Pratte said. “Sometimes the fish drop their food, and it falls into the anemone which eats it.”

Any fun anecdotes from this experiment? 

Plenty: It was scientifically straightforward but laborious to carry out, partly because the researchers were taking meticulous care of the fish at the same time.

“You have to get fish and anemones to pair up, and the fish can host in other places, like nooks in the rock,” Pratte said.

“Clownfish are smarter than other fish, so they’re harder to catch, especially when we want to minimize stress on the animals,” said Alicia Caughman, an undergraduate research assistant in the School of Biological Science’s Fast Track to Research program. “We named one fish ‘Houdini.’ He could wiggle between nets and tight spaces and usually outsmart whoever was trying to catch him."

“We also had 'Bubbles,' who blew a lot of bubbles, 'Biggie' and 'Smalls,' 'Broad,' 'Sheila,' 'Earl,' and 'Flounder,' who liked to flounder (flop around),” Pratte said. Clownfish have differing sizes and details in their stripes, which allow people to tell them apart.

The anemone side of the microbial question may prove harder to answer because for all Houdini's wiles, anemones, which are squishy non-vertebrates, are even more trying. They can squeeze into uncomfortable niches or plug up the aquarium drainage, and they also have temperamental microbiomes.

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Also READ: When boy fish build castles to impress girl fish, boy genes get a rise

Also READ: Teeny bacteria do a dirty job to clean a huge fish tank

The following researchers coauthored the paper: Nastassia V. Patin, Mary E. McWhirt and Darren J. Parris, all of Georgia Tech. DOI: 10.1007/s00338-018-01750-z. The research was funded by the Simons Foundation (award 346253). Any findings, opinions or recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Simons Foundation.

Media relations assistance: Ben Brumfield (404) 660-1408, ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

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Writer: Ben Brumfield

Gravitational waves, hard-to-see ripples in the fabric of space-time, had been predicted by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in 1915. These gravitational waves carry information about their origins, potentially offering a new way to observe the cosmos. Three years ago, however, researchers didn’t know if this first observation was merely an anomaly or part of a widespread phenomenon that could teach us about the population of black holes in the universe.

A dozen Georgia Tech faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and students participated with hundreds of other researchers in the National Science Foundation-sponsored LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration that reported the first gravitational waves. After the announcement, the work continued, and scientists from around the world have now observed 10 black hole collisions and a merger of two binary neutron stars using LIGO and the European-based Virgo gravitational wave detector. 

Catalog of Coalescing Cosmic Objects

The records of these cataclysmic cosmic events, including four black hole observations disclosed for the first time, have been collected into a catalog released December 1 at the Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop held in College Park, Maryland. Production of the catalog suggests that gravitational wave astronomy will indeed offer astronomers a new way to view the secrets of the universe.

“The individual black hole detections previously announced allow us to confirm, after many years of searching, that gravitational wave astronomy is a feasible endeavor,” said James Alexander Clark, a research scientist in Georgia Tech’s Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (CRA) in the School of Physics and a member of the LIGO collaboration. “We now know that pairs of massive black holes exist and collide frequently enough for us to detect gravitational waves within a human lifetime. We also know that the instruments and analysis procedures we use are capable of detecting and characterizing gravitational wave sources and we have been able to start probing some basic features of the theory of general relativity.”

Astronomers do not have the luxury of repeating laboratory experiments to build confidence in their findings, Clark pointed out. “Instead, we rely on observing large samples of objects and phenomena spread throughout the universe. By building a ‘census’ of this population, we are rapidly learning more about how common these objects are, what their general properties are like, and about the diversity of black holes in the universe.”

Expanding the Observations

That census should expand more rapidly starting in April 2019 when LIGO begins its next observing run. The two instruments, one in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other in Hanford, Washington, are shut down periodically for upgrades to improve sensitivity. “By observing a larger sample of binary black hole sources, we are more likely to find systems with more extreme configurations that allow more stringent tests of our models — and of general relativity,” Clark added.

The new Gravitational Wave Catalog shows that gravitational waves from powerful cosmic phenomena arrive at the Earth almost once every 15 days of observation, noted Karan Jani, a postdoctoral fellow in the CRA and also a member of the LIGO collaboration. “Future releases will provide much stronger tests of Einstein’s theory of gravity, and help provide a better understanding of how black holes are formed in the universe.”

Data collected on the 10 black hole mergers describe objects that are as much as 100 times more massive than our own sun. Among the reports is a July 29, 2017, signal that represents the most distant, most energetic, and most massive black hole collision detected so far. That collision happened about five billion years ago — even before the birth of our sun — and released an amount of energy equivalent to converting almost five solar masses to gravitational radiation.

What We Learn from Black Hole Observations

Black holes are among the few objects in the universe massive and dense enough to produce gravitational waves that can be measured, said Sudarshan Ghonge, a CRA graduate student and also a member of the collaboration. But those measurements can be quite worthwhile.

“These waves have signatures that depend on the properties of the black holes from which they originated,” he said. “By measuring these waves, we can infer the masses, spin, sky location, and distance from us. It’s similar to how you can listen to a sound and roughly figure out where it’s coming from, how far away it is, and what’s causing it.”

LIGO works by observing infinitesimally small changes caused by gravitational waves passing through the Earth. The changes affect laser beams traveling through twin four-kilometer arms of the L-shaped observatories. The Hanford and Livingston facilities, separated by 1,865 miles, confirm the observations, as both facilities should detect the waves. Additional information comes from the Virgo facility in Italy.

Observing Runs Produce New Records 

From September 12, 2015, to January 19, 2016, during the first LIGO observing run since undergoing upgrades in a program called Advanced LIGO, gravitational waves from three binary black hole mergers were detected. The second observing run, which lasted from November 30, 2016, to August 25, 2017, yielded one binary neutron star merger and seven additional binary black hole mergers, including the four new gravitational wave events reported December 1. The new events are known as GW170729, GW170809, GW170818 and GW170823, in reference to the dates they were detected.

GW170814 was the first binary black hole merger measured by the three-detector network made possible by collaboration between LIGO and Virgo, and allowed for the first tests of gravitational wave polarization, which is analogous to light polarization. 

One of the new events, GW170818, detected by the global network formed by the LIGO and Virgo observatories, was very precisely pinpointed in the sky. The position of the binary black holes, located 2.5 billion light-years from Earth, was identified in the sky with a precision of 39 square degrees. That makes it the next-best localized gravitational wave source after the GW170817 neutron star merger.

The event GW170817, detected three days after GW170814, represented the first time that gravitational waves were observed from the merger of a binary neutron star system. What's more, this collision was seen in gravitational waves and light, marking an exciting new chapter in multi-messenger astronomy, in which cosmic objects are observed simultaneously in different forms of radiation.

Advancing Gravitational Wave Observation

“The release of four additional binary black hole mergers further informs us of the nature of the population of these binary systems in the universe and better constrains the event rate for these types of events,” said Caltech’s Albert Lazzarini, deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory.

"In just one year, LIGO and Virgo working together have dramatically advanced gravitational wave science, and the rate of discovery suggests the most spectacular findings are yet to come,” said Denise Caldwell, director of NSF's Division of Physics. "The accomplishments of NSF's LIGO and its international partners are a source of pride for the agency, and we expect even greater advances as LIGO's sensitivity becomes better and better in the coming year."

"The next observing run, starting in Spring 2019, should yield many more gravitational wave candidates, and the science the community can accomplish will grow accordingly,” said David Shoemaker, spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and senior research scientist in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “It’s an incredibly exciting time.” 

“It is gratifying to see the new capabilities that become available through the addition of Advanced Virgo to the global network,” said Jo van den Brand of Nikhef (the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics) and VU University Amsterdam, who is the spokesperson for the Virgo Collaboration. “Our greatly improved pointing precision will allow astronomers to rapidly find any other cosmic messengers emitted by the gravitational wave sources.” The enhanced pointing capability of the LIGO-Virgo network is made possible by exploiting the time delays of the signal arrival at the different sites and the so-called antenna patterns of the interferometers.

The scientific papers describing these new findings, which are being initially published on the arXiv repository of electronic preprints, present detailed information in the form of a catalog of all the gravitational wave detections and candidate events of the two observing runs as well as describing the characteristics of the merging black hole population. Most notably, we find that almost all black holes formed from stars are lighter than 45 times the mass of the sun. Thanks to more advanced data processing and better calibration of the instruments, the accuracy of the astrophysical parameters of the previously announced events increased considerably.  

Added Georgia Tech professor Laura Cadonati, deputy spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, “These new discoveries were only made possible through the tireless and carefully coordinated work of the detector commissioners at all three observatories, and the scientists around the world responsible for data quality and cleaning, searching for buried signals, and parameter estimation for each candidate — each a scientific specialty requiring enormous expertise and experience.”

About LIGO and Virgo

LIGO is funded by NSF and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the United Kingdom (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. More than 1,200 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available at http://ligo.org/partners.php.

The Virgo Collaboration consists of more than 300 physicists and engineers belonging to 28 different European research groups: six from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France; 11 from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy; two in the Netherlands with Nikhef; the MTA Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; Spain with IFAE and the Universities of Valencia and Barcelona; two in Belgium with the Universities of Liege and Louvain; Jena University in Germany; and the European Gravitational Observatory, the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, funded by CNRS, INFN and Nikhef. A list of the Virgo Collaboration can be found at http://public.virgo-gw.eu/the-virgo-collaboration/. More information is available on the Virgo website at www.virgo-gw.eu.

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The effect of this “mechanical diffraction” allowed researchers to observe how the snakes’ trajectories were altered through passive mechanisms governed by the skeletal and muscular dynamics of the animals’ propagating body waves. The researchers studied live snakes as they slithered through an obstacle made up of six force-sensitive rigid pegs that buckled the animals’ bodies, changing their paths in predictable ways.

The results, described February 25 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that the Western Shovel-nosed snakes (Chionactis occipitalis) do not deliberately change direction when they encounter obstacles while speeding across the sand. Understanding the movement of these limbless animals could help engineers improve the control of autonomous search and rescue robots designed to operate on sand, grass and other complex environments. 

“The idea behind passive dynamics is that there are waveform shape changes being made by the animal that are driven entirely by the passive properties of their bodies,” said Perrin Schiebel, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Instead of sending a signal to activate a muscle, the interaction of the snakes’ bodies with the external environment is what causes the shape change. The forces of the obstacles are pushing the snake bodies into a new shape.”

The colorful shovel-nosed snake normally uses a sinusoidal S-shaped wave to move across the deserts of the Southwest United States. Running into rigid pegs in a laboratory environment doesn’t lead it to actively change that waveform, which Schiebel and colleagues studied using high-speed video cameras with eight different animals. 

In a study supported by the National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, Defense Advanced Projects Agency, and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, the researchers used 253 snake trips to build up a diffraction pattern. Remarkably, the pattern also revealed that the scattering directions were “quantized” such that the probability of finding a snake behind the array could be represented in a pattern mimicking wave interference. A computational model was able to capture the pattern, demonstrating how the snakes’ direction would be altered by obstacle encounters via passive body buckling.

“One problem with robots moving in the real world is that we don’t yet have principles by which we can understand how best to control these robots on granular surfaces like sand, leaf litter, rubble or grass,” said Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “The point of this study was to try to understand how limbless locomotors, which have long bodies that can bend in interesting ways using potentially complicated neuromechanical control schemes, manage to move through complicated terrain.”

The snake experiment was suggested by a robotic study done by postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Rieser, who found similar behavior among robots encountering obstacles.

“The robot tends to have aspects that mimic features of the subatomic world — the quantum world,” Goldman explained. “When it collides with barriers, a robot propagates through those barriers using waves of body bending. Its trajectory deviates as it exits the barriers, and many repeated trials reveal a ‘lumpy’ scattering pattern, analogous to experiments. We realized that we could use this surprising and beautiful phenomenon, classical physics but with self-propulsion a key feature, as a scattering experiment to interrogate the control scheme used by the snakes.”

Experimentally, the researchers used a “snake arena” covered with shag carpet to mimic sand. Undergraduate students Alex Hubbard and Lillian Chen released the snakes one at a time into the arena and encouraged them to slither through the grating.

The eyes of the desert snakes are naturally covered with scales to protect them. The researchers used children’s face paint to temporarily “blindfold” the animals so they would not be distracted by the researchers. The paint did not harm the animals.

“When we put the snakes down in the arena, they started moving using the same waveform they use on desert sand,” explained Schiebel. “They would then encounter the dowel grating, pass through it, and continue on the other side still using that waveform.”

Instead of continuing to travel through the arena in a straight line, the snakes would exit at a different angle, though they did not grab the posts or use them to assist their movement. Schiebel worked with Zeb Rocklin, a Georgia Tech assistant professor of physics, to model the directional changes. The model showed how simple interactions between the snakes' wave pattern and the grating produce patterns of favored scattering directions.

“We think the snake is essentially operating in a model that control engineers would consider ‘open loop,’” said Goldman. “It is setting a particular motor program on its body, which generates the characteristic wave pattern, and when it collides with the obstacle, its body mechanics allow it to deform and move the posts without degrading its speed.”

Goldman believes the work could help developers of snake-like robots improve their control schemes.

“We think that our discoveries of the role of passive dynamics in the snake can facilitate new snake robot designs that will enable them to move through complex environments more fluidly,” he said. “The goal would be to build search and rescue robots that can get into these complex environments and help first responders.”

And as a bonus, Goldman said, “We find that the richness of interactions between self-propelled systems like snakes and robots with their environment is fascinating from the standpoint of ‘active matter’ physics.”

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Physics of Living Systems program awards PHY-1205878, PHY-1150760 and CMMI-1361778; by the Army Research Office through award W911NF-11-1-0514; U.S. DoD National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG) 32 CFR 168a; and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award. 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 organizations.

CITATION: Perrin E. Schiebel, et al., “Mechanical diffraction reveals the role of passive dynamics in a slithering snake,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019).

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A paper published December 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a closer look at these specialists, who perform essential roles in research and resulting academic publishing – but who may never lead production of a journal paper themselves. These supporting scientists often do their work outside the traditional tenure track and may never obtain permanent positions as professors.

“More and more critical scientific work is taking place in teams, and there are people who are building their careers supporting these teams,” said John Walsh, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and a co-author of the study. “These supporting scientists are here to stay as a part of our scientific workforce, but we don’t really have a career system that accounts for and recognizes the contributions they make.”

Since the 1960s, the ranks of these “middle authors” has grown from 25 to 60 percent of the research authors publishing in the three fields the study examined. With titles such as “research scientist,” “laboratory technician” or “postdoctoral fellow,” these authors often move from one temporary assignment to another, and may drop out of research publishing in as few as five years after receiving a Ph.D.

“There seems to be more volatility in scientific careers,” Walsh noted. “Careers are getting shorter, and the point at which authors drop out, the half-life of a scientist, is getting shorter.” The study found that the time at which half of a cohort has left academic publishing has declined from 35 years in the 1960s to only five years a half century later.

Walsh and colleagues Staša Milojevic and Filippo Radicchi from the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University used data from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science to study the changing demographics of scientific careers by looking at researchers in the fields of astronomy, ecology and robotics. They examined the careers of 71,164 scientists in astronomy, 20,704 in ecology and 17,646 in robotics to determine when publishing careers began and the publishing roles played by individual scientists. The National Science Foundation-supported research analyzed millions of bibliographic items produced during the study period.

The researchers looked for factors that might predict the career length for newly minted Ph.D. scientists. They found that the long-term survival of lead authors correlated with the number of publications during their first five years, while the success of supporting scientists didn’t seem to have a predictor.

The study wasn’t able to determine where the dropout scientists went after they stopped publishing, but Walsh notes there are number of career choices that would utilize Ph.D. skills – teaching, research administration or industrial research – without the expectation of traditional academic publishing.

With academic research based on the conventional roles of principal investigators and graduate students, the supportive scientists necessary for today’s research might not find a place in traditional college and university career paths.

“If you build the hiring, promotion and compensation systems on a model of a principal investigator and graduate students, these important contributors may be left out,” he said. “We may need to rethink the career and reward system because these specialists are becoming a larger and larger share of the scientific workforce.”

What’s causing the shift toward more transient members of research teams? Walsh says factors include the need for large teams to take on big science challenges, and competition for research support that drives the division of labor in team-based approaches – similar to what happened in factories – to get work done faster and more efficiently.

“There is very strong pressure to be good and to be fast,” he said. “One of the effects of what has been called the bureaucratization of research is that as groups get larger, you see more specialization and people who become permanent staff members who help support the team.”

Walsh said the growth of this “temporary workforce” represents a change in the university research enterprise.

“A significant and growing share of authors in each of these fields we studied spent their entire career as part of a research group, but never as a leader,” he said. “We saw this as strong evidence of a transition in the organization of scientific work.”

This work used Web of Science data by Clarivate Analytics provided by the Indiana University Network Science Institute and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University. This work was supported by National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (SMA) Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant SMA-1645585.

CITATION: Staša Milojevic, Filippo Radicchi, and John P. Walsh, “Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800478115

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“Just going back and forth from campus to my house can make me feel claustrophobic,” said Bellotti, a third-year Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering. “I like hiking a lot, so Sweetwater Creek is one of my favorite places to go. It’s really cool to drive just 30 minutes away and feel like you’re in the mountains.”

Besides Sweetwater Creek, there are plenty of spots that are perfect for a day trip. Read on for a list of eight nearby destinations that will help you escape the city this summer. 

1. Check out the largest lake in Georgia. Lake Lanier is located just 45 minutes north of Atlanta and offers a variety of outdoor activities including hiking, camping, and fishing. Plus, it’s home to Margaritaville at Lanier Islands where you’ll find restaurants, a water park with water slides, and more.
2. Visit an Alpine village. About 90 minutes north of the city is Helen, Ga., a village that looks like it was transported from the Swiss Alps. Visit one of the local vineyards, stroll through the Folk Pottery Museum or Helen Arts & Heritage Council, or get a little shopping in at the Alpine Village Shoppes. If you’d rather partake in outdoor activities, check out Duke’s Creek Falls or the Sautee Nacoochee Indian Mound.
3. Hike Georgia’s Little Grand Canyon. Drive south for about two hours, and you’ll reach Providence Canyon, home to trails through nine different canyons. The canyons date back to the 1800s when they were carved out of land damaged by poor farming practices. Visitors can see the red and orange rock formations by walking along the canyon rims, hike through the creeks and trails at the bottom, or check out the museum.
4. See the state’s tallest waterfall. About 90 minutes north of Atlanta, you’ll find Amicalola Falls, which offers several different trails, including an eight-mile path to the beginning of the Appalachian Trail. Once you’re done hiking, try ziplining or practice your archery skills at the Amicalola Falls Lodge.
5. Head to the coast. Not only is Atlanta close to the mountains, but it’s only about four hours west of the beach. Take a swim at one of Tybee Island’s public beaches, and then take a tour of the Tybee Island Light House, or check out historic Fort Screven.  
6. Listen to some tunes. If you’re a music lover, make the 90-minute drive east to Athens where bands like R.E.M. and the B-52s got their start. You can find live music at spots including the Georgia Theatre, the Foundry, and the 40 Watt Club.  
7. Find out about folk art. If you’re an art fan, make the two-hour drive north to Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, which is just outside Summerville, Ga. The garden is home to art and sculpture, including several buildings like the five-story Folk Art Chapel.
8. Leave the state. It doesn’t take long to visit one of Georgia’s neighboring states. For example, a visit to Chattanooga, Tenn., (north of Atlanta) clocks in at about two hours. While you’re there, walk among the fishes at the Tennessee Aquarium, take a walk through the shops and statues in the Public Art District, or check out the Chattanooga Zoo.

Georgia Tech researchers are attempting to answer these questions for peatlands, a freshwater wetland ecosystem. Their recent work indicates that warming of peatlands increases microbial production of greenhouse gases, releases more methane than carbon dioxide, reduces microbial diversity, and alters the composition of microbial communities in peat soils.

“Wetlands store a lot of the Earth’s soil carbon and have the potential to produce a lot of greenhouse gases from the soil,” says Max Kolton, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Biological Sciences and lead author of the paper published recently in Frontiers of Microbiology. “They can act as important feedback to climate.”

“In order for society to decide how to respond to our changing climate, we need to know how these ecosystems will respond to environmental changes,” says Joel Kostka, corresponding author of the paper and professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “As it stands now, we do not have sufficient information to include microbes in climate models, even though they produce and consume a huge proportion of the greenhouse gases.”

The work is part of SPRUCE, which stands for Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Climate and Environmental Change. SPRUCE is administered by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with which Kostka has a long-standing collaboration. The project involves using huge chambers to warm a whole wetland ecosystem, in Marcell Experimental Forest, in Minnesota. Researchers from all over the U.S. study various parts of the ecosystem: trees, shrubs, moss, lichens, insects, etc.

The recent work is part of the Georgia Tech team’s first SPRUCE project, which seeks to understand greenhouse gas production by microbes below ground, where the environment contains no oxygen. It was supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Terrestrial Ecosystem Science Program, under U.S. Department of Energy contracts DE-SC0007144 and DE-SC0012088.

“We show major changes in the soil microbial communities that produce greenhouse gases.  And we show that warming has a very different effect on the production of carbon dioxide."

Microbes are the great decomposers of ecosystems. They break down organic matter and recycle nutrients for plants. They also directly impact climate by producing and consuming greenhouse gases.  

Peatlands store about one-third of all soil carbon as thick peat deposits. “The fear is that as Earth’s climate warms, microbial decomposition of soil organic matter will be stimulated, and much of the soil carbon in peatlands will be released as greenhouse gases,” Kostka says.

“Our research seeks to understand the mechanisms by which microbes produce greenhouse gases and to incorporate this information into climate models to predict how fast our climate is changing,” Kostka says. “We want to know how much gas will be produced, how fast, and what controls it as climate warms.”

Warming increases the release of both carbon dioxide and methane. But the ratio of methane to carbon dioxide produced from peatlands also increases with warming, the study shows. “This is worrisome,” Kolton says, because methane has a global warming potential that is 30 to 50 times that of carbon dioxide. “The production of more methane relative to carbon dioxide could accelerate climate change by acting as a positive feedback.”

The study also shows that soil microbial diversity decreases with warming. Diversity is critical to supporting ecosystem function. If diversity declines, the ecosystem services provided by microbes may go away.

Previous researchers have studied the impacts of warming on methane production in soils from various ecosystems. However, few studies have linked warming to the dynamics of specific microbial populations that produce methane in wetland soils. Likewise, few studies have looked at the impact of warming on carbon dioxide production, which is actually produced in much larger amounts by wetland soils.

“We show major changes in the soil microbial communities that produce greenhouse gases,” Kolton says. “And we show that warming has a very different effect on the production of carbon dioxide."

Next, Kostka’s team is studying the microbe-catalyzed mechanisms controlling greenhouse gas production to understand why and how the production of methane and carbon dioxide are different. The team suspects the existence of a new form of microbial respiration, because generally microbes need oxygen or some electron acceptor to breath when breaking down organic matter. “Peatland soils are generally anoxic and very low in mineral content,” Kostka says. “Therefore, we think that the microbes are actually breathing the organic matter itself.” 

Beyond their role in climate change, wetlands are important for water quality and as habitat for wildlife, Kostka says. “I am passionate about the beauty and elegance of wetlands. I want people to know how important these places are and what services they provide to humans. Conservation and restoration of wetlands are critical.”

Other authors of the paper are Ansley Marks, Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences, and Rachel Wilson and Jeffrey Chanton, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

The work was supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Terrestrial Ecosystem Science Program, under United States DOE contracts DE-SC0007144 and DE-SC0012088.

“After reading the article I thought, ‘This is something our school needs,’” said Irene Daboin, coordinator of Georgia Tech Counseling Center’s Peer Coaching Program and the instructor for PSYC 2803: Psychology and the Pursuit of Happiness. “Working in the Counseling Center, I get to see first-hand the things that students are struggling with and the stress on campus.”

Daboin had been looking for a way to promote a healthy campus culture through a wider lens. So, she talked to John Stein, vice president of Student Life and the Brandt-Fritz Dean of Students, who had read the same article and was also thinking about a happiness course at Tech. He suggested that Daboin collaborate with the School of Psychology to figure out how to make it work.

“It took us a little while,” Daboin said, referring to a couple of failed attempts to offer the class. “We were hoping for a certain number of students to enroll and didn’t get enough. This year we decided to focus less on the number of students, and instead just get the class going.”

The class, offered for the first time this summer, has 10 students.

“It’s a very intimate class, which is great,” said Daboin, who has a Ph.D. in clinical and community psychology from Georgia State University and is a licensed psychologist. “It lends itself to discussion and a more in-depth way of talking about issues and applying it on a personal level. The class is sort of our pilot to see if this is something the students like and if we can do it on a larger scale in fall and spring.”

The class is designed to teach students scientifically-validated strategies for living a healthier, happier, and more satisfying life at Georgia Tech and beyond. Students explore psychological concepts related to mental health and well-being and learn to apply the concepts to better manage their own stress and improve their habits, which will lead to more fulfilling lives.

The class begins and ends by measuring the students’ happiness. It also measures the students’ psychological wealth, including their satisfaction with life and their emotional wellbeing. Students also must envision their best possible self, identify their personal strengths and values, do acts of kindness, and keep a gratitude journal.

Daboin wants students who have taken the class to become wellness ambassadors by sharing strategies they have learned, and promoting a healthier campus culture.

“It’s exciting to see students immediately connecting the lessons learned in class to their personal lives,” said Daboin, who thought she would have to sell the class every step of the way.

“But it’s hitting home,” she said. “If these students can walk out of this class leading healthier lives and their psychological well-being improves, then hopefully it will be a little contagious.”

More Happiness

Chris Martin, a postdoctoral fellow in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, taught a happiness course at Emory University and brought it with him to Tech in 2018.

He teaches BME 2803 Special Topics: Happiness. The class was created by Emory sociology professor Corey Keyes, and Martin taught it for three sessions while earning a Ph.D. in sociology at Emory. Martin taught the course at Tech last fall and spring, and his third session will be this fall.

The class covers three big themes: maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain; the meaning of life; and coping with suffering.

The course explores various theories of happiness, such as how money does or does not help one’s level of happiness.

“In the modern world, we have too many choices and that tends to inhibit happiness,” he said. “Making the choice is burdensome. You think about all of the things you didn’t choose. And, you feel like you lost out on all of the things you didn’t choose because of what you chose.”

Martin said there is an underlying idea that one’s circumstances are the result of their choices. And part of a person’s level of happiness is tied to expectations.

“Happiness can sometimes be elusive because we think a possession or purchase will make us happy for months, but it only makes us happy for a few days,” he said. “This is called the hedonic treadmill; you experience some pleasure and some pain, but you end up pretty much in the same place.”

The two things that seem to help sustain happiness are variety and appreciation. If there is variety in what you purchase, that will help. Also, take time to consciously appreciate what you bought.

“Otherwise, once you purchase something ‘nice’ your aspiration level goes up,” Martin said. “So, you have to keep purchasing things that are significantly more expensive than the last thing you purchased, which is impossible.”

This fall, there will be two sections of Martin’s happiness course: a regular section and one for the  Honors Program. The regular class is housed in BME but is open to all undergraduates. Most students who take the class are engineering majors who have an interest in the humanities. About 25 students usually enroll.

The curriculum covers a discussion of happiness, the hedonic treadmill and if it is realistic (for the students) to increase happiness, and students’ idea of a good relationship. The final paper is on what they have learned from the class and also what they have learned about life overall. The class also talks about character strengths, careers, and relationships.

“The students enjoy having discussions,” Martin said. “The assignments are reflections, so I get to know each student’s unique personality. I get to hear stories about their lives, and it’s quite an honor.” 

NOTE: Students may register for BME 2803 Special Topics: Happiness. Students interested in PSYC 2803: Psychology and the Pursuit of Happiness should check the course catalog to see if the course will be offered this fall.

The award, created in 2017, is granted to an article published in Collectanea Mathematica which demonstrates outstanding achievement in any branch of mathematics. The award comes with a cash prize of 2,000€ as well as a diploma and an invitation to give a lecture addressed to a wide audience at the award ceremony at the Facultat de Matemàtiques i Informàtica of Universitat de Barcelona that will take place next October at the Universitat de Barcelona.

Robert Kesler was a Postdoc in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech since 2016, holding positions of an IMPACT Fellow in Analysis plus Electrical & Compute Engineering and a Visiting Assitant Professor in the School of Math. Dr. Kesler received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Cornell University in 2016. He is currently working in Industry in the Los Angeles area.

Michael Lacey is a prolific mathematician and a gifted teacher and mentor. His work has touched on the areas of probability, ergodic theory, and he is a leading expert in harmonic analysis - or as Prof. Lacey puts it, the fine behaviour of Fourier series. Prof. Lacey has recieved support for his reserach from the National Science Foundation as well as from the award of the Salem Prize, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Simons Foundation.

Editor's Note: This article was published originally on June 25, 2019, in The Conversation. It is republished here through the Creative Common License.

Coral reefs are home to so many species that they often are called “the rainforests of the seas.” Today they face a daunting range of threats, including ocean warming and acidification, overfishing and pollution. Worldwide, more than one-third of all coral species are at risk of extinction.

I am one of many scientists who are studying corals to find ways of helping them survive and recover. As a recent report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine shows, researchers are exploring many different strategies. Some, such as managed breeding to make corals more tolerant of stresses, are already being developed at small scales. Others, such as moving corals to colonize new areas, have not been tested yet.

My own work examines whether greater diversity of coral species on reefs can help corals survive and thrive. In a study published earlier this year, my colleague Mark Hay and I found evidence that the answer is yes. This finding could help to inform broader strategies for making coral reefs more resilient in altered oceans.

In nature, more is better

Are ecosystems healthier if they contain many species than if they harbor only a few? This is a central question in ecology. Generally, scientists have found that ecosystems with more diverse foundation species – those that define a system and are inseparable from it, such as trees in a forest – tend to be healthier and function better.

Until recently, no one had applied this test to coral reefs. But we do know that healthy coral reefs are diverse, structurally complex ecosystems dominated by corals. In contrast, reefs that have been damaged by stresses such as coral bleaching events tend to become simplified, less diverse landscapes, often dominated by seaweeds.

For our study we chose a reef area on the southwestern coast of Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu, in the South Pacific. Many reefs along this coast have been heavily degraded by overfishing and other human-related activities, reducing coral cover and allowing seaweeds to dominate.

There are hundreds of coral species across the Pacific, but at smaller scales, we found just five species or fewer during preliminary surveys conducted on the degraded reef at our site. Since these conditions mirror what is happening to many reefs worldwide, we saw it as an ideal place to test whether coral diversity matters for the “new normal” that we expect to see on reefs of the future.

Underwater gardens

Our team created 48 concrete plots on the seafloor of the degraded reef, which served as the bases for experimental coral gardens. We created single-species gardens that each contained one of three coral species – Pocillopora damicornis, commonly known as cauliflower coral; Porites cylindrica, also known as yellow finger coral; and Acropora millepora, one of a number species known as staghorn corals. We also planted mixed gardens containing all three species.

We chose these corals because they are common to reefs across the Pacific and are representative of different coral families that have shown varying responses to a variety of harmful disturbances. In all, each garden contained 18 coral individuals, for a total of 864 corals.

To assess each coral’s performance as it grew, we needed to remove them from their plots periodically. So we cut off the tops of hundreds of soda bottles and planted an individual coral in the upside-down neck of each bottle with epoxy putty. We embedded the bottle caps into our concrete slabs so that we could easily unscrew each bottle neck to examine the coral it held, then screw it back into its base. Over 16 months we weighed the corals and tracked other measures of their well-being, including tissue death and colonization of each garden by harmful seaweeds.

We consistently found that corals grown in mixed-species gardens performed better than those in single-species plots. Within four months, coral growth in the mixed-species gardens was even exceeding the best-performing single-species gardens. This suggests that different species may benefit each other in yet unknown ways, at least during early stages of a coral community’s development.

Why is more better?

The next question is what drove the effects that we observed. We hope to investigate a number of leads in future experiments. For example, farmers commonly observe that planting a diverse mix of crops helps to reduce the spread of infectious diseases among individuals. Could the same be true for coral reefs?

Our initial findings offer both concern and hope for the future of coral reefs. If diversity is integral to coral well-being, then continued species loss could dramatically alter these ecosystems in ways that lead to further reef decline. How many parts can be removed from the “ecosystem engine” before it breaks down?

That said, many of the strategies in the National Academies report involve using biodiversity – both at the genetic and species level – to enhance coral reef resilience. Examples include cross-breeding corals between populations; altering coral genes to give them new functions, such as higher heat tolerance; and moving stress-tolerant corals or coral genes to new locations.

Promising advances in technology, such as mapping coral reefs from the air, may also help researchers assess coral health and determine which species they contain. This baseline information may help better inform management and restoration efforts.

Corals are in trouble, but they aren’t down for the count yet. Perhaps harnessing the power of their remaining biodiversity can help give them a fighting chance.

Cody Clements is a marine ecologist and currently the Teasley Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. His research interests focus on understanding how ecological interactions such as predation shape coral reef community dynamics in a rapidly changing ocean, as well as integrating these insights into conservation strategies that can promote human health and well-being.

Clements receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Geographic Society, and the Teasley Endowment to the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Humanities scholars found both inspiration and shared challenges at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication’s (LMC) humanTech symposium, held April 19–20, 2019.

The symposium was meant to focus the discussion about what it means to be a humanist at a technologically oriented university such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, said Richard Utz, chair and professor in LMC.

“While our participants had work experience at large research institutions, small engineering oriented colleges, and traditional universities with strong science and technology sectors, it became clear very quickly that we didn’t need to switch codes to understand our most important opportunities. They were the same,“ he said. “Terms like innovation, interdisciplinarity, partnership, integration, and collaboration, were front and center among all presentations and responses.”

Presentations and discussions also identified similar challenges, including funding disparities between the humanities and the STEM fields and a traditional view from both humanities and STEM-based scholars that each group is part of a separate academic world.

Despite such challenges, Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, noted during her opening address to the symposium how many tech firms and even the Columbia University Medical School, which offers a program in “narrative medicine,” are embracing the skills provided by a humanities education and applying them to technical and scientific disciplines.

“If those graduates are better doctors for studying the humanities, what would a better engineer who is fully engaged in the humanities look like?” Krebs asked.

As it happens, they might look something like many Georgia Tech students, who study or intern abroad at much higher levels than the national average and half of whom voluntarily choose to study a foreign language, compared to 8 percent nationally.

The Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, LMC, and the School of Modern Languages also are leading in the fields of language and cultural studies, as Krebs noted.

“Georgia Tech itself is a leader in connecting language and education with career possibilities at the undergraduate and graduate levels,” she said. “The graduate program in Global Media and Cultures, for example, is the kind of program that makes clear the career value of language study.”

That degree, a joint offering of LMC and Modern Languages, and also the Master of Science in Applied Language and Intercultural Studies in the School of Modern Languages, are both meant to give students rigorous training in communication and global leadership, preparing them for careers in international business, non-profits, media, social justice, and education.

Other initiatives are under way at Georgia Tech to help prepare humanities students for interdisciplinary careers in a changing workforce.

LMC and Modern Languages also each have post-doctoral programs for recent humanities graduates. LMC’s Brittain Fellows program seeks Ph.D. graduates with an interest in “digital pedagogy and the cultural studies of science and technology,” while LMC’s Global Languages, Cultures, and Technologies program seeks to foster collaboration across languages, technologies, and global cultures.

Both schools, and faculty from across Ivan Allen College, also are actively engaged in a number of Vertically Integrated Research (VIP) research projects, meant to give undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in meaningful, often interdisciplinary, research projects.

Such program are the product of a spirit of “radical interdisciplinarity” among humanities scholars at Georgia Tech that has allowed such programs to flourish, said Anna Stenport, professor and chair in the School of Modern Languages

“I am very happy and proud to be able to say that there is no crisis of the humanities at the Georgia Institute of Technology,” she told the symposium.

For Utz, the symposium was just the beginning.

“This symposium can only be a first step toward future additional conversations, and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, together with our partners, will take a lead role in continuing what we started this year,” he said.

Another humanities-related symposium occurred April 25-27. The Atlanta Global Studies Symposium focused on global, regional, and international studies and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Discussion centered on collaboration among institutions of higher education, the public and the community, and the K-12 sector in the Atlanta region and beyond through education, research, and outreach.

“I like to bike around and see new places,” said Payne, a second-year master’s student in Aerospace Engineering. “I keep finding great spots in Midtown, like the lounge on the roof of the Hotel Clermont or some of the trails off the BeltLine. It’s fun to have a variety of stuff to do off campus.”

Here are eight of our favorite ways to get outside this summer: 

1. Stop and smell the roses (or other flowers). Visit the Atlanta Botanical Garden where you can wander around 30 acres of outdoor gardens, check out the Storza Woods and Skyline Garden, or take your kids to explore the Children’s Garden. Plus, this summer, check out the Imaginary Worlds: Alice’s Wonderland Exhibit where you’ll find Alice in Wonderland-themed plant sculptures in Skyline Park. Tickets are $22 each, and $19 each for kids.
2. Head downtown. At Centennial Olympic Park you can catch a free concert on Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m., wheel around the bike track, or watch one of the daily Fountain of Rings water shows. Or, if you’re looking to relax, grab a few friends and a picnic, and enjoy the 22-acre green space.
3. Go green. You’ll find fresh fruits and veggies, and other goodies at Atlanta’s many farmers markets. For example, stay closer to campus by visiting the Green Market at Piedmont Park every Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon. Or, if you like to sleep in on Saturday mornings, try the East Atlanta Village Farmers Market on Thursdays from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. There’s also the Grant Park Farmers Market where you can check out free celebrity chef demonstrations on Sunday mornings from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
4. Find your wild side. You can walk with the animals at the Atlanta Zoo, which is home to more than 60 different species. Whether you want to spend all day in the reptile room, meet the red pandas, or watch a bird show, there’s plenty to do. Tickets are $24 at the gate with your student ID.
5. Check out a festival. During the summer, there’s no shortage of festivals to attend. You can find your new favorite flavor at the Atlanta Ice Cream Festival on July 27, support local art at the Piedmont Arts Festival on Aug. 17-18, or catch some live music at the Grant Park Summer Shade Festival from Aug. 24-25. Entry to all of these festivals is free. Looking for additional options? Visit atlanta.net.
6. Catch a movie under the stars. The Starlight Drive-In Theater offers a 1950s aesthetic, and you can see current movies for $9. Visitors can get their tickets at the box office, and then drive right up to their designated screen. (The video is played on the screen, but the audio is on your FM radio, so remember to find the right channel before the movie starts!)
7. Visit a spot with a view.  At the Roof of Ponce City Market, you can try the festival games and rides in Skyline Park, beat your friends at minigolf, or relax in the beer garden at Nine Mile Station. Or, get some exercise in with an hour of yoga on the roof, which is offered every other Friday beginning July 27.
8. Take an art tour. Head to the BeltLine for an official art tour. Even if you’ve walked the BeltLine plenty of times, the murals and statues along the path are always changing. Follow the map of all the public art the BeltLine has to offer, and keep an eye out for the live music and performance art you can see along the way.

Research led by the Georgia Institute of Technology found that common mouth bacteria responsible for acute periodontitis fared better overall when paired with bacteria and other microbes that live anywhere but the mouth, including some commonly found in the colon or in dirt. Bacteria from the oral microbiome, by contrast, generally shared food and assistance more stingily with gum infector Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, or Aa for short.

Like many bacteria known for infections they can cause – like Strep – Aa often live peacefully in the mouth, and certain circumstances turn them into infectors. The researchers and their sponsors at the National Institutes of Health would like to know more about how Aa interacts with other microbes to gain insights that may eventually help fight acute periodontitis and other ailments.

“Periodontitis is the most prevalent human infection on the planet after cavities,” said Marvin Whiteley, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences and the study’s principal investigator. “Those bugs get into your bloodstream every day, and there has been a long, noted correlation between poor oral hygiene and prevalence of heart disease.”

Unnatural pairing

The findings are surprising because bacteria in a microbiome have indeed evolved intricate interactions making it seem logical that those interactions would stand out as uniquely generous. Some mouth microbes even have special docking sites to bind to their partners, and much previous research has tightly focused on their cooperations. The new study went broad.

“We asked a bigger question: How do microbes interact with bugs they co-evolved with as opposed to how they would interact with microbes they had hardly ever seen. We thought they would not interact well with the other bugs, but it was the opposite,” Whiteley said.

The study’s scale was massive. Researchers manipulated and tracked nearly all of Aa’s roughly 2,100 genes using an emergent gene tagging technology while pairing Aa with 25 other microbes — about half from the mouth and half from other body areas or the environment.

They did not examine the mouth microbiome as a whole because multi-microbial synergies would have made interactions incalculable. Instead, the researchers paired Aa with one other bug at a time — Aa plus mouth bacterium X, Aa plus colon bacterium Y, Aa plus dirt fungus Z, and so on.

“We wanted to see specifically which genes Aa needed to survive in each partnership and which ones it could do without because it was getting help from the partner,” said Gina Lewin, a postdoctoral researcher in Whiteley’s lab and the study’s first author. They published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Q & A

How could they tell that Aa was doing well or poorly with another microbe?

The researchers looked at each of Aa’s genes necessary for survival while it infected a mouse -- when Aa was the sole infector, when it partnered with a fellow mouth bacterium and when paired with a microbe from colon, dirt, or skin.

“When Aa was by itself, it needed a certain set of genes to survive – like for breathing oxygen,” Lewin said. “It was striking that when Aa was with this or that microbe that it normally didn’t live around, it no longer needed a lot of its own genes. The other microbe was giving Aa things that it needed, so it didn’t have to make them itself.”

“Interactions between usual neighbors — other mouth bacteria — looked more frugal,” Whiteley said. “Aa needed a lot more of its own genes to survive around them, sometimes more than when it was by itself.”

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How did the emerging genetic marking method work?

To understand “transposon sequencing,” picture a transposon as a DNA brick that cracks a gene, breaking its function. The brick also sticks to the gene and can be detected by DNA sequencing, thus tagging that malfunction.

Every Aa bacterium in a pile of 10,000 had a brick in a random gene. If Aa’s partner bacterium, say, E. coli, picked up the slack for a broken function, Aa survived and multiplied even with the damaged gene, and researchers detected a higher number of bacteria containing the gene.

Aa surviving with more broken genes meant a partner microbe was giving it more assistance. Aa bacteria with broken genes that a partner could not compensate for were more likely to die, reducing their count.

Does this mean the mouth microbiome does not have unique relationships?

It very likely does have them, but the study’s results point to not all relationships being cooperative. Some microbiomes could have high fences and share sparsely. 

“One friend or enemy may be driving your behavior, and other microbes may just be standing around,” Lewin said.

Smoking, poor hygiene, or diabetes — all associated with gum disease — might be damaging defensive microbiomes and allowing outside bacteria to help Aa attack gum tissue. It’s too early to know that, but Whiteley’s lab wants to dig deeper, and the research could have implications for other microbiomes.

Also read: Test for Life-Threatening Nutrient Deficit Made From Bacteria Entrails

These researchers coauthored the study: Apollo Stacy from the National Institute of Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Kelly Michie from Georgia Tech, and Richard Lamont from the University of Louisville. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases (grants R01DE020100, R01DE023193) and the National Institutes of Health (grants F32DE027281, F31DE024931). Any findings, conclusions or recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Institutes of Health. Whiteley is also a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and Co-Director of Emory-Children’s Cystic Fibrosis Center.

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-660-1408), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology
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Ice skating. Holiday markets. Menorah lightings. If you’re looking for things to do to celebrate the holidays, check out these eight Atlanta options.

1. Strap on your skates. Test your balance on the outdoor ice rink in Atlantic Station. It’s just $15 for a pair of skates and access to the ice rink all day long. Skate the Station goes from 4-10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday through Sunday, daily until Jan. 20. Buy tickets online at atlanticstation.com/events.
2. Take in the lights. The Garden Lights, Holiday Nights event at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens features all of the garden exhibits illuminated for the holidays, a Skylights Lounge, and a lights display synchronized to music in Nature’s Wonders. The lights can be seen nightly from 5-11 p.m. until Jan. 11. Enjoy a $5 discount on tickets at atlantabg.org.
3. Stroll through the Christkindl Market. Celebrate German Christmas traditions at the free Christkindl market in Atlantic Station. Open from 11 a.m.-9 p.m. daily until Dec. 23, the market features traditional German food, holiday decorations, and more. Plus, kids can take pictures with Santa or in front of the Christmas tree. Learn more at christkindlmarket.org.
4. Celebrate Chanukah on the BeltLine. Get in the Chanukah spirit with hot drinks, doughnuts, latkes, and more on the Atlanta BeltLine. The event kicks off with a menorah lighting at 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 25. Get the details at chabadintown.org.
5. Wander through a Winter Wonderland. At Fernbank History Museum, you can wander through two floors of trees decorated to display winter holidays around the world. The event is included in admission to the museum ($27 for adults) and is open through Jan. 12 from 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Find out more at fernbankmuseum.org.
6. Pair a little history with the holidays. The Atlanta History Center is running a holiday exhibit to show how Christmas was celebrated throughout Atlanta’s history. Guests can also enjoy a holiday market and a candlelit walk through the center’s gardens. Admission is $20 for adults and $10 for children. The exhibit is open nightly from 5:30-9:30 p.m. until Dec. 15. Get your tickets at atlantahistorycenter.com.
7. Experience the lantern festival. Check out handcrafted lanterns — including interactive ones you can touch — at the Atlanta Chinese Lantern Festival in Centennial Park. This festival is open Sunday through Thursday from 6-10 p.m. and Friday through Saturday from 6 -11 p.m. until Jan. 5. Admission is $17 for adults and $13 for kids, and includes viewing the lanterns; dance and theater performances; and access to the craft and food booths. Get your tickets at freshtix.com.
8. Enjoy Christmas on Stone Mountain. See the Snow Angel’s Christmas Parade, the Musical Frosted Forest, Christmas performances like A Christmas Carol, and more at Stone Mountain’s Christmas Celebration. Admission is $32 for adults and $30 for kids, and includes the Christmas exhibits, park attractions, and all the holiday shows. The celebration runs until Jan. 5. Learn more at stonemountainpark.com.

Currently, 30% of the U.S. population lives with ozone levels that exceed government health standards. Though past environmental regulations have vastly helped clean the air and put the U.S. on a positive trajectory to reduce pollutants — including ozone — policy rollbacks back could slow the progress and even reverse it, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology said.

Continuing progress against ozone would pay off in better health and finances: The more ozone in the air, the more cases of respiratory illness and the higher the cost of meeting ozone level targets.

“Additional ozone is tough to control technologically. The costs would be very high — tens of billions of dollars,” said Ted Russell, a principal investigator on the study. “In the meantime, more people would die than otherwise would have.”

The researchers published their results in One Earth, a Cell Press journal on Friday, October 25, 2019. The research was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and by the National Science Foundation.

The study focuses on ground-level ozone people breathe to the detriment of their health, which should not be confused with the stratospheric ozone that protects us from the sun’s harmful radiation.

Goodbye environmental policies

In the last three years, various energy policies have been loosened, which should result in raised CO₂ emissions and continued emissions of ozone precursors in years to come, the study’s authors said.

“Incentives are being retired like production and investment tax credits, which have been very influential in solar and wind,” said Marilyn Brown, a Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and a principal investigator on the study. “The Investment Tax Credit gives a 30% tax reduction for investments in solar or wind farms or the purchase of solar rooftop panels by homeowners. The Production Tax Credit for utilities reduces tax liabilities by 23 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by solar, wind or other renewable energy sources.”

But one policy move in particular stands to keep more ingredients in the ozone-making cauldron: courts preventing the Clean Power Plan (CPP) from going into effect and its replacement with the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) plan.

ACE, which also has not been implemented, would make it easier to continue burning fossil fuels, particularly coal, according to Brown, who was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. CPP would have phased out those generators, reducing nitrogen oxide gases, or NO_X, key reactants in the production of ozone.

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From NO_X to noxious

“The major target of the CPP was CO₂, but it had side effects on the reduction of NO_X because it shifted coal use to natural gas as well as to renewable sources,” said Huizhong Shen, a postdoctoral researcher in Russell’s group and one of the study’s first authors.

The study modeled atmospheric chemistry that produces O₃ around commonly predicted trajectories for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change paired with anticipated pollutant emissions, particularly of NO_X. The model’s output depicted “non-attainment” scores, which refer to the number of U.S. counties exceeding ozone targets and by how much.

The study modeled against official targets for ozone levels and in addition, against cleaner standards widely held to be attainable and much healthier for people. Models built around rolled-back environmental regulations and increased warming initially showed the current trajectory of progress against ozone levels continuing — but later reversing. Ozone levels then rose again, putting many more counties in non-attainment by or before 2050.

Nature’s surprise ingredient

Alongside human-produced NO_X, nature contributes ozone-making ingredients that aren’t harmful per se and often smell great, like the aroma of cut grass or of a pine tree. They are examples of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), of which nature produces hundreds.

VOCs get into the air easily and react readily with other chemicals. The warmer the air and the sun, the more vegetation produces VOCs that meet with raised levels of NO_X emissions to make ozone. It forms downstream from emissions sources, making it hard to regulate. 

“There are no ozone emissions, just precursor emissions,” Shen said. “So, emission controls for ozone have to mainly target NO_X emissions.”

Feedbacks and pile-ons

Keeping ozone around as the world warms will be more than just the sum of power plants still emitting NO_X plus boosted VOC emissions.

“If you heat up the air, it also speeds up photochemical reactions involved in ozone production,” Shen said.

“Ozone is a greenhouse gas, so it adds some climate change feedback, too,” said Russell, who is Howard T. Tellepsen Chair and Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “You can also have increased vegetation emissions of ammonia. Some of this goes on to form particulate matter, which is also harmful to the lungs.” 

Passing the buck

When coal-fired power plants emit NO_X, the ozone strikes miles away.

“Ozone can occur hundreds of miles away, so if controls are loosened in one state to save industry money there, a state downstream may have to spend even more to try to meet ozone targets. You transfer the problem and the costs,” Russell said. “Most U.S. cities are already not in attainment, and this will likely make it harder for them to get there.”

Also READ the companion piece on policy: U.S. Carbon and Pollution Emissions Policies are ‘Up in the Air’

The co-authors of the research are: Yilin Chen, Yufei Li, Yongtao Hu, Mehmet Odman, Momei Qin, Abiola Lawal, Gertrude Pavur, and Marilyn Brown of Georgia Tech; Zhihong Chen of Georgia Tech and the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Jhih-Shyang Shih and Dallas Burtraw of Resources for the Future; Lucas Henneman of Harvard University; Shuai Shao and Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University; and Haofei Yu of the University of Central Florida. The research was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (grant R835880) and the National Science Foundation (grant 1444745). Any findings, conclusions, or recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies. Ted Russell served on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee during the administration of President Barack Obama.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.09.006 

This story was originally prepared by writers at Georgia Tech Research Horizons. Read the original article here.

You can read the full article by Cassidy Villeneuve here.

Dr. Edwards also published a brief description of her summer teaching experience in a TECHStyle article, "7 Brittain Fellows Reflect on Summer Pedagogical Experiments in First-Year Writing," if you'd like to read more about her class.