The $460,707 grant will be used to study the feasibility of expanding Technology Enterprise Park (TEP) on Atlanta’s west side into a health and bioscience hub.

“This grant provides us an exceptional opportunity for Georgia Tech and the city of Atlanta to help create high-paying jobs and economic opportunity for the city’s west side,” said Chris Downing, associate vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Tech’s chief statewide economic development arm. Downing led the effort in crafting the grant proposal. The University Financing Foundation, Invest Atlanta, and the Atlanta Housing Authority also served as partners in the project proposal.

The target area encompasses approximately 60 acres and will assess the viability of expanding TEP’s footprint. Georgia Tech founded the technology park, which is located at North Avenue and Northyards Boulevard, in 2004.

As planned, the vision for the expanded park would be the interconnection of parcels of land owned by the project’s collaborators and supporters. Those include Tech, the Atlanta Housing Authority, and the city of Atlanta, among others. The goal is to create a health and bioscience hub in an economically distressed part of the city.

As a hub it would be a natural location for startups in the health and bioscience sectors spinning out from area schools, including Tech, Georgia State University, Emory University, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Clark Atlanta University.

Existing health and bioscience companies such as CardioMems, Kemira, and CryoLife would be able to expand their current operations without leaving the area, and it would be a magnet for leading-edge research and innovation enterprises such as the Global Center for Medical Innovation and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

The project will study the best practices Georgia Tech has implemented in the development of the neighboring Technology Square in Midtown, which serves as a model for innovation-led economic development success. This area of the west side could enjoy a similar outcome, Downing said. “It has the potential to create thousands of jobs and deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in economic output.”

The Science and Research Park Development Grants are part of the Regional Innovation Strategies program, which is being run by the EDA Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It is a new initiative designed to advance innovation and capacity-building activities in regions across the country through three different types of grants: i6 Challenge grants, Cluster Grants for Seed Capital Funds, and Science and Research Park Development Grants.

In March, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced the recipients of the i6 Challenge Grants, which included $500,000 to Georgia Tech to support a sweeping innovation and entrepreneurship initiative in Athens, Augusta, and downtown Atlanta.

The Smart Energy Campus Program uses Georgia Tech as a living laboratory and collects data from energy utility systems all over campus. Through collaboration among multiple campus departments, insights from this project will directly impact energy planning and consumption on campus in many ways, with the hope of making Tech’s energy utility systems more efficient.

Smart Energy Campus is a joint sustainability research initiative with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL), and Georgia Tech Facilities Management. Beginning in 2013, the idea behind this project was to see if Georgia Tech researchers could be of use to Facilities by utilizing data analysis as well as modeling and simulation tools to evaluate and optimize different energy systems on Tech’s campus. 

“It is extremely exciting to know that our team is supporting some of the most brilliant complex-system designers in the world,” said Mark Demyanek, assistant vice president of Operations and Maintenance within Facilities Management. “Using our built environment as a living laboratory is a concept that is growing in higher ed, and I believe we at Georgia Tech are leading that growth in a thoughtful and responsible way.”

Already, the Smart Energy Campus Program has created software for the Facilities Management Energy Conservation team to use when analyzing utility consumption trends and identifying potential energy efficiency projects. This project is designed to save labor hours, resources, and money by quickly identifying buildings that have unusually high energy usage, and then notifying teams to remedy the problem. 

“The Smart Energy Campus Program is trying to take advantage of new modeling tools and large amounts of data to gain deeper insight and predict what can happen in terms of energy utilization on campus,” said Scott Duncan, research engineer in the ASDL. 

The Facilities Management team consists of five people who meet with the research team several times per month. The research members on the team have included graduate students, research engineers, and postdoctoral fellows, all of whom serve as another set of eyes to interpret the data and help Facilities see problems in different ways.  

“This program is revolutionary in getting access to data,” said Duncan. “If we were doing this program for a community outside of campus, it would be difficult to get access to this much data.” 

With so much data, the project continues to grow and the mission evolves. Building a predictive model of campus energy is no easy feat.

“We keep finding things to do and smaller side projects to work on,” said Duncan. Through thermal network and electric grid modeling of campus, researchers will have greater agility and insight to see where energy is not being used efficiently, as well as analyze the effects of energy system technology upgrades.

Through the research effort, areas of improvement will be more visible and enable Facilities to channel resources toward areas of need. The ultimate vision of the research team is a “smart” system that will identify and react to problems and inefficiencies on its own, potentially without human assistance. 

“With any luck, one day soon, campuses across the world can use these tools to manage their facilities resources more efficiently,” said Demyanek.

The Board approved the lease agreement for the High Performance Computing Center being built on Spring Street on the south side of the Georgia Tech Bookstore in Tech Square. The 750,000-square-foot project will include space for Georgia Tech research and industry partners and has a targeted opening of 2018.

The Board also approved Georgia Tech’s selection of Juneau Construction of Atlanta for the West Campus Dining Commons project. When completed, the commons will offer space for 610 people and be located at the corner of McMillan and Eighth Streets. Construction at the Van Leer Interdisciplinary Design Commons, part of the recently announced Texas Instruments Plaza project, was also authorized at the meeting. 

Two named faculty positions – the G. Niles Bolton Professorship in the College of Architecture, and the Southern Company Dean’s Chair in the College of Engineering – were approved following recent philanthropic support for these positions.

In academic news, the Board approved the establishment of an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in quantitative bioscience. The program follows the success of Tech’s other bio-focused Ph.D. programs in bioengineering and bioinformatics. The Online Master of Science in Computer Science program will modify its curriculum requirements, bringing the total number of hours from 36 to 30 to earn the degree. Tech will also begin offering a dual degree program for the Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering with an Italian partner, Sapienza-University di Roma. This is the second partnership for the degree program, which is also offered through Georgia Tech in Atlanta and GT-Lorraine in Metz, France. 

Finally, the Board approved the installation of energy optimization and water savings improvements at the Holland Chilled Water Plant and 10th Street Chiller Plant. Savings from the project will have a simple pay-back of 4.72 years.