In one paper, researchers have unraveled how nitrogen, water, carbon, and light can interact with a catalyst to produce ammonia at ambient temperature and pressure, a much less energy-intensive approach than current practice. The second paper describes a stable catalyst able to convert waste fertilizer back into nonpolluting nitrogen that could one day be used to make new fertilizer.

Significant work remains on both processes, but the senior author on the papers, Marta Hatzell, said they’re a step toward a more sustainable cycle that still meets the needs of a growing worldwide population.

“We often think it would be nice not to have to use synthetic fertilizers for agriculture, but that’s not realistic in the near term considering how much plant growth is dependent on synthetic fertilizers and how much food the world’s population needs,” said Hatzell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “The idea is that maybe one day you could manufacture, capture, and recycle fertilizer on site."

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Their findings are the first step in solving one of the key limitations of metal halide perovskites, which are already as efficient as the best silicon-based solar cells at capturing light and converting it into electricity. They reported their work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“Perovskites have the potential of not only transforming how we produce solar energy, but also how we make semiconductors for other types of applications like LEDs or phototransistors. We can think about them for applications in quantum information technology, such as light emission for quantum communication,” said Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, assistant professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and the study’s senior author. “These materials have impressive properties that are very promising.”

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

He grew up in Columbia, Maryland, and spent a lot of time working for his father’s construction business around Washington, D.C. It was there he learned the difference between design and labor in construction and found the path he wanted to pursue in life.

“I didn’t plan on shoveling rocks for the rest of my life; I wanted to look at the other side of construction, so that’s what got me into engineering,” said Foster, who will graduate with his civil engineering bachelor’s this fall. “My dad also guided me toward civil engineering because his construction practice focuses on concrete and masonry — things in the civil engineering realm. He gave me a little nudge and created that exposure, which was super important for me.”

Foster didn’t come to Georgia Tech immediately. In Fall 2018, he enrolled in Morehouse College’s Dual-Degree Engineering Program, which allows students to get two degrees over five years. Students spend three years at Morehouse before transferring to a partner institution to finish their engineering studies.

Foster quickly realized Atlanta was where he wanted to be, so Georgia Tech — with one of the best civil engineering programs in the country — became his clear first choice. He couldn’t wait to tap into the opportunities that awaited him.

Yet, like virtually all of his fellow graduates, the Covid-19 pandemic threw a wrench in his plans.

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Proudfoot is from Costa Rica, and she and a friend had been thinking about the prosthetic devices available in the country for children missing portions of their arms. They were clunky, with limited function — often just a pinching mechanism to grasp objects.

The pair wondered, could they use 3D printing to create an affordable and more dynamic alternative for the kids. Around that time, they found out about an entrepreneurship competition for high schools, and they set out to develop designs.

“My school taught us about designing and engineering and had just bought a 3D printer. We started working with kids that had upper limb amputations and started producing designs,” Proudfoot said. “I think that’s what definitely made me want to go into biomedical engineering and explore the robotic side, because it tied in with prosthetics.”

A high school counselor pointed her to Georgia Tech, where another student from her school had thrived. And Proudfoot used her 3D-printed prostheses, which won the entrepreneurship competition, as the basis for her application essay.

There was just one problem: When Proudfoot got to Tech, she realized biomolecules and physiology were far less interesting to her than biomedical robotics. Suddenly, she felt lost.

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Check. Check. And check.

Zarbaf admits he didn’t necessarily keep track of those goals and intentionally set out to achieve them. It just turns out he knew pretty well what he wanted to accomplish in college when he was just 18 years old.

Four years later, Zarbaf is going even further. He’s headed back to his home state of Florida in the new year to work at SpaceX, where he’ll play a key role in the launches that send satellites, cargo, and astronauts to space.

As usual, Zarbaf is right where the action is.

“I always want to be where it’s booming,” said Zarbaf, a College of Engineering Clark Scholar who is finishing his aerospace engineering degree this fall. “It’s kind of stressful, but I like the commotion.”

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Their idea, a simple menstrual pad add-on to collect blood for lab screening, has earned them one of five finalist spots in the national Collegiate Inventors Competition Oct. 24-25. They’ll compete against other undergraduate teams for $10,000, mentoring from experienced inventors, and a patent acceleration certificate from the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.

The team also is competing for a People’s Choice Award that’s based on online voting.

“We are trying to end the stigma against periods — that's one of our biggest missions behind the product — and we want to increase access to healthcare. Nearly all cervical cancers are preventable with earlier screening and testing for HPV,” said team member Rhea Prem, referring to the human papilloma virus that causes cervical cancer. “We want healthcare to be on your own terms so that you feel in control of your health, and you feel control over what you're doing with your body.”

Read about the team's FADpad kit on the College of Engineering website.

That’s right: Two teams tied for the best overall project award this semester at the showcase of senior projects by engineering, industrial design, and computer science students.

They were among 129 devices and ideas on display at McCamish Pavilion that included everything from a portable sterilizer for surgical instruments to a redesigned logistics system for UPS Healthcare. The teams designed rovers to hunt for water on the moon, revamped recycling processes for Georgia Tech Dining, and simplified placing stakes for specialty crop farmers.

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Lu begins her new role on Dec. 1.

“In her roles as a leader within ChBE and as the director of BioE, Hang has effectively collaborated with and guided researchers both on campus and nationwide across diverse fields and initiatives,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of the College and Southern Company Chair. “Her wealth of experience will prove invaluable to our leadership team as we continue to innovate and forge research partnerships that expand the goals and impact of the College.”

Lu has been a Georgia Tech faculty member since 2005 and holds the C.J. “Pete” Silas Chair of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. Her research focuses on microfluidics, data science, automation, and quantitative imaging, with applications in neurobiology, cell biology, cancer, and biotechnology.

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

A team of scientists at Georgia Tech, Brown University, Nanyang Technological University, and MIT have measured the mechanical stresses that develop in dendrites – solving a long-standing hypothesis that high stresses can be developed around dendrites. Dendrites pierce through solid electrolytes, eventually crossing from one electrode to the other and shorting out the solid-state battery cell.

Georgia Tech Professor Christos Athanasiou and the multidisciplinary team used photoelasticity to measure the stress on batteries caused during the battery cycle. In their paper, Operando Measurements of Dendrite-Induced Stresses in Ceramic Electrolytes using Photoelasticity, they managed to overcome challenges associated with measurements of easy to break, very tiny solid electrolyte samples. The samples thickness was about 10 times smaller than the average diameter of human hair.

The team used an old - and almost forgotten - principle of photoelasticity to directly measure the stress fields during cell operation. Photoelasticity’s contactless nature also allows for the stresses to be directly measured and visualized at the dendrite tips. By shining light through the material under a special photoelastic microscope, it revealed intricate stress fields. In this case, the stress revealed from passing light through the electrolyte appeared at the tip of the propagation dendrite.

This advanced experimental setup has set the stage for profound exploration of stresses developed during battery operation across various electrolytes and conditions, revealing critical data on loading conditions and the dynamics of lithium metal penetration events.

This is just one example where creative, yet simple experimentation, can lead to fundamental discoveries. The Daedalus Lab at Georgia Tech, inspired by the ingenuity of its namesake, the mythical Greek inventor, is dedicated to decarbonizing the future through the development and promotion of sustainable materials and structures, utilizing innovative experimental approaches and artificial intelligence.

The difference between him and his peers was that Johnson wasn’t at the beginning of his career. Rather, he’s developing the third, or maybe fourth, chapter of his story after serving three decades in the U.S. Army and helping the NBA spin up its referee operations department.

For the last 10 years, he’s been at Georgia Tech, where he earned a master’s degree in operations research in 1985. Johnson is a professor of the practice in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and also was managing director of the Tennenbaum Institute for Enterprise Transformation. He teaches Statistics and Applications for engineering and computer science students, advises student groups like the Sports Business Club, and works with the Georgia Tech ROTC.

You can read more about his story here.

The high schoolers from across Georgia and the Southeast participated in a series of half-hour sessions with representatives from each academic program. The conference format was highly interactive, allowing high schoolers to view demonstrations, ask questions of undergraduate panelists, meet engineering graduate students, and participate in interactive design challenges.

Sessions were led by chairs, associate chairs, outreach directors, graduate students, undergraduates, and others. By the end of the conference, CoE schools presented a total of 64 well-crafted information sessions about their units. Because of the overwhelming support WIE received from each school, the number of students accepted to ECC more than tripled to 260 participants in 2023.

Parents also provided overwhelmingly positive feedback:

“The difference I notice at Tech 30 years after I started, is a much more supportive and inclusive environment for female engineers,” said parent Elizabeth Smith. “Thank you for helping to foster and grow that environment.” 

Another parent, Steven Hattier, brought his daughter to Georgia Tech from New Orleans to explore the College’s programs.

“As a father of a daughter very passionate about aerospace engineering, … it is amazing to have the support and encouragement provided to her by the event. Keep up the great work.”

WIE Director Joy Harris said her team was grateful for the support from staff and faculty members across the College and for the care they showed to the students who attended the conference.

“The Women in Engineering Office looks forward to introducing even more high school students to engineering in the years to come,” she said.

It was an ambitious plan for a first grader, and her life journey has been more challenging than she might have imagined. But now she’s laying the foundation for that childhood dream in her second year of Georgia Tech’s bioengineering doctorate program.

Along the way, she’s making a point to help others see paths and opportunities she didn’t — whether they’re fellow Hispanic students interested in engineering, first-generation college students, or especially community or technical college students.

Her efforts to build community — as an undergraduate student at two colleges and now among her fellow grad students in Todd Sulchek’s lab — are among the many reasons the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) has recognized Colón with its national STAR Role Model Award.

The award is the highest honor for a SHPE graduate student member, reserved to recognize “unselfish and outstanding contributions of an honoree to their SHPE student chapter and the Hispanic community while maintaining academic excellence.”

Colón said she doesn’t really see herself as a role model — except, hopefully, for her 14-year-old sister. She’s a gamer, so instead she drew comparisons to nonplayable characters in video games, like those who might give the player a side quest.

“I will be the friend there for you to hold your hand or even help you beat people up if you need to, but I’m a go-with-the-flow type of person in that regard,” Colón said. “I will be there as a friend, if you want me to. I'll be there as a mentor, if you want me to. I will be the person to clear the path, if you want me to. I don’t view it as the term ‘role model.’ I view it more as like somebody who’s going through the same circumstances that’s willing to lend a helping hand.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The College moved up one spot on the 2024 Best Colleges list. It’s the highest ranking since 1996.

Two of the College’s programs are the best in the nation: the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE).

ISyE continues a run at No. 1 that started in 2002. Coulter BME rose one spot and now is ranked first by U.S. News among both undergraduate and graduate programs (graduate rankings are released each spring).

Read the full details on the College of Engineering website.

Stingelin is recognized for her significant contributions in the broader areas of polymer physics, functional macromolecular materials, and organic electronics and photonics as well as her strong devotion and conviction to generating a notable impact on the wider engineering field as a role model for women in STEM.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The environmental engineering graduate founded Rivalia Chemical Co. with her sights set on commercializing her work as a PhD student. Over the past two years, Stoy has been selected for a competitive business incubator and a prestigious fellowship for entrepreneurs.

Stoy and her advisor, Turnipseed Family Chair and Professor Ching-Hua Huang, discovered that by applying an ionic liquid directly to solid coal fly ash, rare-earth elements (REEs) can be successfully removed in a safe process that creates little waste.

Read more on the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering website.

The program was created by Georgia Tech, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan to help the next generation of engineering faculty members build their job search skills and networks.

Open to aspiring faculty members of all backgrounds, the workshop particularly aims to support the career development of traditionally underrepresented groups in academia. Engineering Ph.D. students and those who’ve recently finished their doctorates apply for three days of in-depth discussions about finding faculty jobs, managing courses, and developing rewarding, impactful research programs.

“There’s so much uncertainty of what the process is, so I wanted to come and learn what I needed to be doing to find a faculty position,” said NextProf Nexus attendee Kelsey Cavallaro, a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. “Sometimes you talk to faculty and they tell you to write good papers, apply, and hope for the best. I want to understand the steps to do it well, and what will set me up for success. And I think it’s exciting to have a group of people who are going through the same thing.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Haynes, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, is leading a team of multi-disciplinary investigators who were awarded a four-year, $2.1 million grant from NSF to explore this dark matter and illuminate how the genome controls living systems in all their diversity and complexity.

It’s large space to explore. Only two percent of the human genome is known to provide instructions to build proteins, a process essential to higher functioning life. This leaves 98 percent of the genome as a biological frontier known as dark matter – these segments do not encode for protein, like the other two percent.

“A lot of progress has been made in studying this part of the genome, but what we don’t know yet can be very useful,” said Haynes, whose lab works on the front line of synthetic biology, and is typically dedicated to protein engineering, including the investigation and design of chromatin-based systems for controlling gene expression in cancer and other cells.

Read the full story on the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering website.

This year, for the first time, the camp hosted two sessions. One in Albany, Georgia, to serve the state’s rural population, and the other on the Georgia Tech Atlanta campus. The participants in Albany were challenged to design a delivery drone, while those in Atlanta built rovers for Mars.

“I want students to walk away from this camp with confidence in their abilities, knowing that they can go to college and be engineers," said Lecturer Kelly Griendling, who leads the program and has been doing so for years.

The program is sponsored by the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE), Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL), Georgia Space Grant Consortium, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.

Read the full story on the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering website.

He’s learned the easiest places to park. The familiar faces of TSA. How to pack and move through security. The fastest way to walk from terminal to terminal.

He knows Hartsfield’s walkways like his home’s hallways, and every visit is as effortless and mindless as his commute to Georgia Tech. 

Except for a return trip last August.

Instead of walking off the plane and along those familiar corridors, he was in a wheelchair. And in pain. 

“It was humbling,” said Beyah, dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “I’m normally walking through the airport like I run the place. That day I saw elevators and hallways I didn’t know existed. It definitely changed my perspective.”

It was one minor change of perspective among many larger ones for Beyah in the last two years, when he discovered his own — and his family’s — resilience and courage, while also gaining a new outlook on life.

On that August afternoon, Beyah was returning from Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. He’d had his prostate removed to excise cancer growing there, and he wasn’t yet sure if the surgery was a success.

A year later, Beyah is cancer free. And he wants to tell a story very few know in hopes of helping others who find themselves where he was. It’s a story of discovery, recovery, and lessons learned.

“You can beat prostate cancer,” he said, “but only if men drop their macho attitudes.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Veda Chandler will take over as director of the Center for Engineering Education and Diversity (CEED) starting Aug. 1.

Joyelle “Joy” Harris will be the new director of the Women in Engineering (WIE) program beginning Aug. 14.

Both leaders, who have made careers of supporting student success in science, technology, engineering, and math, will support the College’s Inclusive Excellence Office.

“Veda and Joy each bring a wealth of experience and leadership to the Dean’s Office and will develop programs and initiatives that will advance the College’s national leadership in developing and graduating women and minority engineers,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “I am thrilled to work with these two dynamic leaders. Their gifts and experience will help us continue to position Georgia Tech as the premier place to study engineering.”

Read more about the new leaders on the College of Engineering website.

Three decades later, there were more women in engineering classes but still almost none teaching behind the lectern.

And even 25 years ago, the few women joining Georgia Tech’s engineering faculty found themselves without many others to work alongside.

But in 2023, faculty ranks have changed. This year, 14 women occupy critical leadership roles guiding the College of Engineering and its eight schools and departments. Their positions span research, entrepreneurship, faculty development, and more. They are associate chairs and associate deans. And, for the first time in the College’s history, two women serve as engineering school chairs.

Read about these 14 leaders on the College of Engineering website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she did a science fair project on devices that could alert her family when her grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease tried to leave the house. In the process, she learned about biomedical engineering (BME) and realized her career path.

“When I found out that Georgia Tech was one of the best programs in the U.S. for BME, I knew this was the place for me,” said Barrera Villamizar, whose family moved from Colombia to the Lawrenceville, Georgia, area just before she started high school. “I could stay in state and be close to my family. I just had to get in here.”

Read Natalia's story on the College of Engineering website.

Enough people turn to the site with searches like “loss of taste” or “how long contagious” that researchers at Georgia Tech can use that data to accurately predict looming waves of influenza-like illness and Covid-19 infections. Their forecasting models work for the nation overall and for each state, offering a new source of data about potential “twindemics” that could burden healthcare systems.

The model, developed by Shihao Yang and his team in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is published in the Nature journal Communications Medicine.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Growing up in metro Atlanta, he worked on construction sites and cleaned dishes part-time. His parents, both immigrants from Southern Mexico, pushed him to go to college so he wouldn’t have to keep working manual labor jobs. But the path to actually enrolling at Tech was anything but easy.

Castrejon’s high school was a low-income school that received federal funding to support underprivileged students, and he spent a lot of time worrying that he wasn’t “good enough” for Tech. Those worries ended up being unfounded. Yet Castrejon found himself facing another obstacle: health challenges in his family strained finances and left him wondering whether he could afford the Georgia Tech education he had dreamed about.
Image
Alex Castrejon headshot

“College was still in my future, but it looked like it would take a different shape than I’d imagined,” Castrejon said. “I prepared myself to be a commuter student, and to keep my job in construction, balancing that with classes. It felt unfair – I was finally good enough, but I didn’t have the means to fully immerse myself in school.”

Then, Castrejon received a letter that he had been accepted to the College of Engineering’s Clark Scholars Program.

Read Alex's story on the College of Engineering website.

A new study from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering looks closer at using overhead cable line (OCL) technology to power trucks, evaluating if they are wise environmental and economical choices.

For some countries, including the United States as a whole, Sweden and Germany, the team suggests OCL technology is ideal. It’s also beneficial at the state level for New York, Washington, and Georgia. But for other areas, it shouldn’t be implemented until the region’s electric grid is cleaner.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

A tool developed by Georgia Tech researchers can help make the most of those networks, pinpointing the ideal locations for water level sensors to maximize the real-time data available to emergency managers.

In a test case in Chatham County, Georgia, the approach developed by civil engineer Iris Tien reduced 29,000 potential sensor locations to just 381. The idea, then, is that officials can use their local expertise and historical knowledge to pick where to install sensors among those spots.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Mudd will represent Georgia Tech at the board’s annual Academic Recognition Day alongside one student from each of the state’s other 25 universities. Honorees receive a resolution from the Georgia House of Representatives and a commendation from the USG chancellor.

Read more about Mudd on the College of Engineering website.

Althea Noonan, Samina Patel, and Ishani Peddi are undergraduates in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. Lauren Paulson is studying in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with a minor in aerospace engineering. They’re among a group of 47 exceptional undergraduate women and gender minorities who were chosen by the Brooke Owens Fellowship Program.

Read more about this year's "Brookies" on the College of Engineering website.

AE’s Naia Butler-Craig serves as the aerospace chair for Black in Astro (BIA), a grassroots organization that supports current and future Black space scientists and engineers through education, outreach, mentoring, and networking.

The Annie Maunder Medal annually recognizes exceptional outreach or public engagement for astronomy and geophysics. While announcing BIA as its honoree, the RAS notes that the group's "dedication to fostering joy and authenticity for all Black people interested in STEM sets it apart from most outreach initiatives."

Read the full story on the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineer website.

“Actually going out into the community touched me differently,” said Jones, a fourth-year undergraduate. “The Sandwich Run gave me the opportunity to see the real people I was helping. I felt much more connected to the tangible impact I could have.”

Read more of Jones' story on the College of Engineering website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read about the study on the College of Engineering website.

Prausnitz is the J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) and director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery. He’s also the only Georgia Tech faculty member recognized as both a Regents’ Professor and Regents’ Entrepreneur, the highest academic titles awarded by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents. He joins 105 new NAE members in the 2023 class along with 18 new international members.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The Paris Agreement actually aims for 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avoid potential catastrophic changes to our climate. But it’s become increasingly clear to climate scientists and policymakers that just reducing emissions is not enough.

“We now know that we probably should have stopped putting massive amounts of CO₂ in the air 10, 20, 30 years ago to prevent the climate from getting above 2 degrees C,” said Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech. “Now we've waited so long to reduce our emissions that we need to develop technologies that are referred to as negative emissions technologies that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.”

Jones was one of a handful of scientists who co-authored a landmark National Academies report in 2018 that outlined a variety of approaches to negative emissions. Agricultural practices and forest management are options — essentially using nature’s ability to grab carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away in plants and soil. But Jones said we’ll need quicker and more direct approaches.

“We could plant billions of trees to do this, but there's not enough available land. And the trees don't grow fast enough for us to do this quickly enough to slow global warming at the rate required,” said Jones, John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). “That's where direct air capture comes in: It's a chemical engineering way of designing a process that takes CO₂ out of the air.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

See the full lists in the Georgia Tech News Center.

The MSCFP aims to help increase the number of women in the nuclear field, supporting an inclusive workforce of both men and women who contribute to and drive global scientific and technological innovation. As part of the MSCFP, Lamb and other selected students will receive a scholarship and have an opportunity to pursue an internship facilitated by the IAEA.

“It is wonderful that the IAEA recognizes the importance of women being involved in mission-critical research such as nuclear cybersecurity," said Lamb. “I am both honored and excited to be selected for this prestigious program.”

The MSCFP will allow Lamb to further her research in nuclear cybersecurity, specifically with regard to the implementation and security of machine learning in the nuclear industry. In addition, over the next 12 months, she will have a chance to connect with nuclear cybersecurity experts internationally.

“IAEA promotes the safe, secure, and peaceful use of nuclear technologies, and I am glad that we can continuously contribute to that through various opportunities such as the MSCFP. I am very excited for Patience, and cannot wait to see the opportunities she will have in the future,” said Assistant Professor Fan Zhang, who serves as the director of the Intelligence for Advanced Nuclear (iFAN) Lab at Georgia Tech.

As a graduate research assistant in the iFAN Lab, Lamb works with Zhang on the cybersecurity of digital twins for nuclear reactors, in collaboration with Idaho National Laboratory. Over the years, Zhang has supported IAEA nuclear cybersecurity missions through Coordinated Research Project (CRP) J02008, agency missions, and NucSecCyber webinars.

Outside of the classroom and lab, Lamb participates in the Women in Nuclear (WiN) Club, connecting Georgia Tech students with professionals in the field to help with professional development and workforce preparation. Lamb started the club last semester and Zhang serves as the faculty advisor.

The Brooke Owens Fellowship is a nationally-acclaimed nonprofit program recognizing exceptional undergraduate women and gender minorities with space and aviation internships, senior mentorship, and a lifelong professional network.

Paulson was one of 47 fellows who were selected based on their incredible talent, desire to pursue a career in aerospace, stand-out creative abilities, record of leadership, and most importantly, commitment to their communities. Almost 1,000 promising and talented students applied worldwide.

Paulson has always loved math, science, and problem-solving, but her interest in aerospace started when she was selected to go to a NASA young astronauts day in middle school.

At Georgia Tech, Paulson has served as the Vice President of Membership of the Yellow Jacket Flying Club. Through this club, she has pursued flight training toward a private pilot license. She also serves on the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Student Advisory Committee, is a prototyping instructor at the Flowers Invention Studio, and is active in Georgia Tech’s student-run theatre, DramaTech, where she serves as the head of marketing for the improv troupe and has acted and assisted in directing many shows. Paulson also enjoys running, scuba diving, sailing, and traveling.

Paulson has previously interned at BlackRock through the Hallac Scholars program where she worked to create a data quality visualization tool. She has also worked part-time as a Physics 2 Teaching Assistant at Georgia Tech and as a middle and high school math and science tutor. In addition, she has served as a part-time machine operator at the McKinsey Digital Capability Center where she worked to create a system to send alerts about machine maintenance. Finally, Paulson has conducted research in structural analysis and aeroelasticity under aerospace engineering professors at Georgia Tech.

As a Brooke Owens Fellow, Paulson will intern with Virgin Orbit on their quality engineering team in Long Beach, California this summer.

The Brooke Owens Fellowship was founded in 2016 to honor the memory of beloved industry pioneer and accomplished pilot D. Brooke Owens, who passed away in 2016, after a hard-fought battle with cancer. The Brooke Owens Fellowship celebrates its ongoing mission and legacy of disrupting the historical gender imbalance in the aerospace industry by continuing its mission to provide opportunities and access to talented young professionals from women and gender minorities from all backgrounds.

An international coalition of researchers — led by Georgia Tech — have determined that advancements and innovations in urban research and design must incorporate serious analysis and collaborations with scientists, public policy experts, local leaders, and citizens. To address environmental issues and infrastructure challenges cities face, the coalition identified three core focus areas with research priorities for long-term urban sustainability and viability. Those focus areas should be components of any urban planning, design, and sustainability initiative.

The researchers found that the core focus areas included social justice and equity, circularity, and a concept called “digital twins.” The team — which consists of 13 co-authors and scholars based in the U.S., Asia, and Europe — also provided guidance and future research directions for how to address these focus areas. They detailed their findings in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, published in January 2023.

“Climate change has certainly increased the amount and intensity of extreme weather events and because of that, it makes our decision making today critical to the manner in which our economy and our day to day lives can operate,” said Joe F. Bozeman III, the lead author and an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is also the director of Tech’s Social Equity & Environmental Engineering Lab and has a courtesy appointment in the School of Public Policy. “Our quality of life can be negatively affected if we don't make good decisions today.”

Three core areas of focus to achieve urban sustainability

The researchers’ first core focus area, justice and equity, addresses innovations and trends that disproportionately benefit middle and high-income communities. Trends like IoT, “smart cities,” and the urban “green movement” are part of a broader push by cities to become more sustainable and resilient. But communities of color and low-income neighborhoods — the same areas often home to environmental contaminations, infrastructure challenges, and other hazards — have often been overlooked.

The researchers’ findings showed a consistent trend with marginalized communities across several countries, including Canada, the Netherlands, India, and South Africa. They call for mandatory equity analyses which incorporate the experiences and perspectives of these marginalized communities, and, more importantly, ensure members of those communities are actively engaged in decision-making processes.

“Planning, professional, and community stakeholders,” the researchers write in the paper, “should recognize that working together gets cities closer to harmonizing the technological and social dimensions of sustainability.”

The second focus area, circularity, addresses resource consumption of staple commodities including food, water, and energy; the waste and emissions they generate; and the opportunities to increase conservation of those resources by boosting efficiencies.

“What we mean by circularity is basic reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling efforts across the entire urban system — which not only includes cities and under resourced areas within those cities — but also rural communities that supply and take resources from those city hubs,” Bozeman said. The idea is aligned with the circular economy concept which addresses the need to move away from the resource-wasteful and unsustainable cycle of taking, making, and throwing away.

Instead, the researchers argue, cities should look for ways to improve efficiency and maximize local resource use. That has potential benefits not only for urban areas, but rural communities, too. One example, Bozeman said, is the Lifecycle Building Center in Atlanta. It takes old building supplies and sells them locally for reuse.

“By doing that, they’re at the beginning stages of creating an economic system, a regional engine where we share resources between cities and rural areas,” he said. “We can start creating an economic framework, not only where both sides can make money and get what they need, but something that can actually turn into a sustainable economic engine without having to rely on another state or another country's import or export economic pressures.”

To strengthen circularity and make it more robust, the researchers call for more expansive metrics beyond measuring recycling rates and zero waste efforts, to include other parts of the supply chain that may yield new ideas and solutions.

The third focus area, digital twins, addresses the development of automated technologies in smart buildings and infrastructure, such as traffic lights to respond to weather and other environmental factors.

“Let's say there's a heavy rain event and that the rainwater is being stored into retainment,” said Bozeman. “An automated system can open another valve where we can store that water into a secondary support system, so there's less flooding, and that can happen automatically, if we utilize the concept of digital twins.” 

Creating a new urban planning model

The research came about as part of the mission of the Sustainable Urban Systems Section of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, which aims to be a conduit for scientists, engineers, policymakers, and others who want to marry environmental concerns and economic activity. Bozeman is a board member of the Sustainable Urban Systems Section.

“In that role, part of we do is set a vision and foundation for how other researchers should operate within the city and urban system space,” he said. 

For urban sustainability, engineers and policy makers must come to the table and make collective decisions around social justice and equity, circularity, and the digital twins concepts. 

“I think we're at a really critical decision point when it comes to engineers and others being able to do work that is forward looking and human sensitive,” said Bozeman. “Good decision making involves addressing social justice and equity and understanding its root causes, which will enable cities to create solutions that integrate cultural dynamics.”

CITATION: Joe F. Bozeman III, Shauhrat S. Chopra, Philip James, Sajjad Muhammad, Hua Cai, Kangkang Tong, Maya Carrasquillo, Harold Rickenbacker, Destenie Nock, Weslynne Ashton, Oliver Heidrich, Sybil Derrible, Melissa Bilec. “Three research priorities for just and sustainable urban systems: Now is the time to refocus.” (Journal of Industrial Ecology, January 2023)

Now the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is getting on board with Yushin’s Georgia Tech startup as part of federal efforts to reinvigorate tech manufacturing in the United States.

DOE awarded Sila Nanotechnologies $100 million this fall to support the company’s new factory in Moses Lake, Washington, and help Sila hire and train up to 300 workers for the facility. It was one of 21 projects funded in domestic battery materials processing and manufacturing.

“It’s our mission to help move America away from being energy dependent and become a leader in the energy transformation,” said Yushin, the company’s chief technology officer and a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. “With this funding, Sila will deliver proven, clean energy technology and world-scale manufacturing to revitalize the industry and gain independence.”

Birthed from Yushin’s research on lithium-ion batteries, Sila manufactures next-generation materials and a silicon anode technology that boosts battery energy density by 20%. The silicon anodes are a drop-in replacement for graphite anodes in lithium-ion batteries. The new facility is projected to produce enough capacity to power 200,000 electric vehicles by 2026. Sila has inked a deal with Mercedes-Benz to use the company’s technology, starting with G-Class vehicles.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

We asked a few Clark Scholars and students who’ve been involved in programs in the Center for Engineering Education and Diversity (CEED) to share a piece of their story ahead of graduation.

They talked about how they’ve grown in their years at Georgia Tech and what they’re taking with them as they move on to new chapters in their lives.

Read their reflections on the College of Engineering website.

Designed to help reduce food waste in university dining halls, the can — with a dash of behavioral psychology and a suite of computer vision and natural language processing — quantifies uneaten food going in the trash, then quizzes people about why. The goal is to collect information that chefs can use to improve what and how much they serve. The bucket also helps students think about the carbon footprint of their trash.

“Food waste is a major overlooked issue in the United States. That's what really motivated us to tackle this problem,” said Ivan Zou, a computer engineering major and member of Team Raccoon Eyes. “Our project is really about reducing waste at the source by improving food quality, helping with portion sizes, and making students more aware of what they're actually throwing away.”

The team’s approach to reducing the estimated 7 billion pounds of food discarded every year on college campuses won the Best Overall Project award Dec. 5 at Capstone Expo. This fall, the showcase of semester-long senior design projects featured 110 teams across seven schools in the Colleges of Engineering, Computing, and Design. They displayed work ranging from Martian missions and hedge trimmers with a removable blade to play structures for kids and an easier-to-use epinephrine injector for allergic reactions.

Read a full wrap-up of the Expo and see the list of winners. 

In August, Georgia Tech’s Lunar Flashlight team received news that was both exhilarating and daunting. Their briefcase-sized satellite was catching a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in late November, four months ahead of schedule.

Suddenly the team of researchers and students found themselves ramping up preparations for a journey to the moon in search of frozen water at the lunar south pole.

Those preparations are now complete. Launch week has arrived, with liftoff scheduled for the early morning hours of Nov. 30.

About an hour after launch, Georgia Tech's team will get to work. They'll begin communicating with Lunar Flashlight after it is ejected into space. Over the course of the next few days, the aerospace engineering students will check systems, run through scheduled propulsion burns, and put the CubeSat on a path for the moon. 

Read the entire story, which runs through the series of critical steps the students will make for their mission to the moon.

Researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have developed a system that uses ultrasound-induced microbubbles to help a powerful immunotherapy target brain tumors and a custom algorithm to continuously fine tune the bubbles for maximum impact.

Their closed-loop controlled focused ultrasound system proved effective in boosting survival rates in mouse models, including eradicating the entire tumor in at least one case. They described their approach Nov. 18 in the journal Science Advances.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Pizano went to Cristo Rey Atlanta Jesuit High School about 2.5 miles from Georgia Tech. The school enrolls more than 500 students from families who couldn’t otherwise pay for a private, college preparatory education. While families contribute a portion of the $16,400 cost of education, the school fundraises approximately $5,000 per student. The remaining 60% of the cost is earned by the students, who work at area businesses as part of Cristo Rey’s Corporate Work Study Program.

In his sophomore year of high school, Pizano landed at Georgia Tech and worked in the College of Engineering’s dean’s office. He had never been to campus and wasn’t yet thinking of college, although he hoped to one day study engineering.

“I didn’t know much at all about Georgia Tech,” said Pizano, who grew up in Atlanta. “My only goal was to make some connections and do the best I could. That year, I set my heart and mind on Tech.” 

Pizano loved Georgia Tech so much that he returned to the dean’s office to work his senior year, then applied and was accepted as a student.

Once a 15-year-old sitting in Tech Tower, uncertain about what to do for college, Pizano is now a third-year civil engineering student with a focus on transportation systems.

“I came here in high school, loved the people, and kept coming back,” said Pizano, who stayed on in the dean’s office as a student assistant in 2020 and 2021. “My job in the dean’s office gave me a kickstart to my current success at Tech.”

Pizano said the work-study experience at Georgia Tech also taught him the pillars of working in a professional environment, an opportunity that isn’t typically available to high school students. It’s one of Cristo Rey’s main goals, with Georgia Tech playing a supporting role since the school was founded eight years ago.

Read more about the how Georgia Tech is expanding access through its partnership with Cristo Rey. 

That’s why she brought 23 of her students to the Atlanta Marriott in Buckhead Oct. 13 to an event co-hosted by the Georgia Tech College of Engineering, the Center for Engineering Education and Diversity, and the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. The conference provided a taste of all the ways high schoolers could pursue a college degree in engineering and science as well as the impact a career in engineering could have on their lives and communities.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

“The journey of injury and recovery required a lot of mental stamina because no one knew when I was going to get better, and it took longer than anyone expected,” Jakubowski said. “But that experience was also the entry into my research in rehabilitation and helping people with mobility impairments.”

Ultimately, that concussion led Jakubowski to shift her degree in biomedical engineering from a sports focus to a focus in rehabilitation, eventually earning a master’s and then a Ph.D. in the field. This fall, she’s joining the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University as an American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) eFellows Postdoctoral Fellow.

Read the full story on the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering website.

To be successful, the nation should focus on “meaningful investments in infrastructure that will result in resilient, sustainable, and equitable systems in support of communities,” said Tien, who studies infrastructure networks, including building, water, power, gas, communications, and transportation systems in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Writing recently in the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Journal of Infrastructure Systems, Tien identified areas in current infrastructure systems that inhibit progress and offered recommendations for more of those meaningful investments.

Read about her key suggestions on the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering website.

With a $4.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers from Georgia Tech, Spelman College, and Albany State University will begin to look for causes and solutions. They’ll recruit 45 women for a five-year study to investigate the relationship between systems of oppression and Black women’s intent to persist in STEM studies.

“We’re positing that the lack of progression is based upon continual and progressively more damaging interruptions,” said Tamara Pearson, director of the Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM at Spelman College. “Although interruptions are daily occurrences in the lives of all people, Black women are interrupted more frequently than others as a matter of their sheer existence. Each occurrence results in losses of focus, momentum, and confidence, and requires time to rebound. I'm excited for what this work will mean for Black women in STEM.”

Pearson will co-lead the initiative with Felicia Benton-Johnson at Georgia Tech, Kathaleena Edward Monds at Albany State, and PLR Consulting’s Pamela Leggett-Robinson — all Black women who pursued STEM education.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Biomedical engineer Gabe Kwong will receive $5.5 million over five years through an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award — the first such award for a faculty member at the Institute. Three others have won New Innovator Awards: John Blazeck in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Felipe Quiroz in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Aaron Young in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Each will receive approximately $2 million to pursue creative, but risky ideas.

The NIH funding is for high-impact ideas that might be too early in their development to secure other research grant funding.

“The science advanced by these researchers is poised to blaze new paths of discovery in human health,” said Lawrence A. Tabak, acting director of NIH. “This unique cohort of scientists will transform what is known in the biological and behavioral world. We are privileged to support this innovative science.”

Read more about the four projects on the College of Engineering website.

Each fall, 10 first-year students are admitted as Clark Scholars. Nate Tenorio was among the first group three years ago. He will become the first in the program to earn his degree at Fall Commencement on December 18.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Since arriving in 2019 Fraticelli-Guzmán has thoroughly involved herself in the wider Georgia Tech community, serving as a member of the Fellowship of Christian Graduate Students and as a Leadership Fellow with the Leadership Education and Development office. Her work with the Latino Organization of Graduate Students (LOGRAS) particularly underscores her wholehearted commitment to inclusion and equity, helping the organization expand its membership and broaden the scope of its community engagement.

Read the full story on the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering website.

However, the nationwide ratio is just 1 in 5. In addition, according to the Society of Women Engineers, only 18% of tenured/tenure-track faculty in engineering are women.

Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, wants to ensure that women students and faculty have equal and equitable opportunities within the Woodruff School. One of his top priorities since becoming chair in January has been to increase access to engineering education, as well as teaching and research opportunities, amongst women.

“To support the Woodruff School’s strategic vision of becoming an inclusive and equitable community, we are striving to increase the number of women graduate students to 30% by 2030,” said Ranjan.

It’s the reason why Ranjan and the Woodruff School are launching a new initiative called Women of Woodruff (WoW). WoW, which is still in development, is an organization made up of College of Engineering alumnae and friends who are committed to ensuring women mechanical engineering students and faculty have the tools they need to thrive at Georgia Tech.

Read the full story on the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering website.

That’s true as a senior lecturer and director of the Center for Academics, Success, and Equity (CASE) in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). It’s also true as senior pastor of Providence Missionary Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta.

“They end up being two sides of the same coin. Both jobs require a lot of teaching, sharing, and relationship building,” Williams said. “It’s my job to get to know people, to identify where their point of need is, and to see how I can support help them. I do that in both places.”

Starting Sept. 1, Williams will expand the scope of where and how he helps students, faculty, and staff at Georgia Tech as the College of Engineering’s first associate dean for inclusive excellence and chief diversity officer. The position was created this year to advance diversity and inclusion initiatives and support an inclusive climate of belonging across the College community.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

This year’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) welcomed 44 juniors and seniors from across the nation. This cohort, which participated in-person for the first time since 2019, worked in labs throughout all eight of the College’s Schools and Departments. Building a research portfolio is just one part of experience. SURE also provides professional development and social opportunities, in addition to stressing the importance of integrating principles of inclusion and diversity into research.

A handful of this year’s SURE students were from Georgia Tech, with a few others enrolled at University System of Georgia institutions. Most students were from out of state, including from other top-tier research universities. Nearly half of the cohort consisted of first-generation college students. The majority of the group consisted of Black and Hispanic/Latinx aspiring researchers.

A number of universities host SURE programs. Georgia Tech’s began in 1992 and is among the nation’s longest running summer programs. The main priority is to recruit students to consider Georgia Tech for graduate school from underrepresented backgrounds.

“The goal of Georgia Tech’s SURE program is to diversify STEM,” said Lakeita Servance, who manages the program. “We recruit many students from underrepresented backgrounds, which paves the way for them to gain exposure to STEM research, set up a strong mentorship support system, and helps them to see Georgia Tech as a place where they can truly belong.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Pamela Bhatti is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE); Anna Erickson is a Woodruff Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Both also serve as associate chairs in their Schools. They’ll spend the next year in an intensive program of personal and leadership development through the Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science (ELATES) program at Drexel University.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

In OUE, Joy will work to advance their Institute Strategic Plan as it relates to undergraduate education as well as the strategic plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which has been recently finalized. She will collaborate with Georgia Tech's minority-serving offices, programs, and organizations to analyze and identify barriers that impede under-resourced and under-represented students from engaging in OUE programs/services and other high impact practices. She will work to develop and implement initiatives to address these barriers and measure their success. Finally, she will support University System of Georgia (USG) initiatives, including Complete College Georgia, Momentum Approach, and the USG HIPs Initiative.

Read the full story on the Office of Undergraduate Education website.

Brewer is one of the seven new inductees in NASA’s 2022 class of flight directors, stationed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas. In her new role, she will lead human spaceflight missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and prepare for a multitude of others including Artemis.

“I am excited about everything. “This role is a perfect combination for me. It’s technical work, while also allowing me to work with people and solve problems. That’s everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” shared Brewer.

Read the full story on the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering website.

“Natalie is an innovator with a bold vision for the future. These attributes, in addition to being a world-renowned researcher and her ongoing efforts to increase diversity in engineering, make her the best choice to lead MSE,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “I’m excited to continue to partner with Natalie as she begins this new chapter of her Georgia Tech career.”

Stingelin is a well-regarded researcher in polymer physics, functional soft matter, organic electronics and photonics, and bioelectronics. She received the 2022 Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Innovation Award. She serves as the director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics and is an initiative lead for the Institute for Materials.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

SICPEA is hosted by the College’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council. The second-year competition encourages Georgia Tech students to utilize engineering fundamentals to develop creative solutions to challenges in the student community. The goal is to recognize innovations that will promote equity and access, rather than revenue, convenience, or workflow.

Teams were asked to identify a campus problem that has a significant, negative impact, then design an innovative solution to effectively address it. Submissions included a proposal outlining the problem they chose to research and the potential impact of their solution. Many proposals, including the three winners, chose to focus on socially disadvantaged populations at Georgia Tech and the structural barriers making their academic success more difficult. Their proposals aimed to address these issues to improve academic experiences for a multitude of groups.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Stebner thought it would take 10-15 years of incremental steps and funding to achieve the goal. He was wrong.

Thanks to a new $65 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, announced by President Joe Biden, Stebner’s plan will begin to become a reality — and include the entire state of Georgia and all of its manufacturing sectors from agriculture to airplanes — two years after arriving on campus.

The largest of the nine projects within the larger Georgia AI Manufacturing (GA-AIM) technology corridor grant will allow Stebner and Georgia Tech to transform the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) into the Artificial Intelligence Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AI-MPF). The 24,000 square-foot facility on 14th Street will more than double in size after Georgia Tech and statewide GA-AIM partners were selected as one of 21 Phase II awardees in the $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBB) competition, part of the Investing in America’s Communities initiative under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

AMPF has been a shell waiting for a vision like Build Back Better to fill it out,” said Stebner, associate professor the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. “Now we will transform the facility into one of the nation’s first manufacturing labs designed for autonomy with the goal of helping the state and the nation to be world AI manufacturing leaders.”

Read the entire story on the College of Engineering website. 

After flying 1,500 miles, that’s all three Georgia Tech student researchers would have inside a dark, smelly cave tucked under a small ridge near a ski lift in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Even with full-on oxygen masks and protective clothing.

The trio recently traveled from Atlanta to explore the cave, which was packed with a toxic — and deadly — mix of gases capable of knocking a person unconscious within a few breaths. Surrounded by walls covered in patches of sulfuric acid able to burn skin and eat through clothing and gear, they searched for a phenomenon they’ve only observed in a Georgia Tech lab: worm blobs.

“It was dangerous, but it was necessary,” said Harry Tuazon, a bioengineering Ph.D. student who led the excursion.

Read about their treacherous exploration of the cave.

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

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

Read about the study and see video from the experiments. 

Kardomateas has spent over thirty years improving aircrafts from a structural standpoint. More specifically he investigates ways to ensure that aerospace structures retain their structural integrity. He focuses on the special part of mechanics called fracture mechanics, which studies the conditions for the initiation and propagation of cracks and debonds. “Fracture mechanics and damage tolerance have been very successful in that, nowadays, airplanes don’t usually come down because of structural failure,” explained Kardomateas.

He credits his lifelong scientific triumphs to his education in the United States and Greece, his collaboration with past and present colleagues at Georgia Tech, and the academic system in America. “The environment at Georgia Tech fosters collaboration and innovation. The higher education system provides opportunities through the collegial network in scientific forums where ideas can be exchanged with those inside and outside of your institution.” Former AE School professors, including the late Bob Carlson, and George Simitses, inspired him as colleagues and also acted as mentors to him.

Kardomateas earned a diploma from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece and both his master’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1989, he joined the School of Aerospace Engineering's faculty at the Georgia Tech. He has authored three books, An Introduction to Fatigue in Metals and Composites, Structural and Failure Mechanics of Sandwich Composites, and Mechanics of Failure Mechanisms in Structures. He is also the editor of six volumes on the topic of failure mechanics of composite and sandwich structures, an associate editor of the Handbook of Damage Mechanics: Nano to Macro Scale for Materials and Structures, as well as the author of about 200 papers published in refereed journals or as parts of books.

In addition to his work at Georgia Tech, he has served the discipline in several capacities. The ASME Fellow has operated as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanics, and the AIAA Journal, as a Contributing Editor of the International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics and as a guest editor of the International Journal of Solids and Structures and the Journal of Mechanics of Materials and Structures. In addition, he has served as the technical chair of the 2014 ASME Congress, general chair of the 2015 ASME Congress, and the steering committee chair of the 2017 ASME Congress. He was the elected chairman of the Applied Mechanics Division Composites Committee and the program representative of the Aerospace Division Structures and Materials Committee.  Kardomateas has also served in many other panels and committees including as the Chair of the Daniel Guggenheim Medal Award Board, and on the Organizing Committee of the sixth, seventh, tenth and eleventh Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing’s International Conferences on Sandwich Structures; he has also served on external evaluation committees for many academic programs.

Currently, the medal winner is working on his next book that focuses on the fracture and fatigue of metallic and composite aerospace structures, which will include his latest research advances in the field.

HOOKED: When Want Becomes Need is curated by Floyd Hall, interim director of Science Gallery Atlanta. For the exhibit, Science Gallery International partnered with Emory University to explore addiction through art and science by way of multimedia art installations.“This exhibition is about unpacking all that we think we know about addiction and approaching the topic from a public health perspective,” said Hall, who holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech. “No one is exempt from the effects of addiction on society.”

Caroline Greiner, a Georgia Tech graduate student in mechanical engineering and engineering education, is a mediator for the exhibit. She guides guests as they explore the installations, answering questions about the art and science behind each piece.

“With a background in engineering, science, and art, I have an interest in how the arts collide with STEM topics and how that can enhance learning and experiences in both fields,” Greiner said.

HOOKED, the inaugural exhibit for Science Gallery Atlanta, runs through Sept. 4 at Pullman Yards. Admission is free at the door, and guests can also reserve a ticket online.

Georgia Tech’s connection to Science Gallery International goes beyond Atlanta. In March, Tech alumna Jahnavi Phalkey became the founding director of Science Gallery Bengaluru.

Rohan Datta, however, reversed the usual timeline. The 18-year-old recently graduated from The Galloway School in Atlanta. By the time he attends his first classes on campus this fall as a Stamps Scholar, Datta will already have a published paper on his resume.

With guidance from and collaboration with both a professor and an alumna of the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), Datta is the first author on a recently published study in the Journal of Chemical Physics. In the paper, “Conductivity prediction model for ionic liquids using machine learning,” Datta describes his construction of a deep neural network capable of making rapid and accurate predictions of the conductivity of ionic liquids.

Datta’s publication marks a fitting conclusion to high school while serving as the next phase of his Georgia Tech experience.

Read the entire story. 

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

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

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

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

Originally a six-cylinder, the Georgia Tech team converted its Blazer to a four-cylinder hybrid vehicle with adaptive cruise control. Its vehicle-to infrastructure communication technology allows it to “talk” to stoplights and adjust its speed for optimization.

The team of approximately 60 graduate and undergraduate students represent six of the College of Engineering’s eight schools. The group also includes students from the College of Computing, Scheller College of Business, and Georgia State University.

Read the entire story on the College of Engineering website. 

How did “Top Gun” change movie making, and why does it continue to be relevant 36 years later? To address those questions and much more, the Georgia Tech community reflects on the film and its legacy on the eve of its long-awaited sequel — “Top Gun: Maverick.”

A film studies professor discusses that rebirth of military movies, as well as a memorable soundtrack, and a psychology professor explains adrenaline rush. Three recent ROTC graduates prepare for their own flight school experience. And a current faculty member remembers his days in the real TOPGUN, where he helped Hollywood create a classic.

Read the entire story on the College of Engineering website. 

One of Joe Bozeman’s core research areas is America’s food consumption habits and how they affect climate change, specifically greenhouse gas emissions. The assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering looks at food intake across a number of groups, including socioeconomic status, race, and age. Using that data, he’s able to create models that better inform communities and assist policy makers.

However, the most consistent, thorough data he uses to develop those models are from 2005-2010. Five-year datasets before and after that timeframe aren’t standardized, as all sociodemographic groups are not included. This makes it difficult for Bozeman to draw comparisons that are inclusive of everyone across spatial scales and time periods.

It’s one reason why he and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Colorado Denver have published a framework and 10-step process to help engineers, scientists, and community members standardize their data related to energy and environmental topics. Their goal is to integrate equity into these fields, a practice Bozeman and his colleagues call systemic equity. By doing so, they hope to create a system that all demographics of groups are included, including age groups, income levels, race, and ethnicity.

Read the entire story on the College of Engineering website. 

This installment of the Faces of Research Q&A series is with Kinsey Herrin

What is your field of expertise and why did you choose it?
I’m a prosthetist/orthotist and conduct research in the field of prosthetics, orthotics/exoskeletons, and rehab robotics. Our goal is to make it easier for people with mobility challenges to live more independent lives by helping them move more easily in the real world. The change we see through our technology sometimes is amazing — people with amputations can go upstairs, step-over-step instead of stiff legged, and kids with walking disabilities start to have more normal walking patterns. As a kid, I always wanted to help people and this profession is the perfect blend of medicine, science, and art — all things that I love plus the added benefit of getting to be around some really incredible people.

What makes Georgia Tech Research institutes unique?
We’re trying to advance technology outside of the lab and into the real world where it can make an impact on real users. That means not only assessing how our users perform with the technology — does it actually make them walk faster, with a more natural and easy gait — but also assessing a user’s own perspective on technology and using all of that data to keep improving the end results. Our facilities and resources are incredible. I often feel I have access to a dream playground for a research prosthetist/orthotist. On top of all of that, our faculty and students are not only extremely talented and at the top of their fields, but I think there is a deeper passion for pursuing this goal to make mobility easier for people with physical challenges.

What impact is your research having on the world? 
I see our work as having an impact on all people with mobility challenges. We are trying to make the world a better place for them by challenging the status quo and saying what clinicians can currently provide is still not good enough. We can still do more to return people to a new normal after amputation, stroke, brain, and spinal cord injuries. When people can access their own environment independently, it has overwhelmingly positive impacts on their quality of life. I think our research is making great strides toward making that possible. 

What do you like to do in your spare time when you are not working on your research or teaching?
I enjoy being outdoors with my husband and son any chance we get. We love pretty much everything about being on or near water — fishing, kayaking, canoeing, swimming, and camping. I also have nine backyard chickens and a dog that are hilarious and fun additions to the Herrin chaos.

Using data from the Federal Highway Administration’s National Household Travel Survey, the team looked at the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas and each community’s likelihood of riding buses and trains. They then compared the numbers with the 838,000 confirmed Covid cases on the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering's dashboard from Jan. 22 – May 1, 2020.

The timeframe covers the initial days, weeks, and months of the pandemic, before mask mandates were in place and prior to widespread social distancing. Ventilation on public transit had yet to be addressed, along with other public health measures that have since become the norm.

The study found that cities with high-usage public transportation systems displayed higher per capita Covid incidence. This was true when other factors, such as education, poverty levels, and household crowding, were accounted for. The association continued to be statistically significant even when the model was run without data from transit-friendly New York City.

The paper, “Investigating the association between mass transit adoption and COVID-19 infections in US metropolitan areas,” is published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. While the researchers don’t suggest that transit is the sole cause of the high incidence rates, they say it could have been an important factor early in the pandemic.

“This is what we expected, but we wanted to run the models to know for sure. Policymakers shouldn’t make decisions based on what they assume to be true,” said Michael Thomas, one of the study’s co-authors and a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering. “This study is similar to dusting off a dinosaur dig site and finding a leg bone. This isn’t the entire dinosaur. There are many ways of making the argument about Covid spread, and transit is just part of it.”

The team got the idea of tracking transit and Covid cases after watching early reports from Wuhan, China, and reflecting on how differences in public transportation systems may factor into pandemic spread patterns. As assumptions were being made about how American cities should react based on ridership patterns on the other side of the globe, Professor John Taylor thought the pandemic shouldn’t be treated as a “one size fits all” situation.

“In the initial months of the pandemic, models were being developed here at home based on incidence rates in Wuhan. But, in terms of mass transit ridership behavior, China’s may be far different than what we see in American cities,” said Taylor, Frederick Law Olmsted Professor and associate chair for graduate programs and research innovation in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “For instance, people in Chinese urban areas often stand in long, single file lines as they wait for trains and buses. We don’t. Different spread patterns can develop because of differences in mass transit behaviors.”

Taylor’s primary research focuses on the dynamics that can occur at the intersection of human and engineered networks, such as how people change electricity consumption behaviors and changing mobility patterns in natural disasters. Pandemics were on his research radar before Covid became a household name, as Taylor wanted to create better models to forecast the spread of illnesses. His first research effort in this direction was tracking the Ebola virus that reached Texas in 2014.

In the fall of 2019, Thomas was working as a biostatistician at the Georgia Department of Public Health when he spoke with Taylor about pursuing his Ph.D. Thomas submitted his application to Georgia Tech that November — just four months before Covid shut down America.

The two, along with study co-author and senior research engineer Neda Mohammadi, are now creating models to predict the spread of future illnesses among populations. They’re also looking to demonstrate how researchers can modify those models for better accuracy.

“If engineers and scientists can better understand the factors of community spread, policymakers can make faster, more accurate decisions to protect public health,” said Thomas. “In transportation, for example, it could lead to quicker decisions to restrict the number of people on buses. Or policies to stagger vehicle departure times more consistently. Studies like ours provide a basis for those decisions.”

Having more accurate models also takes varying human behavior into account, according to the researchers. Just as people in Wuhan wait for public transportation differently than those here in America, cities can differ from each other.

“Your pandemic is different than your neighbor’s,” said Mohammadi. “Pandemic spread isn’t the same from city to city, nor is ridership. Decision makers often look to other communities to see how they’re responding to shape their actions. That’s not always accurate. Models need to be customizable because populations don’t react uniformly. It’s our goal to improve decision making to be easier, faster, and more accurate for the next pandemic.”

CITATION: Thomas, M., Mohammadi, N., Taylor, J. Investigating the association between mass transit adoption and COVID-19 infections in US metropolitan areas. Science of the Total Environment Vol 811, 152284 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.152284

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 1837021. 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 NSF.

The first was an afternoon question-and-answer session with the Georgia Tech community. Then he went under the lights at a sold-out Russ Chandler Stadium as the Yellow Jackets baseball team hosted the University of Georgia.

The day of events marked Kimbrough’s first on campus since the Georgia Tech graduate’s third mission to space — which included 199 days and 84 million miles aboard the International Space Station (ISS).  

Kimbrough’s first stop of the day was a morning tour of the Space Systems Design Lab. Nearly two dozen students and research engineers showed Kimbrough the lab space of Glenn Lightsey, a professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE School).

Kimbrough watched as the group tested electronics and navigation systems for future CubeSats. Their GT-1 spacecraft was deployed into orbit in February, and the students are currently working on three 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm follow-up models for future missions.

From there, Kimbrough visited Mission Operations Center, which is currently being used to track GT-1. He also checked in on Lunar Flashlight, which is scheduled for launch this summer and will be the first CubeSat ever to orbit the moon. A Georgia Tech interdisciplinary team built the spacecraft’s propulsion system. The AE School and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have been assembling and integrating Lunar Flashlight for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab the last several months.

“I was really inspired by the students I met, and I’ve been very impressed by the projects they’re working on,” said Kimbrough, who received his master’s degree in operations research from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) in 1998. “So many people are interested in space, which is great to see.”

“Friday was amazing! It was very cool to share the work we do here at the lab and hear about his various experiences, from the military to NASA to being on the ISS,” said Ebenezer Arunkumar, GT-1’s software team lead and a master’s student in aerospace engineering. “Being an astronaut has always been a dream of mine, so meeting someone who has accomplished that goal was awe-inspiring.”

The morning ended with a visit to the Yang Aero Maker Space. The student-led facility in the Weber Space and Science Technology Building allows students to use 3D printers, laser cutters, and more to build prototypes that advance their research and curiosity.

“It was a really great opportunity to talk to an astronaut, something I’d only done on Zoom,” said Rachel Thomas, a member of the Ramblin’ Rocket Club who is scheduled to graduate this semester with her undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering. “I talked to him about my team, GTXR (Georgia Tech Experimental Rocketry), and he was really excited about that. It was a unique experience.”

The day’s main event, a Q&A in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, filled an auditorium. In addition to the 250 or so Yellow Jackets in the room, nearly a thousand K-12 students from around the Atlanta area tuned into the livestream as invited guests, with some submitting questions for Kimbrough.

Topics ranged from the astronaut application process, when he knew he wanted to travel to space (as a young child), and the relevancy of his ISyE degree to his success as an astronaut.

The session was moderated by AE School Ph.D. student Naia Butler-Craig, an aspiring astronaut.

“I’m so grateful that Shane took his time to pour into the next generation of aerospace engineers,” Butler-Craig said. “It was such an honor to hear from someone as accomplished and personable as him. I feel motivated to keep going on my own journey in following his footsteps!”

Before taking a detour and riding in the Ramblin’ Wreck for the first time, Kimbrough stood before another packed house that night. He threw out the first pitch before Georgia Tech beat Georgia 11-7. Kimbrough grew up attending Yellow Jacket sporting events and nearly enrolled as undergraduate. Instead, he attended the U.S. Military Academy and pitched for its baseball team.

“It was an incredible, perfect day for me. “Getting to come back and give back a little bit to the students and faculty was amazing.” Kimbrough said. “The weather was great. The events were great. I just want to go back to school!”

Kimbrough is returning to his alma mater for the first time since living on the International Space Station (ISS) for six months in 2021. In three trips to space, he has spent 388 days away from Earth, the fourth highest total among U.S. astronauts.

The event will be moderated by Naia Butler-Craig, a Ph.D. student in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. Butler-Craig is a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellow and a NASA Pathways intern in the Science and Space Technology Systems branch at Glenn Research Center. The Q&A will be streamed live on the Georgia Tech YouTube channel, where viewers can submit questions. K-12 schools around Atlanta will also participate remotely.

The Q&A session is one of several Georgia Tech events for Kimbrough on Friday. He will spend the morning touring labs dedicated to spacecraft design and space-related research. That evening, he will throw out the first pitch at Georgia Tech’s baseball game against the University of Georgia. The action starts at 6pm at Russ Chandler Stadium.

Kimbrough grew up in Atlanta, attending Georgia Tech sporting events as a kid. He was an NCAA pitcher while earning his undergraduate degree at the United States Military Academy. After nearly a decade serving in the U.S. Army, Kimbrough graduated with a master’s degree in operations research from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE).

Kimbrough was selected to be an astronaut in 2004. His first mission was aboard space shuttle Endeavour in 2008. He returned to orbit in 2016 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, serving as commander of the ISS for six months.

Last April, Kimbrough was commander of NASA/SpaceX Crew-2, launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida. By flying on Crew Dragon, Kimbrough became the fourth person to travel on three different spacecrafts.

During his three missions, Kimbrough has taken Georgia Tech jerseys and a flag from the Ramblin’ Wreck into orbit. He also threw out the first pitch in a taped ceremony from the ISS before a 2021 Georgia Tech baseball game and recorded a message that was played during last fall’s space-themed football game.

Magnus returned to her alma mater in 2021 with joint appointments in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. As professor of the practice, her position primarily focuses on research advocacy, leadership and mentorship to students, as well as offering guidance to faculty related to issues in aerospace engineering.

Magnus was selected as an astronaut in 1996, the same year she received her doctoral degree in MSE. Her first launch was in 2002 aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis. In 2008, she flew to the International Space Station and lived onboard for four and a half months. Magnus’s final flight, STS-135 in 2011, was the final space shuttle launch (again on Atlantis). She has spent 187 days in orbit.

Magnus is currently a principal at AstroPlanetview LLC. She has received numerous awards, including the NASA Space Flight Medal, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, and the 40 at 40 Award (given to former collegiate women athletes to recognize the impact of Title IX).

Her election to the hall of fame comes a week after she was named to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest professional distinctions awarded to an engineer.

At the same time, there currently isn’t a federal entity that approves respiratory protection devices intended for the general public. The committee recommends that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) designates a laboratory to oversee standards development, assessment, and approval of such devices. 

Jayaraman is a national leader in studying and defining the roles of engineering design, manufacturing, and materials technologies in public policy. The founding director of Georgia Tech’s Kolon Center for Lifestyle Innovation served on the Committee on Respiratory Protection for the Public and Workers without Respiratory Protection Programs at their Workplaces, a group sponsored by the CDC Foundation, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. 

He expands on the report, which is titled “Frameworks for Protecting Workers and the Public from Inhalation Hazards.”

What do you think are the most important recommendations?  

The needs of many workers and the public are not being met. Significant disparities exist.

For example, not only isn’t there an authority responsible for oversight of respiratory protection for the public, but RPPs in place for workers with OSHA coverage are not suitable for implementation in the general population. As we have all seen during the pandemic, messaging and guidance are unclear and sometimes conflicting. This leads to confusion. Even terminology is unclear to the public – what is a mask? A respirator? A face covering? Finding answers to simple, yet important, questions has not been easy. Which device to use, and is it safe? Where can it be bought and how can it be used effectively?

These are among the reasons we recommend a “coordinating entity” within HHS to oversee the efforts of multiple stakeholders with responsibilities and authorities related to respiratory protection for the public. This would ensure availability and access to respiratory protective devices, as well as the development of clear and consistent guidance and training for those charged with educating the public.  

In the meantime, many of America’s workers, such as wildland firefighters and gig workers, fall outside of OSHA’s RPP. Protection afforded by a respirator used outside of an RPP may be diminished due to improper fit or use. Our recommendations to expand OSHA coverage are aimed at filling gaps in these protections, providing more training for workers, and expanding research in workplace protection against inhalation hazards.

Thus, for the first time, we are laying out a road map to protect the respiratory health of everyone in our country to ensure that all people have access to the right devices at the right time.

Do you think the nation is prepared to make the changes necessary to follow the recommendations?

We are facing unprecedented threats from inhalation hazards, such as wildfire smoke and infectious agents like SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a pivotal point in public health.

The proposed systems-based road map is forward-looking and provides a solid foundation for policy making that should lead to implementation. There is no better time for moving forward. The time for protecting the nation’s respiratory health is now!

Was the Covid-19 pandemic the primary reason the committee was formed?  

The origins and impetus for this study predate the pandemic, which happened to reinforce the importance and criticality of respiratory protection for the population at-large.

Wildfire smoke in the west has been a major inhalation hazard. Mold growth indoors after flooding from storms poses another inhalation hazard. The respiratory health of families of our diplomats stationed abroad in cities with high degrees of air pollution is affected.

Today’s workforce includes independent contractors, self-employed workers, and gig workers who are not considered employees of an employer. This is why they lack the respiratory protection from inhalation hazards that come from OSHA-mandated programs.

Past National Academies reports have focused on respiratory protection needs of workers exposed to inhalation hazards. Our report builds from those efforts while being the first focused specifically on the needs of the public.

What was your role on the committee and how does your expertise play into your contributions?

The committee members chosen to serve brought a wide variety of disciplines and expertise to address this critical topic. The unifying theme of my research at Georgia Tech has been convergence: the seamless integration of materials, information, and technology to enhance quality of life. Consequently, the work in my lab includes systems modeling, smart textiles, and design and development of respiratory protective devices, among others.

This is the ninth NASEM committee on which I have had the privilege of serving. The first one was in 2006 when the threat of bird flu led to the study titled “Reusability of Facemasks during an Influenza Pandemic.” I never imagined that the threat would become a reality with COVID-19.

The opportunity to interact and critically engage with the world’s leading experts on a host of interdisciplinary topics related to the study is a great learning experience. It has also given me the opportunity to bring the results of the research from my lab to inform the discussions during the compiling of the report. I firmly believe that research must blend conceptual advancements with practical implementation of these concepts for solving real-world problems, including shaping public policy. These studies have given me that fulfilling opportunity to contribute to society. 

Datta is the Stinson Professor of Nanotechnology in Notre Dame’s Department of Electrical Engineering. He is the director of ASCENT (Applications and Systems-Driven Center for Energy-Efficient Integrated NanoTechnologies), a $40 million microelectronics research center funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The center's mission is to provide breakthrough advances in foundational semiconductor materials, devices, and heterogenous integration technologies. ASCENT includes Notre Dame and 13 partner universities.

Datta’s research involves high-performance, heterogenous computing, brain-inspired computing, and collective state computing using advanced CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) and beyond-CMOS devices. He also focuses on the development of semiconductor technologies for other types of computing, including intermittent computing, cryogenic computing, and harsh environment computing.

“Suman is a leader in the fields of semiconductors and nanoelectronic device research. His addition to the faculty is a tremendous benefit for our students, research community, and the state of Georgia,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “I welcome him to Georgia Tech and am excited to see him continue to define the future of computing.”

From 2016-2021, Datta served as director of the six-university Center for Extremely Energy Efficient Collective Electronics (EXCEL), which is funded by the SRC and National Science Foundation (NSF). EXCEL explores the demonstration of an alternate computing platform that leverages continuous-time dynamics of emerging devices to execute optimization, learning, and inference tasks in a collective, cooperative, and scalable way to transcend the current energy efficiency wall by many orders of magnitude.

Georgia Tech ECE faculty members have played technical roles in both EXCEL and ASCENT and many have collaborated with Datta in recent years. 

“I have been fortunate to pursue a career in semiconductor science and technology, a field inherently multi-disciplinary that touches many areas of physical sciences. Looking ahead, with new paradigms of computing, communication, and information storage on the horizon, I see traditional boundaries between computing and physical sciences blurring,” said Datta. “This is why I’m thrilled to join the Georgia Tech family in ECE and MSE. Additionally, as a new member of the Georgia Research Alliance, I look forward to bringing my technology development experience in the private sector and contributing to the larger tech transfer and commercialization ecosystem in the state of Georgia.”

Datta has been at the forefront of logic transistor research for the past two decades. While at Intel from 1999-2007, two of his most impactful contributions in high-k/metal gate CMOS and Tri-gate CMOS research and development led to commercially successful technologies that allowed transistor scaling from 45nm node to 14nm node and beyond. Datta’s recent research has driven advances in embedded high-performance memory space such as single transistor Ferroelectric transistor memory and capacitorless gain cell (or floating body DRAM) suitable for compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators. His recent work on using continuous time dynamics of coupled oscillators to solve optimization problems is galvanizing interest in the alterative compute paradigm of “let physics do the computing.”

“Suman Datta is one of the nation’s leaders in semiconductor research,” said GRA President Susan Shows. “He is a strong collaborator and will continue to make advances in this growing, important industry for Georgia. GRA is pleased to welcome him to its Academy.”

Prior to Notre Dame, Datta was a professor of electrical engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, from 2007-2015. Datta has co-authored 11 book chapters and more than 400 refereed journal and conference proceedings papers.

In 2013, Datta was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to high-performance advanced silicon and compound semiconductor transistor technologies. Datta holds 185 U.S. patents. In 2016, he was named Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in recognition of his inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.

Jarin, who is pursuing her degree in environmental health engineering, earned a $1,000 cash prize for her efforts.

The annual event is sponsored by VentureLab, which helps Georgia Tech researchers explore market opportunities and create startups based on their work. 

In her three-minute pitch, Jarin explained more than 800 million people worldwide lack consistent access to clean drinking water due to the high cost of treatment plants, difficulties in transporting chemicals, and the aftermath of carcinogenic disinfection byproducts.

“With the current trend in water disinfection centered on alternative solutions to standard chemicals like chlorine, we are excited to continue exploring the market opportunities for VoltaPure,” Jarin said. “I am honored and extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to present to a panel of experienced judges — and especially female entrepreneurs — on our current progress with the commercialization efforts for VoltaPure.

VoltaPure’s novel co-axial electrode copper ionization cell enables superior water disinfection, while producing a low-level, safe effluent copper concentration.

“Mo made a compelling case for the commercial potential of her VoltaPure water disinfection technology,” said VentureLab Director Keith McGreggor. “Her idea illustrates why the Innovation Competition is a great opportunity for Georgia Tech student researchers to think about what it might take to start a business based on their work.”

To better understand her technology’s potential, Jarin has already participated in Georgia Tech’s inaugural Female Founders program and audited the CREATE-X Startup Launch program. She was also awarded a $50,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s Innovation-Corps program to participate in a seven-week bootcamp focused on experiential education to gain insight into her startup’s industry. She is advised by Xing Xie, the Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Strong Contenders 

Two other student presenters were selected as runners-up and will each receive $500. Nathan Zavanelli, pursuing a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering/bioengineering, and advised by Woon-Hong Yeo in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, explained the benefits of his “smart patch” for sleep apnea assessments. The disorder affects more than 900 million adults worldwide, but most often goes undiagnosed.

Amirtha Varshini Anbuchezhiyan Sindhanai, a computer science master’s student in Tech’s College of Computing, and advised by James Rehg, described how her technology uses machine learning and machine vision to help job applicants review and enhance their nonverbal communications skills.

LaVonda Brown, a Georgia Tech alumna and founder of startup EyeGage, served as a judge alongside Nammy Vedire, director of platform and operations of Engage, the Georgia Tech-affiliated incubator for enterprise-focused startups.

VentureLab will provide ongoing support, reaching out to all the competitors to offer guidance and help them pursue programs and grants that support the transition from success in the lab to success in the market.

Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff interested in these opportunities to further the commercialization of their own research may contact VentureLab through its website, venturelab.gatech.edu, or by e-mailing info@venturelab.gatech.edu.

In addition to the three faculty members, two additional alumni were honored. Nick Lappos (AE ’73), was also elected to the NAE Class of 2022. Lappos is a senior technical fellow (emeritus) of Sikorsky Aircraft Corp and serves on the Georgia Tech Aerospace Engineering School Advisory Council (AESAC). He was honored for “improving rotary wing flight performance and serving as test pilot, engineer, inventor, technologist, and business leader.”

Nathan Meehan (Phys '75), a member of the College of Sciences Advisory Board, was also elected. He is president of CMG Petroleum Consulting Ltd. and was recognized for "technical and business innovation in the application of horizontal well technology for oil and gas production."

They are among this year’s 133 new members (including international selections).

“On behalf of Georgia Tech, I extend my sincere congratulations to Chris, Sandy, and Nick for this incredible honor, which highlights a lifetime of achievement,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “Chris and Nick’s research have advanced their respective fields and left an indelible mark on their peers at Georgia Tech and around the world. Sandy, in addition to her service with NASA, is a tireless advocate of raising awareness of STEM and diversity within the aerospace industry in an effort to grow the next generation of the AE workforce. The College of Engineering is tremendously proud of this trio.”

Jones is the John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). He has been a faculty member at Georgia Tech since 2000, leading a ChBE research group that works in catalysis and adsorption, with a strong emphasis in materials chemistry. The NAE is honoring him for “contributions to the design and synthesis of catalytic materials and for advancing technologies related to carbon capture and sequestration.”

Jones is known in the field for his pioneering work on materials that extract carbon dioxide from ultra-dilute mixtures such as ambient air, which are key components of direct air capture technologies that have the potential to reverse climate change.

Magnus (MSE, 1996) is a professor of the practice with joint appointments in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. She is currently a principal at  AstroPlanetview LLC and is being recognized by the NAE for “national accomplishments in the U.S. civil space program and in Department of Defense engineering and technology integration.

As a NASA astronaut, Magnus flew to space three times and spent 157 days in orbit. Before joining NASA, Magnus worked for McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company as a stealth engineer. After retiring as an astronaut, she served as executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). She is now one of three Georgia Tech women in the NAE, joining Marilyn Brown and Susan Margulies.

Sahinidis is the inaugural Gary C. Butler Family Chair in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a joint appointment in ChBE. In the NAE announcement, Sahinidis was selected for “his contributions to global optimization and the development of widely used software for optimization and machine learning.” His research activities are at the interface between computer science and operations research, with applications in various engineering and scientific areas.

During his career, Sahinidis developed BARON (Branch-and-Reduce Optimization Navigator), a global optimization software system that solves challenging, nonconvex optimization problems, including continuous, integer, and mixed-integer nonlinear problems. Sahinidis also created ALAMO (Automated Learning of Algebraic Models), a black-box modeling tool that generates simple, yet accurate, algebraic models from data. 

The Academy annual inducts new members, recognizing “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature.” The Academy also honors engineers for being instrumental in "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." 

Georgia Tech now has 45 NAE members. This year's cohort will be formally inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting in October.

Georgia Tech will provide resources and technical expertise to support the Rotorcraft Vertical Lift Technology Development through task orders in areas such as advanced rotorcraft technologies, testing, flight controls, and health management. Most of the work will be performed on campus, with some taking place at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.

The Rotorcraft Vertical Lift Technology Development (RVLTD) award is an IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity) contract with a total ceiling of $40 million. It allows Georgia Tech to propose, apply, and quickly learn if they’re selected for NASA research projects that could also include developing codes, accessing models for validation, and more.

“Instead of writing a 30-page research proposal and waiting up to year for a decision, this contract vehicle allows us to submit a brief statement of work in response to NASA’s requests for support. We will learn within a few weeks if NASA selects our team for each request,” said Smith, a faculty member in Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE School). “It’s a significant advantage that allows us to collaborate closer with NASA.”

The Georgia Tech group includes GTRI (Georgia Tech Research Institute) and the University of Texas at Arlington. It also includes a number of private companies around the country, with an emphasis on small businesses and organizations led by veterans and women. One of them is Laser Aviation in Duluth, Georgia, which specializes in 3D laser scanning and modeling.

Of the six submissions accepted, Georgia Tech’s proposal was ranked first by the Source Evaluation Board (SEB).

The AE School was one of the nation’s first helicopter rotorcraft research and educational institution. Montgomery Knight became the School’s first director in 1942 and developed one of the first jet-powered rotors for a helicopter. He was among the country’s earliest top researchers of helicopter design.

Through the decades, Georgia Tech has expanded its research to fit the current definition of rotorcraft, which also includes tilt rotors, unmanned air vehicles, and advanced urban air mobility. Georgia Tech has been a Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence (VLRCOE) since 1982, conducting basic research focused on scientific barriers in technologies that support current and future vertical lift capabilities.

The RVLTD award is not restricted to AE researchers. Any Georgia Tech faculty member supporting vertical lift technology can ask to be on the list of faculty who will respond to each NASA request. Those interested should send their contact details and research areas of interest to Smith.

“Georgia Tech faculty and students are contributing to rotorcraft technology research in a variety of ways,” said Smith, who serves as director of the VLRCOE, which receives funding from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and NASA. “This includes not only vehicle design and analysis in AE, but air traffic control, cyber-physical security, vertiport design, public policy, robotics and sustainability. We have the core faculty and students across the Institute to drive this field. This depth of research, along with our excellent student base, is what makes us more competitive.”

The Georgia Tech College of Engineering’s Center for Engineering Education and Diversity (CEED) will double the number of students in its annual summer research program thanks to a new partnership with Amazon. The company is committing $730,000 to support CEED’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) during the next two years.

SURE is a 10-week summer program designed to attract qualified, underrepresented minority and women students into graduate school in the fields of engineering and science. It is one of the longest-running summer research programs in the country, with attendees coming from universities around the country.  

“Our SURE program has supported more than 500 students since it was established in 1992, with 75 percent ultimately attending graduate school,” said Felicia Benton-Johnson, director of CEED and assistant dean in the College of Engineering. “Georgia Tech is grateful to Amazon for its commitment to growing the number of underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.”

Beginning this May, 30 students will be identified as Amazon SURE scholars, bringing the total number of SURE participants to approximately 50. Attendees will also visit an Amazon location (in-person or virtually). Amazon staff will host professional development seminars and lunch-and-learns during SURE.

With the commitment, Amazon becomes a CEED platinum sponsor.

“Amazon is excited to collaborate with the Georgia Tech SURE program – which has opened new doors of opportunity for hundreds of students over the past three decades,” said Prem Natarajan, vice president of natural understanding, Alexa AI. “Through this collaboration, Amazon will support and help expand the impact of the program by providing additional opportunities to students to grow and flourish as future leaders.”

CEED has hosted SURE for more than 30 years. Each summer, junior and senior undergraduates are recruited to spend two and a half months at Georgia Tech. While conducting research within the Colleges of Engineering, Computing and Sciences, the students receive weekly professional development and graduate school preparation seminars. Each participant is also paired with a Georgia Tech grad student and faculty member for mentoring.

SURE attendees are provided campus housing and a stipend to cover costs of living. The program is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, Intel Corporation, and other federal and corporate sponsors.

The application period for the 2022 summer program is open until February 15.

“It is a home that brings together people who work on ocean science,” Monteagudo said. There are many events with students in the program that have made it feel like a home for Monteagudo on campus that extends beyond the classroom. She has found close friends during her time in the program while receiving support from her faculty mentors.  

“Tech was defined by the people in my department,” she said. That is why she is excited to see what future cohorts will accomplish. Next year will be the first full group of students graduating, and many are already writing their dissertations. Monteagudo recently finished hers on fossil shells in ocean sediment. She used chemistry to reconstruct ocean temperatures from the geological past. These findings can be used to bolster current models of future temperature changes by seeing if they match past records. During Monteagudo’s time at Tech, she was a teaching assistant for EAS 2600, which enabled her to use her love of teaching while interacting with undergraduate students. 

“Students saw connections from earth and atmospheric sciences to their own majors, so I was able to learn many things from their personal experiences,” Monteagudo said. She was also asked to join a task force for racial equality with 12 other students. This was a rare opportunity that she did not take lightly. Over her short few years at Tech, Minda Monteagudo has blazed many trails and helped shape a better future for all students. Currently, she is seeking jobs and will likely start working in the coming months. 

Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar and Natalie Stingelin will be inducted at the NAI Annual Meeting this coming June in Phoenix, Arizona. Election to NAI’s fellowship program is the highest professional distinction for academic inventors. 

Sivakumar, Georgia Tech’s first vice president of commercialization and chief commercialization officer, is being recognized for having demonstrated a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society. He is a co-inventor on 22 issued patents, with 15 of them licensed to industry.

Sivakumar holds the Wayne J. Holman Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he has served as a faculty member since 2000.

The NAI is honoring Stingelin for her significant contributions in the broader area of polymer physics and organic electronics and photonics. This includes the advancement of novel strategies that enable processing and design of soft electronic materials (such as organic semiconductors and inorganic/organic hybrid materials) with unique functional properties and the creation of innovative device architectures.

Stingelin holds a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She is an internationally recognized authority in the polymer field and serves as the director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics. Stingelin is also an initiative lead for Georgia Tech’s Institute of Materials.

Sivakumar and Stingelin are among 164 honorees from more than 100 research universities and governmental and non-profit institutions worldwide.

The award will establish a network of 12 sites around the United States, including locations in national parks and some of the country’s largest cities. Each will be outfitted with state-of-the-art instruments for characterizing the properties of aerosols. These sites will form what is officially called the Atmospheric Science and mEasurement NeTwork (ASCENT).

Data from ASCENT will allow researchers to address a variety of questions about how the composition and abundance of aerosols are changing, such as how the modernization of electrical production (coal to natural gas to renewable) and transportation (gasoline to electric vehicles) affect air pollution and climate-relevant variables.

“This is an incredibly exciting opportunity,” said Ng, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “ASCENT represents a key advancement in atmospheric measurement infrastructure in the U.S. For the first time, we will be able to acquire comprehensive, high time-resolution, long-term characterization of aerosols over a wide range of geographical regions. ASCENT will provide the critical, fundamental knowledge for informing science-based decisions on climate change, air quality, and minimizing inequalities in air pollution exposure.”

ASCENT will also advance understanding of the adverse health impacts of PM_2.5 (particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometers). Exposure to PM_2.5 has been associated with cardiopulmonary diseases and millions of deaths per year.

“ASCENT's long-term, advanced chemical composition and particle size measurements will facilitate transformative studies to unravel specific aerosol types and properties responsible for their adverse health effects,” Ng said. “This will contribute to building a foundation to define future regulations in the U.S. for protecting public health, as aerosol sources and properties continue to evolve in a changing world.”

Aerosols impact climate by changing the Earth’s energy balance via direct absorption or scattering of solar radiation and altering the albedo (surface reflection), formation of clouds, and precipitation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment established that the aerosol effects represent the single largest source of uncertainty in understanding climate change.

According to NSF, ASCENT will also allow U.S. researchers to remain competitive in a global research environment. The 2016 National Academies report on The Future of Atmospheric Chemistry Research emphasized the critical need for long-term atmospheric chemistry measurements, recommending that the NSF take the lead to establish synergies with existing sites.

Currently, several aerosol monitoring networks exist in the United States, but none have the capability of measuring aerosol chemical and physical properties at high time-resolution (highly regular intervals of measurement, in the order of minutes).

The ASCENT network’s 12 sites across the United States are strategically located in rural, urban, and remote sites that have pre-existing infrastructure for atmospheric monitoring. Five ASCENT sites are in the National Core Network (NCore), which is a subset of the Chemical Speciation Network (CSN). Four rural sites are in the Interagency Monitoring of PROtected Visual Environment (IMPROVE) network. Other ASCENT sites are located in NSF’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) in California, and the Houston Network of Environmental Towers (HNET) in Texas.

Each site will be equipped with four advanced instruments: an Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor (ACSM, non-refractory aerosols), Xact (trace metals), Aethalometer (black/brown carbon), and Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS, aerosol number size distribution and concentration).

The sites include: Delta Junction, Alaska; Cheeka Peak/Makah, Washington; Los Angeles/Pico Rivera, California; Rubidoux, California; Joshua Tree National Park, California; Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming; Denver, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; and Great Smoky Mountain National Park, Tennessee.

On the education and outreach side of the project, ASCENT has specific recruitment, mentoring, training, and career development plans for graduate and undergraduate students, with an emphasis on underrepresented groups. One of the ASCENT locations is on tribal land and the project will train tribal air quality staff and perform outreach to interested tribal members. ASCENT will also provide training and educational opportunities for the state agency and National Park Service site operators.

In collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a comprehensive database and web interface will be developed to provide research communities, educators, policy makers, the public, etc. with free and open access to all ASCENT data.

In addition to lead principal investigator (PI) Ng, co-PIs on the ASCENT project include Professor Armistead Russell of Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professor Roya Bahreini of the University of California-Riverside, and Professor Ann Dillner of the University of California-Davis, with Senior Research Scientist Christina Higgins of the Georgia Tech Research Institute serving as project manager.

Other ASCENT partner institutions and academics include the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Professor Jingqiu Mao), University of Washington (Professor Joel Thornton), California Institute of Technology (Professor John Seinfeld), Harvey Mudd College (Professor Lelia Hawkins), University of Wyoming (Professor Shane Murphy), University of Colorado Boulder (Professor Jose Jimenez), Roger Williams University (Professor Robert Griffin), University of Houston (Professor James Flynn), Carnegie Mellon University (Professors Allen Robinson and Albert Presto), Yale University (Professor Drew Gentner), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Professor Jason Surratt), and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Jeff de La Beaujardiere and Eric Nienhouse).

Ng said: “I look forward to working with the team and the greater atmospheric community to build this amazing network and all the new and exciting research opportunities that ASCENT will enable for the many years to come.”

Georgia Tech researchers have been meeting with the choreographer, Troy Schumacher, and the ballet company for the last year and a half to shape the concept, which explores ideas at the forefront of mechanical interventions into the human body and mind.

“I think the arts can be a really powerful way to bring people from all backgrounds into a conversation about science and technology,” said Chris Rozell, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who has worked on the project since its genesis. “My goal is to facilitate that conversation by helping to translate between the scientists doing amazing work and the artists who are approaching these ideas from the perspective of making something beautiful.”  

Georgia Tech Arts and TMBT have dubbed the project the “Grand Neuroethics Challenge.”

“A lot of the concepts, technologies, research, and ethics we've been discussing in this work are extremely complicated, but what's come through for me is that a lot of their work is going to have profound implications for the future of humanity,” said Schumacher. “So, for this ballet, I've decided to focus on the emotional relationship to brain-machine interfaces, while touching on what I've learned so far. I've spent most of my career collaborating with artists with little to no relationship to dance, but nothing quite as complex and fascinating as this.”

Aaron Shackelford, director of Georgia Tech Arts, said the project is a worthwhile endeavor because it offers a case study as to the importance of collaboration between artists and researchers, while demonstrating the importance of the arts in the mission and strategic plan of Georgia Tech.

“We recognize that the arts are critical to championing innovation and creativity at Georgia Tech,” said Shackelford. “Our mission is to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The arts — and artists — provide a vital avenue for pursuing this work. This project illuminates the impact of artists and researchers coming together to mutually inspire and learn from each other, while inviting audiences to participate in the discussions about their discoveries.”

“As a director coming from an arts/dance background and facilitator to this project, I have become fascinated with the work of the scientists during the conceiving/creation process and how this gets interwoven into the choreography and dancers’ bodies,” said John Welker, TMBT’s artistic director. “In any collaboration, there are surprises that are part of my joy for discovery, but this particular process has made me so much more aware and appreciative of the intimate connection between our minds' intention and how that is carried out through the movement of our bodies.”

This Friday will be more than a dance performance. It will also include talks from the researchers involved in the project and opportunities for audience to ask questions. Rozell will discuss his work on AI and its applications in treating depression. Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech, will talk about his AI research and how the brain controls movement. They’ll be joined by Karen Rommelfanger, director of Emory’s Neuroethics Program.

Rommelfanger knows the field of neuroscience can introduce complex words and concepts. When mixed with dance, however, she sees the project as a powerful opportunity for audiences to engage with multiple modalities of sensation and comprehension.

“I believe neuroscience brings great hope and promise for humanity. But my fear is that the promise of the field will be undermined by a deterioration of trust related to a real and hyped threats of unconsidered ways neuroscience might interface with individuals and society,” said Rommelfanger.” My hope is that this project will invite audiences, including myself, to challenge and surface our unspoken values and assumptions about the brain and technologies that interface with it.”

Friday’s event starts at 8pm at the Ferst Center for the Arts. Tickets are just $10. The full work, which is made possible in part through a grant from the Charles Loridans Foundation, will premiere on campus next fall.

“I’m excited to see how something as abstract as the concepts in neuroscience, neurotechnology, and neuroethics can be translated into dance,” Rozell said. “As a researcher, we can get really caught up in the technical details. I can’t wait to see how those details turn into an overall impression that is both beautiful and gives us a new way to think about what we do.”

For the next year, the researchers will deliver daily fire impact forecasts to each school, while also installing air purifiers and low-cost air quality monitors. Data from those monitors will be broadcast in real-time inside and outside classrooms. The Georgia Tech team will also create new curricula for teachers and students that increase understanding of air pollutants, their sources, and mitigation measures. 

The Georgia Tech team consists of members in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE), School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), and the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain.

“Air pollution leads to more premature deaths than virtually all other environmental exposures. In the Southeast, prescribed burning is a major source of air pollution: it releases more particulate matter into the air than cars, trucks, factories, and power plants,” said Armistead (Ted) Russell, the Howard T. Tellepsen Chair and Regents’ Professor in CEE. “Children in areas that experience prescribed burning smoke are uniquely vulnerable. We are excited to work with schools to identify effective measures that can be used to help protect schoolchildren.”

Russell and his colleagues have decades of experience studying emissions. His previous studies found that prescribed burns led to highly elevated emissions in southern Georgia, especially during the peak burn period from January to April. The research showed that the highest levels of unhealthy emissions — primary and secondary particulate matter — occur during school hours when burns are most active. However, Russell also found that elevated levels linger into the evening, long after the fires are extinguished.

Russell also found a communications gap that helped him create the new initiative.

“Schools are very good at providing information to parents about health-related interventions. Families serve as important communication channels,” Russell said. “However, schools are infrequently used to disseminate information about fire emissions. Incorporating teachers and students into a communications strategy has the potential to reduce exposure to children and the school’s broader community.”

The award will allow Russell and CEE Principal Research Engineer Talat Odman to expand Georgia Tech’s Southern Integrated Prescribed Fire Information System (SIPFIS), which they helped create in 2015. The tool merges prescribed fire and air quality data into a common analysis framework, providing a unified prescribed fire database for the southern U.S. That data is primarily used by forest and air quality managers. SIPFIS will now be tweaked to also provide daily forecasts to the schools.

Forecast and information products and lessons learned from the one-year project will be shared with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its health partners.

The initiative will be coupled with outcomes from a $2.3 million Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program project that is currently being led by Odman. His team is measuring and modeling air quality impacts from prescribed burning at Fort Benning, which is adjacent to Columbus and across the border from Phenix City.

“By focusing on both the source of smoke, such as burns at Ft. Benning, and the effects on nearby schools, we can have a more complete understanding of the air quality impacts of prescribed fires,” said Odman. “This will allow us to develop strategies to minimize exposure to smoke, while also helping to protect the health of people and forests.”

The EPA and DoD projects will further a third project: Russell’s NASA-funded work that is utilizing satellite products in SIPFIS for predicting smoke impacts on air quality and health. 

ChBE and EAS Associate Professor Sally Ng, who researches airborne particles, is also on the Georgia Tech team and will lead the deployment of the low-cost sensors at the schools. Rebecca Watts Hull, a community engagement specialist with the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, is the fourth member of the team.   

“As wildfires become more frequent and severe, we are working to effectively communicate the risks of smoke exposure to impacted communities,” said Wayne Cascio, acting principal deputy assistant administrator for science in EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “We are seeing an increase in prescribed fires to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires; however, these are also a source of smoke exposure. The research we are funding will help develop strategies to prevent and reduce the health impacts of smoke from wildfires and prescribed fires.”

The project will begin in October.

The study found that 90 percent of customers experience 10 percent of a disruptive event’s total downtime during moderate to extreme storms. However, recovery degrades with the severity of the disruptions. Large failures that cannot recover rapidly increase by 30% from the moderate to extreme events, while prolonged small failures dominate entire recovery processes.

The study from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering looked at 169 weather-induced power failures at two service regions in the states of New York and Massachusetts. The failures were induced by a wide range of disruptive events from hurricanes, nor’easters, and thunder and winter storms from 2011-2019, affecting nearly 12 million people.

A feature article, “Large-scale data analytics for resilient recovery services from power failures,” is published in Joule: Cell Press.

“Our goal was to use large-scale data from the operational energy grid to better understand resiliency,” said lead author Amir Hossein Afsharinejad, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “By using such a large dataset that covers nearly a decade, we sought to learn how recoveries respond to the severity of a wide range of weather-induced failure events.”

The Georgia Tech analysis finds that the behavior of restoration services follows a “recovery scaling law.” This law restores service for the majority of affected customers at the cost of a small fraction of the total interruption time. This prioritization policy, however, becomes less efficient, shown by large power failures that can’t be prioritized. This results in customer interruption times that are 47 times longer from moderate to extreme failure events.

The study found that the prioritization recovery doesn’t optimize restoration of small failures, which dominate delayed recovery during an entire evolution of an extreme event.

“These findings tell us that the typical services governed by the prioritized recovery policy is at the cost of the disparity, and the cost is significant when failure events become severe and extreme,” said study co-author Chuanyi Ji, a Georgia Tech ECE associate professor and Afsharinejad’s thesis advisor. “Our analysis shows both the capability and fundamental limitation of recovery under the prioritization policy, where rapid restoration does not sustain to severe and extreme failure events.”

The research team also explored if other approaches would be more beneficial to speed up recovery from failures. One included distributed generation and storage. Their initial study found the approach scales well, as expediting restoration of a small fraction of the large failures in the non-prioritized category can reverse the degraded recovery from the moderate to extreme events.

The data used in the study are commonly available to most distribution grid operators in the U.S. and other parts of the world. The researchers hope their work, which took more than four years to analyze, demonstrates that energy service providers have the ability to adopt data science and turn their own data into new knowledge to improve both recovery and infrastructure enhancement.

“We are moving in a direction where severe storms are becoming more costly,” said Robert Wilcox, a principal engineer from National Grid who co-authored the paper.  

The team is enthusiastic about the future direction. “This is also an historic time as more consumers need data and machine learning to help enhance energy services and smart infrastructure,” Wilcox added. “Hopefully our study will motivate the industry to use data to better understand the problems we face today and in the decades to come.”

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

To collect and transport pollen, honey bees mix pollen particles with regurgitated nectar and form it into a pellet, which clings to each of their hind legs. The honey bees then deposit the pellets into a cell within the hive by carefully scraping them off using their other legs. 

The study, from the lab of George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Professor David Hu, sought to better understand the mechanics of this process which could inspire new ways to manufacture and manipulate soft materials. Hu holds a joint appointment in the School of Biological Sciences.

The paper, “Biomechanics of Pollen Removal By the Honey Bee,” is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 

“We measured the viscoelastic material properties of a pollen pellet,” said Marguerite Matherne, a recent Georgia Tech mechanical engineering Ph.D. graduate who now teaches at Northeastern University. “We found that the pellets have a really long relaxation time, which means they remain mostly in a solid form during the transport process. This is good because it keeps the pellet from melting or falling apart from vibration during flight.”

Matherne and the Georgia Tech research team also tried to replicate how honey bees remove the pellets from their hind legs in the lab. They built a device that scraped adhered pollen pellets from bee legs. The invention produced two discoveries. The first was that the honey bees were much more efficient in removing the pellet than the scraping device they built (the device left much more pollen residue on the leg). They also found that slower removal speeds reduce the force and work required to remove pellets under shear stress. 

“If you remove it slowly, you can avoid applying the excessive force required to remove it quickly,” said Hu, Matherne’s former Georgia Tech advisor. “Removing a pollen pellet is like the opposite of ripping off a Band-Aid.”

Matherne said that there are two key components to the efficiency of the honey bees transporting these pellets. First, the pellets are gooey, allowing them to stick to the hind legs. But, she said, the bees also have a special structure on their legs called the corbicula. It’s fringed with long, curved hairs and becomes embedded into the pellet, allowing for adhesion.

In addition, honey bees can collect pollen particles in various shapes and sizes, while also developing a way to transport them. This is different from other species of bees, which only collect and carry specific types of pollen that are similar in size. They also use different transport techniques.

“Honey bees collect from flowers miles and miles away,” said Hu. “The pollen can change in size by a factor of 10. They must collect all these individual particles and bring it back to one place. And they must do a dozen foraging trips each day, all while keeping their bodies clean. They solve it all by this special method they created to exploit the pellet’s soft material properties.”

The research team believes further studies could lead to new developments in medical patches or fastener applications for soft materials.

“It’s kind of like smart gooey Velcro for soft materials,” said Hu. “It could be a fastener and it knows when you’re trying to remove it so that you don’t have to use an excessive amount of force.”

Matherne suggests that it’s also important to understand the pollinating process since 35% of the world’s crop production depends on pollinators.

“Honey bees are really important pollinators,” said Matherne. “If we want to create a world where we can keep up our pollinators, I think it’s important to understand exactly what they’re doing.”

CITATION: Matherne, M., et.al., "Biomechanics of pollen pellet removal by the honey bee." (Journal of the Royal Society Interface) https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2021.0549

Now, they are recruiting 200 Georgia Tech students to participate in a six-week research study this semester sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). All study participants will receive $150.

Participants will be divided into two groups. One will continue to wear whatever mask they currently use, whenever they would usually wear one. The other group will be asked to wear a mask provided to them. Using a simple online Qualtrics form, both groups will log their daily activities, as well as any health symptoms that may arise during the six-week study.

“There were a lot of misconceptions early on in the pandemic with the role of masks,” said Sundaresan Jayaraman, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. “Our desire and hope is to dispel misconceptions around masks and show how effective and useful they are.”

But the project goes beyond function. The mask designed by Jayaraman and Sungmee Park, principal research scientist in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, is meant to be comfortable and stylish as well. They also want to learn how masks affect social and psychological elements of the wearer’s life.

“We want to get a feel for, ‘What is their view of masks? Does the mask affect their social life? Does it make a difference if the mask matches their outfit?’ Park said.

The study will include three phases. In the first two weeks, all participants will wear their own face coverings and continue their usual habits. The second two weeks will have half the cohort wear the masks provided by the research team. During the last two weeks, all participants will return to their usual habits — wearing their preferred mask, whether it’s the new one or not, and logging their activities and any symptoms.

The study is approved by Georgia Tech’s Institutional Review Board and is registered as a clinical trial with clinicaltrials.gov. Those interested in participating can learn more and sign up at maskstudy.gatech.edu. For questions, email maskstudy@gatech.edu.

The grant will create the Integrative and Quantitative Biosciences Accelerated Training Environment (InQuBATE) Predoctoral Training Program at Georgia Tech. InQuBATE is designed to train a new generation of biomedical researchers and thought leaders to harness the data revolution.

“We want to improve and enhance the training of students to focus on biological questions while leveraging modern tools, and in some cases developing new tools, to address foundational challenges at scales from molecules to systems,” said Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences. Weitz is co-leading the program with Peng Qiu, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Biology is undergoing a transformation, according to Weitz and Qiu, requiring a new educational paradigm that integrates quantitative approaches like computational modeling and data analytics into the experimental study of living systems.

“Our intention is to develop a training environment that instills a quantitative, data-driven mindset, integrating quantitative and data science methods into all aspects of the life science training pipeline,” added Weitz, founding director of Tech’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS).

The roots of InQuBATE go back to the fall of 2016, shortly after QBioS was launched. Weitz saw an opportunity to augment what he was teaching in his cornerstone course, Foundations of Quantitative Biosciences, in which students model living systems from the molecular level up through cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems. In doing so, students “got a brief introduction to implementing high-dimensional data analytics, visual analytics, clustering, and modern machine learning methods. But we couldn’t cover allthose topics in detail,” Weitz said.

So, he reached out to Qiu, who was teaching data analytic methods in his Machine Learning in Biosciences course: “Instead of us developing that class, we started strongly encouraging QBioS students to take Peng’s class,” Weitz said.

“For me, this was a great opportunity to work with students from the biology side who had real interests in learning data mining and machine learning, as well as students from the engineering side,” said Qiu, principal investigator in the Machine Learning and Bioinformatics Lab in Coulter BME. “We could see that it was a great learning environment and the QBioS students really excelled in the class. That gave us confidence. Now we’re building this [InQuBATE] training program, and hope it will foster even greater cross pollination.”

The training program is designed to do exactly that, bringing together students and faculty from three Georgia Tech colleges: computing, engineering, and sciences. That combination of expertise is reflected in the leadership team. In addition to principal investigators Weitz (College of Sciences) and Qiu (College of Engineering), the faculty leadership team includes Elizabeth Cherry (School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing), Eva Dyer (Coulter BME, College of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine), and Marvin Whiteley (School of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences).

The InQuBATE program will ultimately support 15 Ph.D. students over five years. The first cohort — prioritizing second-year Ph.D. students — will be selected in August. Next spring, the program will begin soliciting applications from first-year Ph.D. students.

“The program will extend the breadth of student training without adding time to the Ph.D.,” Weitz said. “For students on the engineering or computing side, InQuBATE will augment their living systems research experience. For students on the living systems side, the program will augment their training in modeling and data analytics.”

Weitz, Qiu, and their collaborators also are developing a series of semester-long and short-form (a week or less) courses that will be available to other graduate students, in addition to the InQuBATE cohorts.