Wheelock, along with fellow NASA astronaut Shannon Walker and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on June 15. During the mission, Wheelock served as commander of Expedition 25 and supported three unplanned spacewalks to replace a faulty pump module. The trio spent 163 days in space and landed in Kazakhstan on Nov. 25.
During their mission, the crew worked on more than 120 microgravity experiments in human research, biology and biotechnology, physical and materials sciences, technology development and Earth and space sciences. The crew also celebrated the station’s 10th anniversary of continuous habitation, work and research by international crews on Nov. 2.
Wheelock is from Windsor, N.Y. He received a bachelor’s degree in Applied Science and Engineering from the United States Military Academy, West Point in 1983, and a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1992. Wheelock reported for Astronaut Candidate Training in August 1998.
In total, Wheelock has spent 178 days in space on his two missions. This trip, he tweeted pictures from the International Space Station, attracting thousands of followers and media attention.
“It was really one of major objectives to take what I was seeing and feeling, and the great things we were doing in the way of science on the space station, and bring them back to the planet so everyone could enjoy those and understand what we were doing,” Wheelock said during an interview this morning with Channel 2 Action News WBNG in Bingham, N.Y. “[Twitter] turned out to be a great way to do that.”
]]>In a laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers gaze intently into a line of large flat-screen monitors. Using hand-held devices and famous-name gaming software, they guide on-screen vehicles through winding streets and around or over obstacles. Groans can be heard when a vehicle doesn’t make the grade.
No, it’s not break time in the lab. The gaming activity here is serious, aimed at investigating ways in which a robot might move through complex environments. Its ultimate purpose is to provide the U.S. military and other government agencies with tiny autonomous devices that could carry out combat or disaster-relief missions.
The term serious gaming might seem to be an oxymoron, like “static electrons.” But in today’s pragmatic research world, investigators from numerous Georgia Tech units are appropriating technologies, practices and even equipment from both digital and real-world games. Then they’re applying those gaming techniques to defense, industry, education, health care and more.
Definitions of serious games and gaming vary. Still, most definitions cite the use of gaming technologies for purposes other than entertainment.
On-screen games such as Pong go back to the 1970s, but during the past 20 years the computer- and video-game world has expanded very rapidly. This digital revolution has produced powerful game “engines” – the basic code underlying a digital game – that are now widely available to aspiring game developers.
The result is that today’s game technologies are often highly user-configurable, a process called “modding” (short for modification); that adaptability helps make them useful for research purposes. Even gaming hardware is being modified for use in applications that its designers probably never envisioned.
This article provides a look at a variety of Georgia Tech research efforts related to serious games.
At the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), a research team is using game-engine technology to support an ambitious program to develop tiny mobile robots that are both intelligent and interactive.
The overall effort is called the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance Program. It’s hoped that this five-year effort will result in rolling, hopping and even flying devices that could aid the military and other agencies in combat, disaster relief and other tasks.
The MAST research program, which includes Georgia Tech, 13 other universities and BAE Systems Inc., is sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. GTRI and the College of Computing are among several Georgia Tech units involved in the program.
To date, no truly autonomous robots actually exist, much less tiny ones that can move cooperatively through unpredictable environments. To gain insight into the many challenges involved in such technology, researchers are turning to game-development techniques, said GTRI principal research engineer Lora Weiss.
“To design micro-autonomous systems, we first need to explore in a virtual way how they might behave in the real world and interact with one other,” she said. “And a good way to start exploring them is with game engines, because you can examine robotic systems using the synthetic entities found in many game worlds.”
By combining a widely available computer-game engine with open-source software called USARSim – short for urban search and rescue simulation – the GTRI engineers can simulate many challenges that robotic hardware might encounter. Modifying game parameters to suit their purposes, engineers can rapidly construct a three-dimensional world – complete with reasonably accurate 3-D physics – to test a variety of concepts.
“What we’re trying to do here is look at high level – but not high-fidelity – interactions of dynamic systems,” Weiss said. “We’re using this approach on several robotics projects.”
High-level analysis, she explains, focuses only on behavior. For example, can a robot with certain attributes move successfully across an intersection, or might a car hit it on the way?
At this level, the high-fidelity physical details of robot motion or car damage are not vital. What’s most important is understanding whether the robot can apply reason to the situation and then activate an avoidance behavior.
“Game engines and virtual worlds allow exploring these interactions in ways that, until we understand the issues, are much safer than building systems and identifying problems the hard way,” Weiss said.
However, once behavioral basics have been worked out, researchers will likely leave the game world and move to more high-fidelity simulations. Such simulations offer greater accuracy and rigor that would help investigators understand the complex physics necessary to design and build a robot prototype.
Those future hardware prototypes will have their functionality evaluated by computer-based test equipment, a process known as hardware-in-the-loop. Once a prototype seems to be working properly, final steps will involve rigorous field testing.
Getting small robots to operate collaboratively with humans will be another hurdle, Weiss acknowledges. That’s a problem being addressed not only by Weiss, but by researchers in other Georgia Tech units, including College of Computing professors Charles Isbell and Mark Riedl (see “Applying Games to Complex Environments” in this article).
“High-level modeling of humans collaborating with groups of robots will be particularly important as robots become more independent and less remote-controlled,” Weiss said. “If robots are to exist with people and operate in shared spaces, then they must cooperate.”
Digital gaming equipment has become highly sophisticated – so much so that some investigators are using off-the-shelf game accessories for serious research and applications.
At GTRI, a team of engineers is developing a research device capable of analyzing physical stresses on the arms of workers in poultry plants. Critical to their approach is a Nintendo Wii game-console remote controller, known popularly as the Wiimote. This inexpensive controller’s capabilities include advanced motion-sensing.
“Poultry workers typically stand and make the same cuts eight hours a day, and they have a risk of developing repetitive-stress syndrome,” said GTRI research scientist Clayton J. Hutto. “There’s a real need to study the ergonomics of poultry work to make it less physically stressful.”
Existing motion-capture devices cost thousands of dollars, Hutto explained. In the wet environment of a poultry plant, their expensive electronics can be damaged quickly.
But motion capture based on the $30 Wiimote would be affordable even if the capture devices didn’t last long. Moreover, at such reduced cost researchers could outfit multiple workers with capture devices, greatly increasing the amount of motion data gathered.
GTRI’s work with the Wiimote goes back to 2006, the year the device was introduced. Intrigued by the Wiimote’s capabilities, GTRI research engineer Donnie Smith developed the open-source CWiid library (pronounced seaweed) as an interface to the Wiimote’s low-level message format. CWiid, programmed in the C language with bindings to an open-source language called Python, allows a Wiimote to work in a variety of platforms and uses beyond traditional games.
In 2007, supported by research scientist Josh Davis, Smith worked with fellow research scientist Nick Bollweg to develop a Wiimote-based head-tracking system. This system, pyWiiVR, consists of a Wiimote, a computer, wireless headphones and goggles that have been modified with inexpensive infrared sensors.
Connected to a computer via Bluetooth, the system provides immersive 3-D visualization and audio that changes realistically with a user’s head movements. Such technology could have several military applications including training and mission preparation, the researchers said.
Collaborating with Jonathan Holmes, a researcher with GTRI’s Ergonomic Work Assessment System program, and Jessica Pater of GTRI’s Office of Policy Analysis and Research, Hutto and his team have developed a Wiimote-enabled device that mounts on a poultry worker’s lower arm. A Wiimote detects the location of four infrared LEDs and then transmits data gathered to a computer. Software transforms this information into arm and wrist angle data, which can be visualized and stored for analysis.
“So far, we’re on track, and it’s working very well,” said Hutto. “We’re also working on a feedback capability that instantly alerts a worker when he or she exceeds the recommended physical limits. If we can change worker behavior during the performance of an actual task, then we’re really onto something.”
Game developers work hard to make electronic games more engaging. In fast-moving shooting games, computer-generated adversaries increasingly behave with human-like cunning. They can even take cues from human players’ gaming styles to make the action more competitive.
In other digital amusements, such as role-playing games, programmers use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to help create “drama managers.” Working either in the background or as actual game characters, drama managers monitor player behavior and can quickly alter events to enhance a player’s experience.
Mark Riedl, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, is using the drama-manager approach to develop simulations for certain types of military training. For this application, he has developed the Automated Story Director, software that uses a drama manager as a kind of coach.
For example, he has used simulations created by the Automated Story Director to develop cultural role-playing scenarios for soldiers who may soon experience similar situations on real foreign streets. The work was sponsored by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.
“We create virtual characters with certain cultural qualities, and the user’s goal is to pick up on what is happening in this foreign environment and to respond accordingly,” Riedl said. “The virtual coach watches what you’re doing, and if you’re not picking up on things, it might, for example, send a character to talk to you to make it more obvious.”
Riedl crafted this simulation using the software engine of a well-known shooting game. When he was finished with modifications, the carnage was gone; in its place, a role-playing game filled with edgy socio-cultural exchanges had emerged.
Riedl – collaborating with School of Interactive Computing colleagues associate professorCharles Isbell and associate professor Ashwin Ram – is also working on AI-enhanced, scenario-generation software. This kind of software can model the learner and then automatically craft a customized interactive experience, catering to the learner’s particular needs and abilities.
Using such scenario-generation software, learners enter an interactive, multiplayer virtual world. The software assigns roles to players, coaches them on how to play their roles – and can change the scenario on the fly depending on how things go.
“This technology could be useful in almost any area in which you might want to use a game or a simulated environment to educate,” Riedl said.
In another education-related effort called Refl-ex, Riedl is developing software to aid children with autism. He is collaborating on Refl-ex with Rosa Arriaga, a senior research scientist in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, and L. Juane Heflin, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education at Georgia State University.
Refl-ex uses a game-like environment to repeat and reinforce interactions between the child and a therapist or teacher. Riedl explains that game experiences tend to be a hit with autistic youngsters, who sometimes prefer interacting with computers rather than humans.
“We have people with autism who go to therapy several times a week, and yet it’s not enough,” he said. “If they can play this game at home, it could add five or 10 hours per week of valuable interaction for them.”
Charles Isbell sees serious gaming as a two-way street.
An associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and an associate dean in the College of Computing, Isbell is a specialist in statistical machine learning – software that allows computers to learn and change based on incoming data.
Isbell’s research goals include using gaming elements to improve machine-learning technology. He’s also doing the reverse – employing machine-learning approaches to improve serious-gaming applications.
“I’m very interested in large, complex problems where communication is difficult, your goals change, and you need to work with other people or even other agents such as robots,” he said. “Serious gaming has much to offer here, because these kinds of problems occur in a variety of social and other games.”
Isbell’s research includes three areas related to gaming:
In one recently initiated project, Isbell and his team are investigating ways to influence human subjects to adopt goals without obvious coercion – what Isbell calls “computational models of influence.” This effort is related to Lora Weiss’s work with the robotics program (see “Using Games for Robotics Research”in this article).
Entertainment games, Isbell notes, typically limit players to a specific area until they’ve accomplished a given task. He wants players to pursue tasks on their own, and have a sense that they’re acting of their own free will.
Working with School of Interactive Computing colleague Mark Riedl and others, Isbell is building tools to allow rapid development of models or game-like programs by non-programmers. The team is developing a language called A²BL, which is an adaptation of a well-known programming language called A Behavior Language, or ABL.
“With A²BL, you as a user can describe in simple terms what you’re trying to accomplish, and with that information we can build a system for you,” Isbell said.
Isbell and his team are using gaming concepts such as narrative to help re-envision approaches to machine learning. He sees a strong connection between mathematical sequences and the process of narrative.
Traditionally, machine learning focuses on immediate tasks rather than on sequences. In other words, it doesn’t matter where you’ve been, it only matters where you are.
But narrative can help make machine learning more flexible, Isbell explains. “With a story, it matters very much where you’ve been and those of us in machine learning have something to learn from that.”
Can the gaming worlds that keep kids anchored to computers for hours also help them in the classroom?
Jessica Pater, a GTRI research associate, has been investigating the use of gaming in education for several years. She believes that digital gaming technology can be a serious teaching tool.
“In K-12 education, there has been hesitation about using gaming in classrooms,” she said. “But now, quite a number of schools are starting to use immersive environments to create experiences that kids otherwise wouldn’t have.”
One example: game-like environments that let students manipulate molecules in real time. This kind of technology, limited to supercomputers only a few years ago, can allow youngsters to look at the actual bonds between different atoms, offering them a better understanding of how things work at the nanoscale level.
Also useful, Pater said, are immersive online environments such as Second Life and ActiveWorlds, also known as massively multiplayer online environments. These applications support development of simulations that can dramatize scientific subjects for middle school and high school students.
“Historically, schools have lacked the bandwidth to support these applications,” Pater said. “As the price of bandwidth continues to fall, more of these opportunities are starting to take hold in schools.”
Working with Georgia’s DeKalb County schools, Pater and colleagues are developing a learning environment within the Teen Second Life application. Using a Second Life island – a secure area only students can access – the GTRI-DeKalb team is creating a project called “Small Fry To Go.”
Based on a real-world DeKalb project where students raise trout at school-based hatcheries, Small Fry To Go extends that trout-growing venture into an immersive virtual world. In this world, students can investigate the underwater environment of trout fry (hatchlings) and make critical decisions about hatchery conditions.
“The intent is to teach environmental responsibility and show the impact of our decisions on the environment,” Pater said.
One downside to using immersive spaces for online education is the unevenness of funding for classroom technology, she said. Less-affluent school districts may lack the money to install the required equipment, to buy space in online environments or to maintain the immersive domain.
Other Georgia Tech units are also investigating the educational potential of online environments. The Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing(CEISMC) is sharing in a new five-year, $3 million NASA grant to Georgia Tech aimed at supporting science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in K-12 schools. Mike Ryan, CEISMC’s program director, will lead a course that uses Second Life to help develop online environments.
“Being online doesn’t replace the curriculum – it augments it in a way that gets kids excited,” Pater said. “It’s basically an immersive space where teachers can go and create rich content for their kids.”
What makes one game serious and another just entertainment?
Ian Bogost believes that distinction is in the eye of the beholder. He suggests any game or environment that affects people’s lives should be viewed as serious, regardless of its original intent.
Bogost’s research often focuses on the cultural roles played by the fast-growing gaming field. He’s interested in mainstream commercial video games, but also in games that go beyond entertainment to address politics, advertising, learning or art.
“I’m interested in upsetting the solid line between seriousness and entertainment,” said Bogost, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Literature, Communication and Culture. “Can you really label a game as pure commercial entertainment if, in fact, it has tremendous influence in the cultural sense?”
He points to SimCity, a popular game that lets users design urban areas from scratch. This hit game, he said, was not conceived as a serious tool for urban planning.
“But it has clearly created a certain interest in urban planning as a concept,” he argued. “And that has probably been responsible for inspiring an entire generation of potential urban planners – or at least aware citizens who attend their local city council meetings.”
Second Life and other online environments are increasingly used formally in education, Bogost observes. But, he asks, what about more casual uses? Couldn’t such environments also be viewed as serious if users find friendships and a sense of satisfaction online?
Even real-world games involve serious elements, Bogost notes. Basketball was devised as a way to keep poor children amused and out of trouble. Football is often touted for its character-building influence.
And, he points out, the issue of serious games is on the minds of many in the game-development world. For instance, the annual Game Developers Conference has for six years included a sub-conference that focuses squarely on serious-gaming issues.
Bogost’s 2007 book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games, looks at the capacity of both commercial and other games to act as an influential medium. In particular, the book examines three areas where video-game persuasion shows potential: politics, advertising and education.
Bogost has published a large number of other books, articles and games. In 2007, The New York Times took the novel step of publishing a number of Bogost-developed games online.
One example is a game dealing with the failed McCain-Kennedy immigration bill of 2005. This game, playable online, offered a fictional competition between immigration agents. It conveyed details about this complex piece of legislation and made critical points about the nature of immigration politics.
Bogost’s most recent book, Newsgames: Journalism at Play, written with students Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer, examines the potential role of video games in journalism. His current research also includes a project sponsored by the Knight Foundation that examines the developing relationship between journalism and gaming.
“News is changing, and the media are going to have different roles to play,” he said. “I don’t believe for a minute that reading will go away, but I think there will be new roles for tools such as video games.”
Bogost is working on a book that focuses on the diverse uses of digital gaming.
“Today, video gaming is a hot medium, though it’s been around for 30 years already,” he said. “It could turn out to be more or less a child’s toy or a fad, or it could achieve the mainstream acceptance and influence of television and movies. What we’re going to do with gaming is an open question.”
Serious games don’t have to be solemn. Some researchers are investigating the potential for online games to be constructive and social and also appealing to a broad range of people.
Celia Pearce, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Literature, Communication and Culture, is interested in games that push the boundaries of online play. Working with her Emergent Game Group, she develops large-scale multiplayer game worlds that offer a viewpoint on the real world.
“I’m not sure I like the term ‘serious gaming’ – it could imply that a game is belaboring a point for is didactic,” she said. “Other terms that might work better are ‘activist games’ or ‘games for change.’”
Among the projects that Pearce and her team are working on is “Mermaids,” an experimental multiplayer game set underwater among the ruins of an extinct mermaid culture. Players must rebuild this lost culture while trying to avoid their ancestors’ fatal mistakes, which are unknown.
“This isn’t a blatantly activist game, but it has a very green subtext,” Pearce said. “Teachers have told us it could be a good way to reach about environmentalism.”
Project Passage is a suite of historical digital and board games. The digital game of the group, called “Five Boroughs,” takes place in the New York City of 1928, where players assume the roles of new immigrants.
Unlike many commercial games, where players lock themselves into a fully fledged character from the start, Project Passage players must familiarize themselves with their new world before they make important choices, Pearce said. Moreover, they even get opportunities to back out of those decisions if they want.
“If you look at the narrative of many games, everything is oversimplified – you’re either good or bad, a criminal or a cop,” she said. “Our game introduces nuances and ambiguities that often don’t get included in games, and are more similar to how the real world operates.”
These experimental games are developed under Pearce’s direction by students who get credit for each project studio they participate in.
“It’s kind of a market-driven program,” Pearce said. “We announce each semester what projects we’re doing, and the students work on the projects they’re interested in.”
Pearce – author of The Interactive Book (MacMillan 1997) and Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (MIT 2009) – has also created games that blend the digital world with real-world activity.
In one game created by students in her group, participants are contacted by an international cast of characters from the future who report on the damage caused by current environmental practices. Players help one another complete real-world missions aimed at cleaning up today’s biosphere.
Pearce, who is also involved in independent game development, laments that the commercial gaming industry generally isn’t interested in funding projects that push the envelope.
“But who knows,” she adds. “If some of the more experimental games found a substantial following, that could change.”
Atlanta-based Kaneva, which has created a unique online environment, wants participants to generate their own 3-D casual games and other content for the Kaneva community.
Kaneva was founded by Georgia Tech alumnus Chris W. Klaus, who sold his Internet Security Systems company to IBM for $1.3 billion in 2006. Kaneva is definitely MMO – massively multiplayer and online – but it views itself as more of an environment, an enabling tool for its users.
“Kaneva is Latin for canvas, and our mission has always been to provide a digital canvas for our online community with 3-D game graphics and video technology,” Klaus said. “Now we’re entering into the phase of empowering these environments with gaming mechanics, so that ultimately our community will create its own 3-D games, serious and otherwise.”
Klaus said he’s already seeing users exploit the Kaneva space to achieve their own goals. When singer Michael Jackson died, site members immediately used the website’s tools to create a variety of 3-D graphical memorial spaces.
And Klaus points to the more than 20,000 churches created by Kaneva users as another means of self-expression.
“If you go into one of these online churches, you will see immediately that this is definitely not a game,” he said.
One area where Klaus particularly expects game-like environments to develop involves Kaneva’s home decorator application. The website lets users upload their own photos and other graphics and then use Kaneva’s 3-D tools to produce a multitude of design variations.
“If you then add some game mechanics such as points, prizes and levels,” Klaus said, “you’re well on your way to creating a serious online game that many users would also find fun and satisfying.”
This article was originally published in the Spring 2010 issue of Georgia Tech’s Research Horizons magazine.
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It’s been called revolutionary – technology that lends supercomputer-level power to any desktop. What’s more, this new capability comes in the form of a readily available piece of hardware, a graphics processing unit (GPU) costing only a few hundred dollars.
Georgia Tech researchers are investigating whether this new calculating power might change the security landscape worldwide. They’re concerned that these desktop marvels might soon compromise a critical part of the world’s cyber-security infrastructure – password protection.
“We’ve been using a commonly available graphics processor to test the integrity of typical passwords of the kind in use here at Georgia Tech and many other places,” said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “Right now we can confidently say that a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate – and as GPU power continues to go up every year, the threat will increase.”
Designed to handle the ever-growing demands of computer games, today’s top GPUs can process information at the rate of nearly two teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion floating-point operations per second). To put that in perspective, in the year 2000 the world’s fastest supercomputer, a cluster of linked machines costing $110 million, operated at slightly more than seven teraflops.
Graphics processing units are so fast because they’re designed as parallel computers. In parallel computing, a given problem is divided among multiple processing units, called cores, and these multiple cores tackle different parts of the problem simultaneously.
Until recently, multi-core graphics processors – which are made by either Nvidia Corp. or by AMD’s ATI unit – were hard to use for anything except producing graphics for a monitor. To solve a non-graphics problem on a GPU, users had to couch their problems in graphical terms, a difficult task.
But that changed in February 2007, when Nvidia released an important new software-development kit. These new tools allow users to directly program a GPU using the popular C programming language.
“Once Nvidia did that, interest in GPUs really started taking off,” Boyd explained. “If you can write a C program, you can program a GPU now.”
This new capability puts power into many hands, he says. And it could threaten the world’s ubiquitous password-protection model because it enables a low-cost password-breaking technique that engineers call “brute forcing.”
In brute forcing, attackers use a fast GPU (or even a group of linked GPUs) – combined with the right software program – to break down passwords that are blocking them from a computer or a network. The intruders’ high-speed technique basically involves trying every possible password until they find the right one.
For many common passwords, that doesn’t take long, said Joshua L. Davis, a GTRI research scientist involved in this project. For one thing, attackers know that many people use passwords comprised of easy-to-remember lowercase letters. Code-breakers typically work on those combinations first.
“Length is a major factor in protecting against brute forcing a password,” Davis explained. “A computer keyboard contains 95 characters, and every time you add another character, your protection goes up exponentially, by 95 times.”
Complexity also adds security, he says. Adding numbers, symbols and uppercase characters significantly increases the time needed to decipher a password.
Davis believes the best password is an entire sentence, preferably one that includes numbers or symbols. That’s because a sentence is both long and complex, and yet easy to remember. He says any password shorter than 12 characters could be vulnerable – if not now, soon.
Would-be password crackers have other advantages, says Carl Mastrangelo, an undergraduate student in the Georgia Tech College of Computing who is working on the password research. A computer stores user passwords in an encrypted “hash” within the operating system. Attackers who locate a password hash can besiege it by building a rainbow table, which is essentially a database of all previous attempts to compromise that password hash.
“Generating a rainbow table takes a long time,” Mastrangelo explained. “But if an attacker wants to crack many passwords quickly, once he’s built a rainbow table it might then only take about 10 minutes per password rather than several days.”
Software programs designed to break passwords are freely available on the Internet, Boyd says. Such programs, combined with the availability of GPUs, mean it’s only a matter of time before the password threat will be immediate.
Boyd hopes his password work will increase awareness of the GPU’s potential for harm as well as benefit. One result of this research, he says, could be GPU-based workstations that would offer rapid assessments of a given password’s real-world security strength.
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]]>The Georgia Tech Division of Professional Practice (DoPP) is home to Georgia Tech’s popular undergraduate Cooperative Education (Co-op) Program, founded in 1912. It also administers the Graduate Co-op Program, the Georgia Tech Internship Program (GTIP) and the Work Abroad Program.
“We’re the office that helps develop future leaders for Georgia employers,” said Debbie Gulick, DoPP interim executive director and director of the Work Abroad Program. “Our office gives students a chance to learn by doing, and it’s a doorway for employers who are looking for solutions to their recruiting needs.”
During the 2009-2010 school year, more than 6,500 Georgia Tech students were registered in the division’s database, Gulick said. These students sought assistance in finding internships and co-op jobs, as well as resume advice and more. Through all four DoPP programs, students participated in 2,969 work terms outside the classroom.
The undergraduate co-op program, the largest of the four, sent students on 1,393 work terms within the United States – 80 percent in Georgia. During the 2009-10 school year, these students’ average hourly wage of $16.50 amounted to $20 million annually, most of which stayed in the state.
Georgia Tech has the largest voluntary co-op program among tier-one universities in the United States, said Harold Simmons, director of the undergraduate co-op program. It is also the largest U.S. co-op program for engineering students.
“In our undergraduate co-op program, students alternate semesters of on-campus study with at least three semesters at work,” Simmons explained. “By contrast, an internship is usually a one-time arrangement for a fixed period of time, but students may work multiple internships with one or more employers.”
DoPP’s programs offer important benefits to both students and employers, he said.
The availability of co-op opportunities and internships attracts to Georgia Tech many students who want both the income and the work experience, he said. It gives employers a chance to identify and train the people they want to hire at graduation.
“This is a chance for employers to grow their own people,” Simmons said. “And the state benefits because that hiring helps keep highly skilled workers right here in Georgia.”
This article is part of a special feature, “Serving Georgia,” in the Fall 2010 issue of Research Horizons magazine.
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]]>Sickle cell disease is a genetic condition present at birth that affects more than 70,000 Americans. It involves a single altered gene that produces abnormal hemoglobin — the protein that carries oxygen in the blood. In sickle cell disease, red blood cells become hard, sticky and “C” shaped. Sickle cells die early, which causes a constant shortage of red blood cells. The abnormal cells also clog the flow in small blood vessels, causing chronic pain and other serious problems such as infections and acute chest syndrome.
“Even though researchers know sickle cell disease is caused by a single A to T mutation in the beta-globin gene, there is no widely available cure,” said center director Gang Bao, the Robert A. Milton Chair in Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “By directly and precisely fixing the single mutation, we hope to reduce or eliminate the sickle cell population in an individual’s blood stream and replace the sickle cells with healthy red blood cells.”
The center is one of eight NIH Nanomedicine Development Centers established in 2005 and 2006, a key initiative of the NIH’s long-term nanomedicine research goals. The centers have highly multidisciplinary scientific teams that include biologists, physicians, mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists. Through an intense competition, the NIH selected four centers for second phase funding, including the one led by Georgia Tech.
In addition to experts in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, researchers from Medical College of Georgia, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York University Medical Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Harvard University are also members of the center.
The gene correction approach proposed by the research team to treat sickle cell disease involves delivering engineered zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) — genetic scissors that cut DNA at a specific site — and DNA correction templates into the nuclei of hematopoietic stem cells isolated from the bone marrow of individuals with sickle cell disease. The researchers chose hematopoietic stem cells because they are the precursors of all blood cells, including the cells rendered dysfunctional in sickle cell patients. Hematopoietic stem cells possess such potent regenerative potential that transplantation of even a single hematopoietic stem cell is sufficient to rebuild the entire blood system of an organism.
The researchers plan to engineer and optimize the ZFN proteins so they will induce a double-strand break in the DNA near the sickle cell disease mutation, thereby activating the gene for correction. The broken DNA ends will enter the homologous recombination repair pathway, which will use the genetic information provided by the donor template — rather than the original flawed information — to correct the mutation. When the gene-corrected hematopoietic stem cells are injected back in the body, they will produce healthy red blood cells to replace the sickle cells.
“This approach represents a significant paradigm shift in current gene targeting and gene therapy technology in that no viral-based vector or foreign DNA is used,” explained Bao, who is also a Georgia Tech College of Engineering Distinguished Professor. “We think it’s a promising approach because we do not need to fix all of the mutations in all cells; we only need to greatly reduce the sickle cell population by replacing those cells with healthy red blood cells.”
There are significant challenges in achieving the goals of the center, including the need to dramatically increase the rate of homologous recombination-mediated gene correction, improve the activity and specificity of ZFNs to maximize gene correction efficiency and minimize potentially harmful off-target effects, deliver the components necessary for gene correction to hematopoietic stem cells with high efficiency and throughput, avoid unwanted genomic rearrangements and optimize the engraftment of ZFN-modified hematopoietic stem cells.
To increase the efficiency of gene correction in the hematopoietic stem cells, the proposed gene correction approach will require a shift in repair pathway choice from non-homologous end joining toward homologous recombination. To accomplish this, the researchers plan to use methods they developed in the last four years to visualize the assembly of repair complexes at double-strand break sites and develop interventions to shift pathway choice toward homologous recombination.
To control ZFN activity so that unwanted off-target effects or gene rearrangements can be minimized or avoided, the researchers plan to refine and optimize the design and production of the proteins and develop photoactivatable proteins for better temporal control of ZFN activity. In addition, by investigating the fate and dynamics of the engineered proteins and donor template in living cells, and the incidence and biological effects of undesired mutations and gene rearrangements, the research team will further improve the process.
With novel imaging probes and methods already developed in the Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines, the researchers will be able to observe and systematically optimize each step in the gene correction process. Once that is accomplished, the research team will demonstrate the gene correction approach in a mouse model of sickle cell disease. Their goal is to demonstrate that gene-corrected cells can reconstitute the mouse hematopoietic system and reverse the sickle cell disease phenotype, according to Bao.
“We want to focus on sickle cell disease to demonstrate this approach, but if we are successful, the same approach can be adopted to treat some of the other 6,000 estimated single gene disorders in the world today, such as cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs,” noted Bao.
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]]>The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering atGeorgia Tech and Emory University now offers teaching laboratories with fivestate-of-the-art microelectrode arrays, which allow for experimentation incellular communications.
The cutting-edge technology is produced by Axion BioSystems, acompany co-founded in 2008 by Georgia Tech alumnus Tom O’Brien using technologylicensed from the Institution.
With this new system, Georgia Tech and Emory undergraduates can tacklethe challenges of neuroscience in a tangible way, from unlocking the mysteriesof learning and memory, to developing methods for restoring vision.
The technology will also allow students to explore and interactwith tissue of the heart, spinal cord, bone and pancreas.
By training undergraduates to work with these tissues, the goal isto better prepare students for careers developing the next generation medical devicesand cell therapies.
This spring, undergraduates will begin using the new technology incourses such as Neuroengineering Fundamentals and Quantitative EngineeringPhysiology Lab.
The Wallace H. CoulterDepartment of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University is ajoint department, equally part of the Emory School of Medicine and the GeorgiaTech College of Engineering.
]]>Now, a research team led bya group of biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech and Emory University areseeking to improve brain-machine interface by irrefutably identifying whycurrent methods fail.
DARPA has funded $4.5million for three years to support the multi-disciplinary team as they seekreasons for the failure of neural implants.
The research team includes:Georgia Tech Professor and Principal Investigator Ravi Bellamkonda, AssociateProfessors Garrett Stanley and Niren Murthy from the Wallace H. CoulterDepartment of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University;Senior Vice Provost for Research and Innovation Mark Allen and ProfessorRob Butera from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering;Senior Research Engineer Judson Ready from the Georgia Tech Research Institute;Associate Professor of Pathology Themis Kyriakides from Yale University andAssociate Professor of Bioengineering Tracy Cui from University of Pittsburgh.
“This research is a greatmatch between our desire to develop new, innovative ways to interfacetechnology to the human nervous system, and DARPA’s desire to overcome thescientific hurdles that are thwarting the development of the next generation ofneuro-controlled prosthetic devices,” Bellamkonda said.
]]>"We've created the strawberry parts list," said the consortium's leader Kevin Folta, an associate professor with the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. "For every organism on the planet, if you're going to try to do any advanced science or use molecular-assisted breeding, a parts list is really helpful. In the old days, we had to go out and figure out what the parts were. Now we know the components that make up the strawberry plant."
From a genetic standpoint, the woodland strawberry, formally known as Fragaria vesca, is similar to the cultivated strawberry but less complex, making it easier for scientists to study. The 14-chromosome woodland strawberry has one of the smallest genomes of economically significant plants, but still contains approximately 240 million base pairs.
The consortium of 75 researchers from 38 institutions that sequenced the genome included two Georgia Tech researchers. They are Mark Borodovsky, a Regents professor with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the Georgia Tech School of Computational Science and Engineering, and Paul Burns, who worked on the project as a bioinformatics Ph.D. student.
Once the consortium uncovered the genomic sequence of the woodland strawberry, Borodovsky and Burns led the efforts in identifying protein-coding genes in the sequence. Using a newly developed pattern recognition program called GeneMark.hmm-ES+, Borodovsky and Burns identified 34,809 genes, of which 55 percent were assigned to gene families.
The GeneMark.hmm-ES+ program iteratively identified the correct algorithm parameters from the DNA sequence and transcriptome data. The program used a probabilistic model called the Hidden Markov Model to pinpoint the boundaries between coding sequences -- called exons -- and non-coding sequences, which could be either introns or intergenic regions.
In identifying the genes, prediction and training steps were repeated, each time detecting a larger set of true coding and non-coding sequences used to further improve the model employed in statistical pattern recognition. When the new sequence breakdown coincided with the previous one, the researchers recorded their final set of predicted genes.
"GeneMark.hmm-ES+ is a hybrid program that uses both DNA and RNA sequences to predict protein-coding genes," said Borodovsky, who is also director of Georgia Tech's Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics.
Borodovsky developed the first version of GeneMark in 1993. In 1995, this program was used to find genes in the first completely sequenced genomes of bacteria and archea. The research team then developed self-training versions of the gene finding program for prokaryotic (organisms that lack a cell nucleus) and eukaryotic (organisms that contain a cell nucleus) genomes in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Development of these programs has been supported by the National Institutes of Health since 1993.
Most recently, Borodovsky's team predicted genes in the genomes of the green alga Chlorella variabilis NC64A and the mushroom Coprinopsis cinerea, with reports published in 2010 in the journals The Plant Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, respectively.
"Our approach to gene prediction in the strawberry genome proved highly effective, with 90 percent of the genes predicted by the hybrid gene model supported by transcript-based evidence," added Borodovsky.
Further analysis of the woodland strawberry genome revealed genes involved in key biological processes, such as flavor production, flowering and response to disease. Additional examination also revealed a core set of signal transduction elements shared between the strawberry and other plants.
The woodland strawberry is a member of the Rosaceae family, which consists of more than 100 genera and 3,000 species. This large family includes many economically important and popular fruit, nut, ornamental and woody crops, including the cultivated strawberry, almond, apple, peach, cherry, raspberry and rose.
In the long term, breeders will be able to use the information to create plants that can be grown with less environmental impact, better nutritional profiles and larger yields.
"The wealth of genetic information collected by this strawberry genome sequencing project will help spur the next wave of research into the improvement of strawberry and other fruit crops," added Borodovsky.
This project was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Award No. HG00783). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NIH.
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]]>Scientists know that among an embryo's first major developments is the establishment of its dorsoventral axis, which runs from its back to its belly. Determining how this axis development unfolds -- specifically the presence and location of proteins during the process -- requires the ability to simultaneously monitor large numbers of embryos with different genetic backgrounds at several time points.
"Collecting and analyzing the signaling and transcriptional patterns of the dorsoventral axis typically requires manual manipulation of individual embryos to stand them on their ends, making it difficult to conduct high-throughput experiments that can achieve statistically significant results," said Hang Lu, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.
To enable large-scale quantitative analyses of protein positional information along the dorsoventral axis, Lu designed a microfluidic device that reliably and robustly orients several hundred embryos in just a few minutes.
Details of the device design and results from proof-of-concept experiments with fruit fly embryos were published in the Dec. 26 advance online edition of the journal Nature Methods. This project was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the DuPont Young Professor program.
Lu designed and fabricated the device with the help of Kwanghun Chung and Emily Gong, who worked on the project as Georgia Tech graduate and undergraduate students, respectively. Fabricated from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), the compact device is the size of a microscope slide and contains approximately 700 traps for embryos, which are shaped like grains of rice but smaller in size.
In operation, fluid flows through an "S"-shaped channel wide enough for embryos of any orientation to move easily through it. The fluid efficiently directs the embryos toward the traps, while sweeping out extra and improperly trapped embryos.
"The flow pattern significantly increased the frequency at which embryos contacted the traps and were loaded into them," explained Lu. "Experimentally, we found on average 90 percent of the embryos became trapped in the device, which will be valuable for studies that only have a small number of embryos available."
When an embryo approaches an empty trap, it experiences non-uniform pressure and shear from the surrounding fluid. The resulting force flips the embryo vertically and inserts it into the cylindrical trap in an upright position, with its dorsoventral axis parallel to the ground. The embryo is then secured inside the trap, without any need for user intervention or control. The lock-in feature allows the device to be disconnected from the rest of the hardware and transported for imaging or storage with the embryos enclosed.
"At one point, we mailed a microfluidic embryo trap array device full of trapped fruit fly embryos to our collaborators at Princeton University, and upon arrival, the embryos were still upright in their locked traps," said Lu.
To demonstrate the device's capabilities, Lu collaborated with Stanislav Shvartsman, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University, and his graduate student Yoosik Kim. The Princeton researchers used the device to quantify gradients of signaling molecules called morphogens in fixed embryos and also used it to monitor nuclear divisions in live embryos.
In one experiment, the Princeton researchers determined the spatial extent of the distribution of Dorsal, a transcription factor that initiates the dorsal-to-ventral patterning of the Drosophila embryo. They also demonstrated that this gradient could be quantitatively compared between wild-type and mutant embryos.
"The trap array device provided a significant increase in the number of fixed and live embryos we could image simultaneously and allowed us to accurately resolve issues of interest to developmental biologists today," explained Lu.
In the future, scientists should be able to adapt the microfluidic device for studies of pattern formation and morphogenesis in other model organisms, such as zebrafish or worm embryos. Results of those studies will be important to the scientific community because many genes controlling development are similar in worms, fruit flies and mammals.
This project was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Award No. DBI‐0649833) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Award No. R21NS058465). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF or NIH.
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]]>Researchers from the two leading producers of nanotechnology papers -- China and the United States -- have become each nation's most frequent international co-authors. Though Chinese and U.S. researchers now publish roughly the same number of nanotechnology papers, the U.S. retains a lead in the quality of publications -- as measured by the number of early citations.
"Despite ten years of emphasis by governments on national nanotechnology initiatives, we find that patterns of nanotechnology research collaboration and funding transcend country boundaries," said Phillip Shapira, study co-author and a professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "For example, we found that U.S. and Chinese researchers have developed a relatively high level of collaboration in nanotechnology research. Each country is the other's leading collaborator in nanotechnology R&D."
The findings were part of a new study of nanotechnology publishing reported Dec. 2 in the online edition of the journal Nature. The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation-supported Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU).
Sparked by programs such as the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in the United States, leading industrial nations have launched nanotechnology research programs that invested more than $8 billion in public funds in 2008 alone. China, Germany, Japan and Korea are among the many countries that have launched major governmental programs to develop their national nanotechnology capabilities as part of efforts to boost future economic growth.
"There is widespread anticipation that nanotechnology will be a critical component in addressing global challenges in such areas as energy, environment, health care, security and sustainability," explained Shapira, who is also a professor of innovation at the University of Manchester. "At the same time, nanotechnology may be a key driver in the next wave of technology-led economic growth and investment. Governments around the world are hoping that their often massive investments in nanotechnology R&D will lead not only to economic, but also to significant societal returns."
Though the revolutionary advances that nanotechnology promises are still off into the future, Shapira noted that the investments made so far have led to "a noticeable shift toward innovation in the past few years as companies are beginning to market a wide range of products and devices whose performance has been enhanced by nanoscale science and engineering."
The study was conducted by Shapira and collaborator Jue Wang, an assistant professor at Florida International University. It used data mining techniques to study funding acknowledgements that have been available since 2008 in the Web of Science -- one of the leading international databases of scientific publications. Shapira and Wang analyzed more than 91,000 papers published worldwide between August 2008 and July 2009.
They found that although researchers from 152 nations were represented in the survey, just 15 countries represented 90 percent of the papers. The top four countries by author affiliation were the United States (23 percent), China (22 percent), Germany (8 percent) and Japan (8 percent). Papers authored by researchers from more than one nation – which constituted 23 percent of those examined – were assigned to more than one country.
Though the United States and China now produce approximately the same number of papers, the U.S. maintains significant advantages.
"Compared with Chinese counterparts, papers authored by U.S. researchers still have a substantial lead in terms of citation quality and U.S. corporate activity in nanotechnology innovation remains rather larger," Shapira said. "However, Chinese quality is improving and an increasing number of Chinese companies are becoming engaged in developing and commercializing nano-enabled products."
The study analyzed the funding sources cited in a sub-set of 61,300 papers that were supported by grants. The National Natural Science Foundation of China was the top funder, with more than 10,200 publications representing 16.7 percent of all sponsored papers. Second was the U.S. National Science Foundation with 6,700 publications. Rounding out the top five were the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the European Union’s R&D programs, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- which includes the National Institutes of Health.
Eight sponsors saw at least 10 percent of the papers they funded garner five or more citations within a year of publication -- the study's definition of an "early-citation" paper. This group is led by four U.S. agencies: the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense.
About three percent of U.S. papers reported co-funding from the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation, while a similar proportion of Chinese papers report co-funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
"Although these numbers are still low relative to purely nationally-funded papers, they signal a significant trend as China has taken over from European countries as America's leading international collaborator by volume in nanotechnology research," Shapira explained. "China's scientific relationships do, of course, extend beyond the United States, and China has emerged as the hub for nanotechnology research collaboration in Asia."
The study also found that sponsors concentrating their funding in fewer institutions had lower research impact as measured by early citation counts. "Our starting hypothesis is that when groups from multiple institutions vie for funding, there is increased competition, review processes are less partial, and there are more opportunities to select the most improving projects," Shapira explained.
With increasing budget pressures, growth in nanotechnology funding appears unlikely. How should countries invest their limited funding for greatest benefit?
"One way would be to foster more high-quality international collaborations, perhaps by opening funding competitions to international researchers and by offering travel and mobility awards for domestic researchers to increase alliances with colleagues in other countries," the researchers suggested in their paper.
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]]>Believed to be the first systematic study of the nature of the protein-protein interfaces, the research could help explain the phenomena of "promiscuous" proteins that bind to many other proteins. The results could also have implications for the development of drug compounds designed to affect these protein-protein interactions.
"Proteins and the rules of protein-protein interactions are the result of very simple physical principles," said Jeffrey Skolnick, director of the Center for the Study of Systems Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "In this study, we set out to characterize the nature of the interfaces -- the structures of the interfaces -- in all known protein structures. We wanted to ask how much of the interface could be explained purely by the structural features of the proteins without involving evolution or intelligent design."
A paper describing the research was published Dec. 13 in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Skolnick and collaborator Mu Gao studied the structural similarity of protein-protein interfaces involving interactions between dimers, developing an efficient computational method called iAlign to classify the interfaces known to exist among native proteins. They found that even without structural similarity between the individual monomers that form dimeric complexes, roughly 90 percent of the interfaces had a close structural neighbor.
"We found that in the library of protein-protein structures that nature has available, there are about a thousand structurally-distinct interfaces," said Skolnick, who is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in computational systems biology. "You can have very different types of protein structures adopting the same interface, but it was still surprising to see such a small number."
To obtain the kind of bonding measured experimentally requires that interfaces have sufficient surface area, so Skolnick believes most interfaces are roughly planar, much like two Nerf balls pressed together. "If you take this spherical interface and blunt it, that creates a much larger surface interface, so most of the interfaces that we saw are actually planar," he said. "You need to have enough sticky surface area."
To separate the role of the proteins' basic physical structure from the effects of the amino acids that they gain through an evolutionary process, the researchers studied a set of synthetic homopolypeptide proteins created totally in the computer to mimic natural proteins. After conducting docking tests on these "toy proteins" decorated with random amino acids, Skolnick and Gao observed 90 percent of the interfaces that they had previously characterized in the natural proteins.
"This suggests that the interfaces we see are features of the protein structure and the protein physics," Skolnick said. "Proteins seem to be primed by their physical characteristics to enable these higher-order molecular interactions to occur with a significant probability. The capacity is a feature of the structure."
That means the interfaces are independent of the kind of secondary structure that each protein has and uncoupled from the global fold that each protein adopts. "If the interaction between the proteins doesn’t depend on the internal geometry of the structure or the secondary type of folding, that allows the possibility of having one protein interface with many interactions," Skolnick said.
The planar nature of the interfaces and their similarity could help explain the promiscuity observed among a number of proteins. If the surfaces were highly specific, it wouldn't be possible for these proteins to interact with so many different proteins.
"If you have a background capacity to interact, then you could imagine that this is the origin of a lot of promiscuous interactions that you see in cells," he said. "The surfaces are essentially complementary, and by accident you happen to have an appropriate constellation of amino acids. The more stable interactions clearly need to have undergone some kind of selection procedure to stabilize them enough to stick."
Skolnick believes that the basic physics of the proteins therefore forms a foundation on which evolution -- everything the protein encounters -- can act. "We are examining the basic rules of the road that evolution takes advantage of over time," he said.
Understanding these rules helps clarify the complex operation of cellular structures -- and potentially give drug designers a new pathway to exploit.
"Promiscuity of interactions appears to be a feature of biological systems, and this bears on drug discovery," Skolnick said. "There are now very few drugs that inhibit protein-protein interactions because of the surface areas that are involved. Knowing the nature of these interfaces and the rules governing them might allow us to figure out how to design an inhibitor better."
Knowledge that protein interfaces are primed for promiscuity helps explains the observations in biology, but open up some new questions. For one, how do cells maintain order if each protein can interact with many other proteins?
"It may be like being at a crowded New Year's Eve party in which everybody is wearing weak flypaper," Skolnick suggested. "How do you reach the person you want to meet when you are sticking to people you don’t want to interact with? How do you assemble anything useful when all the parts stick together?"
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Improving archivists' ability to categorize and access hundreds of different computer file formats is critical in the digital age. Increasingly, archives receive large quantities of government and other records in a wide variety of digital formats.
"The ultimate problem we're addressing here is technical obsolescence," said William Underwood, a principal research scientist leading the file-recognition effort for GTRI. "As software programs have been superseded over the years, it’s become critical to automate the enormous task of categorizing, verifying and viewing hundreds of past and present file formats."
One major facilitator of that task is the PRONOM service, developed by The National Archives of the U.K. This file-format registry, which can be utilized online by archivists and others worldwide, employs a database containing details of more than 750 different digital file formats. Those formats, in turn, are accessed by a file-format identification tool called DROID.
Underwood explained that archivists face the task of distinguishing among data files in hundreds of different formats. At the most basic level, categorizing these data formats requires software tools that examine file extensions, which are the identifying characters such as "doc" or "pdf" found at the end of filenames.
Yet a file extension -- an external identifier that is easily modified or deleted -- can be inaccurate. More critical is the capability to identify correctly the distinctive internal signature that characterizes a file's format.
GTRI, in cooperation with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is helping the United Kingdom expand the roster of internal signatures in the PRONOM database. GTRI has added more than 50 such signatures to PRONOM in the past months, increasing the number of signatures in the database by almost a quarter, with more additions expected next year. This work is being performed at the request of the National Archives Center for Advanced Systems and Technologies (NCAST), a NARA unit.
Currently, about a third of PRONOM's 750 file formats have internal signatures. Increasing the number of internal signatures is important, Underwood said, because it helps the DROID tool identify files more accurately. In turn, increased accuracy enables digital archivists to better identify older, obsolete file formats and develop appropriate migration strategies and preservation tools.
"We are grateful to NARA and the Georgia Tech Research Institute for the work they have recently undertaken on file-format research," said David Thomas, director of technology at The National Archives of the UK. "The decision to share their work...has significantly improved the PRONOM database and will be of enormous benefit to the wider digital preservation community."
The technology contributed to The National Archives of the UK is derived from GTRI's research into Advanced Language Processing Technology Applied to Digital Records, a project sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and by NCAST. This work applies computational linguistics technology to summarizing, accessing, reviewing and preserving electronic records of the Department of Defense, federal agencies and presidential administrations.
"In PRONOM/DROID, The National Archives of the U.K. has responded to an essential need for preserving and providing sustained access to valuable digital information," said Kenneth Thibodeau, director of NCAST. "We are happy to be able to contribute to enhancing a tool that we use in NARA's Electronic Records Archives system. This helps us and also benefits anyone who needs to preserve digital assets."
The first version of PRONOM was developed by The National Archives' Digital Preservation Department for internal use in March 2002 and was launched as a free online service to the public in February 2004. In 2007 The National Archives won the Digital Preservation Award for its development of the PRONOM and DROID tools.
In 2011, PRONOM data will be released in a linked, open format. This move will make it easier for others to reuse the data, and will provide a means to extend and develop the dataset. More information is available at http://labs.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wordpress/.
"The GTRI computational-linguistics team will certainly continue to contribute to PRONOM," Underwood said. "We're eager to use our experience in language-processing technology to support the evolution of this internationally important file format database."
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Tim Lieuwen, professor of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was awarded the George Westinghouse Silver Medal by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at the organization’s annual International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in November. Lieuwen was honored for his "outstanding contributions to combustion science and technology for low-emission gas turbines."
The George Westinghouse Medals were established by ASME to recognize eminent achievement or distinguished service in the power field of mechanical engineering. The silver medal is given to an individual under the age of 45.
In 1999, Lieuwen began his academic career as an assistant professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering after completing his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. Lieuwen maintains an active teaching and research program in the area of clean combustion.
Karim Sabra, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, was awarded the R. Bruce Lindsay Award from the Acoustical Society of America for his work on time-reversal acoustics and ambient noise cross-correlations.
The R. Bruce Lindsay Award is presented in the spring to a member of the society who is under 35 years of age and who, during a period of two or more years immediately preceding the award, has been active in the affairs of the society and has contributed substantially, through published papers, to the advancement of theoretical and/or applied acoustics.
Sabra began his career at Georgia Tech in 2007 as an assistant professor. Prior to Tech, he was a project scientist at the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego. His research at Georgia Tech emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to applied and theoretical problems in acoustics, structural health monitoring, biomechanics and seismology based on common wave propagation physics features.
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The winners were selected through two rounds ofinterviews, a presentation on how their Georgia Tech experiencehas prepared them for the future and a vote by the Georgia Tech student body.
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For Tech, membership means that the Institute is joining a group that helps shapes diversity policy agendas for universities across the nation.
Georgia Tech's Vice President for Institute Diversity, Archie Ervin, currently sits on NADOHE's board of directors. He was appointed to a three-year term in 2009 while at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
]]>For Curry's full written testimony, see the link below.
]]>A new study in the Nov. 21 advance online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience details the biological basis of this ability for rapid adaptation: neurons located at the beginning of the brain's sensory information pathway that change their level of simultaneous firing. This modification in neuron firing alters the nature of the information being relayed, which enhances the brain's ability to discriminate between different sensations -- at the expense of degrading its ability to detect the sensations themselves.
"Previous studies have focused on how brain adaptation influences how much information from the outside world is being transmitted by the thalamus to the cortex, but we show that it is also important to focus on what information is being transmitted," said Garrett Stanley, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
In addition to Stanley, Coulter Department research scientist Qi Wang and Harvard Medical School Neurobiology Department research fellow Roxanna Webber contributed to this work, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health.
For the experiments, Stanley and Wang moved a rat's whisker to generate a sensory input. Moving whiskers at different speeds or at different angles produced sensory inputs that could be discriminated. This sensory experience is analogous to an individual moving a fingertip across a surface and perceiving the surface as smooth or rough. While the whiskers were being moved, the researchers recorded neural signals simultaneously from different parts of the animal's brain to determine what information was being transmitted.
"Neuroscientists know a lot about different parts of the brain, but we don't know a lot about how they talk to each other. Recording how neurons are simultaneously communicating with each other in different parts of the brain and studying how the communication changes in different situations is a big step in this field," said Stanley.
The results from the experiments showed that adaptation shifted neural activity from a state in which the animal was good at detecting the presence of a sensory input to a state in which the animal was better at discriminating between sensory inputs. In addition, adaptation enhanced the ability to discriminate between deflections of the whiskers in different angular directions, pointing to a general phenomenon.
"Adaptation differentially influences the thalamus and cortex in a manner that fundamentally changes the nature of information conveyed about whisker motion," explained Stanley. "Our results provide a direct link between the long-observed phenomenon of enhanced sensory performance with adaptation and the underlying neurophysiological representation in the primary sensory cortex."
The thalamus serves as a relay station between the outside world and the cortex. Areas of the cortex receive and process information related to vision, audition and touch from the thalamus.
The study also revealed that information the cortex receives from the thalamus is transformed as it travels through the pathway due to a change in the level of simultaneous firing of neurons in the thalamus. The researchers found that the effect of adaptation on the synchrony of neurons in the thalamus was the key element in the shift between sensory input detection and discrimination.
"There is a switching of the circuit to a different function. The same neurons do two different things and switch quickly, in a matter of seconds or milliseconds, through a change in the synchronization across neurons," explained Stanley. "If we think of the neurons firing like members of an audience clapping hands, then the sound of the clapping becomes louder when they all clap together."
In the future, the techniques used in this study may be valuable for probing the effects of brain injury on this pathway and others, as a variety of different diseases and disorders act to change the degree of synchronization of neurons in the brain, resulting in harmful effects.
This project is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Award No. R01NS48285). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NIH.
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]]>Creating micro-scale air vehicles that mimic the flapping of winged insects or birds has become popular, but they typically require a complex combination of pitching and plunging motions to oscillate the flapping wings. To avoid some of the design challenges involved in mimicking insect wing strokes, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology propose using flexible wings that are driven by a simple sinusoidal flapping motion.
"We found that the simple up and down wavelike stroke of wings at the resonance frequency is easier to implement and generates lift comparable to winged insects that employ a significantly more complex stroke," said Alexander Alexeev, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering.
Details of the flapping motion proposed by Alexeev and mechanical engineering graduate student Hassan Masoud were presented on Nov. 22 at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics. A paper published in the May issue of the journal Physical Review E also reported on this work, which is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through TeraGrid computational resources.
In nature, flapping-wing flight has unparalleled maneuverability, agility and hovering capability. Unlike fixed-wing and rotary-wing air vehicles, micro air vehicles integrate lifting, thrusting and hanging into a flapping wing system, and have the ability to cruise a long distance with a small energy supply. However, significant technical challenges exist in designing flapping wings, many motivated by an incomplete understanding of the physics associated with aerodynamics of flapping flight at small size scales.
"When you want to create smaller and smaller vehicles, the aerodynamics change a lot and modeling becomes important," said Alexeev. "We tried to gain insight into the flapping aerodynamics by using computational models and identifying the aerodynamic forces necessary to drive these very small flying machines."
Alexeev and Masoud used three-dimensional computer simulations to examine for the first time the lift and hovering aerodynamics of flexible wings driven at resonance by sinusoidal oscillations. The wings were tilted from the horizontal and oscillated vertically by a force applied at the wing root. To capture the dynamic interactions between the wings and their environment, the researchers used a hybrid computational approach that integrated the lattice Boltzmann model for fluid dynamics and the lattice spring model for the mechanics of elastic wings.
The simulations revealed that at resonance -- the frequencies when a system oscillates at larger amplitudes -- tilted elastic wings driven by a simple harmonic stroke generated lift comparable to that of small insects that employ a significantly more complex stroke. In addition, the simulations identified one flapping regime that enabled maximum lift and another that revealed maximum efficiency. The efficiency was maximized at a flapping frequency 30 percent higher than the frequency for maximized lift.
"This information could be useful for regulating the flight of flapping-wing micro air vehicles since high lift is typically needed only during takeoff, while the enhanced aerodynamic efficiency is essential for a long-distance cruise flight," noted Masoud.
To facilitate the design of practical micro-scale air vehicles that employ resonance flapping, the researchers plan to examine how flapping wings can be effectively controlled in different flow conditions including unsteady gusty environments. They are also investigating whether wings with non-uniform structural and mechanical properties and wings driven by an asymmetric stroke may further improve the resonance performance of flapping wings.
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]]>Titled "SiGe Integrated Electronics for Extreme Environments," the $12 million, 63-month project was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In addition to Georgia Tech, the 11-member team included academic researchers from the University of Arkansas, Auburn University, University of Maryland, University of Tennessee and Vanderbilt University. Also involved in the project were BAE Systems, Boeing Co., IBM Corp., Lynguent Inc. and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"The team's overall task was to develop an end-to-end solution for NASA -- a tested infrastructure that includes everything needed to design and build extreme-environment electronics for space missions," said John Cressler, who is a Ken Byers Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Cressler served as principal investigator and overall team leader for the project.
A paper on the project findings will appear in December in IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability, 2010. During the past five years, work done under the project has resulted in some 125 peer-reviewed publications.
Unique Capabilities
SiGe alloys combine silicon, the most common microchip material, with germanium at nanoscale dimensions. The result is a robust material that offers important gains in toughness, speed and flexibility.
That robustness is crucial to silicon-germanium's ability to function in space without bulky radiation shields or large, power-hungry temperature control devices. Compared to conventional approaches, SiGe electronics can provide major reductions in weight, size, complexity, power and cost, as well as increased reliability and adaptability.
"Our team used a mature silicon-germanium technology -- IBM's 0.5 micron SiGe technology -- that was not intended to withstand deep-space conditions," Cressler said. "Without changing the composition of the underlying silicon-germanium transistors, we leveraged SiGe's natural merits to develop new circuit designs -- as well as new approaches to packaging the final circuits -- to produce an electronic system that could reliably withstand the extreme conditions of space."
At the end of the project, the researchers supplied NASA with a suite of modeling tools, circuit designs, packaging technologies and system/subsystem designs, along with guidelines for qualifying those parts for use in space. In addition, the team furnished NASA with a functional prototype -- called a silicon-germanium remote electronics unit (REU) 16-channel general purpose sensor interface. The device was fabricated using silicon-germanium microchips and has been tested successfully in simulated space environments.
A New Paradigm
Andrew S. Keys, center chief technologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center and NASA program manager, said the now-completed project has moved the task of understanding and modeling silicon-germanium technology to a point where NASA engineers can start using it on actual vehicle designs.
"The silicon-germanium extreme environments team was very successful in doing what it set out to do," Keys said. "They advanced the state-of-the-art in analog silicon-germanium technology for space use -- a crucial step in developing a new paradigm leading to lighter weight and more capable space vehicle designs."
Keys explained that, at best, most electronics conform to military specifications, meaning they function across a temperature range of minus-55 degrees Celsius to plus-125 degrees Celsius. But electronics in deep space are typically exposed to far greater temperature ranges, as well as to damaging radiation. The Moon's surface cycles between plus-120 Celsius during the lunar day to minus-180 Celsius at night.
The silicon-germanium electronics developed by the extreme environments team has been shown to function reliably throughout that entire plus-120 to minus-180 Celsius range. It is also highly resistant or immune to various types of radiation.
The conventional approach to protecting space electronics, developed in the 1960s, involves bulky metal boxes that shield devices from radiation and temperature extremes, Keys explained. Designers must place most electronics in a protected, temperature controlled central location and then connect them via long and heavy cables to sensors or other external devices.
By eliminating the need for most shielding and special cables, silicon-germanium technology helps reduce the single biggest problem in space launches -- weight. Moreover, robust SiGe circuits can be placed wherever designers want, which helps eliminate data errors caused by impedance variations in lengthy wiring schemes.
"For instance, the Mars Exploration Rovers, which are no bigger than a golf cart, use several kilometers of cable that lead into a warm box," Keys said. "If we can move most of those electronics out to where the sensors are on the robot's extremities, that will reduce cabling, weight, complexity and energy use significantly."
A Collaborative Effort
NASA currently rates the new SiGe electronics at a technology readiness level of six, which means the circuits have been integrated into a subsystem and tested in a relevant environment. The next step, level seven, involves integrating the SiGe circuits into a vehicle for space flight testing. At level eight, a new technology is mature enough to be integrated into a full mission vehicle, and at level nine the technology is used by missions on a regular basis.
Successful collaboration was an important part of the silicon-germanium team's effectiveness, Keys said. He remarked that he had "never seen such a diverse team work together so well."
Professor Alan Mantooth, who led a large University of Arkansas contingent involved in modeling and circuit-design tasks, agreed. He called the project "the most successful collaboration that I've been a part of."
Mantooth termed the extreme-electronics project highly useful in the education mission of the participating universities. He noted that a total of 82 students from six universities worked on the project over five years.
Richard W. Berger, a BAE Systems senior systems architect who collaborated on the project, also praised the student contributions.
'"To be working both in analog and digital, miniaturizing, and developing extreme-temperature and radiation tolerance all at the same time -- that's not what you'd call the average student design project," Berger said.
Miniaturizing an Architecture
BAE Systems' contribution to the project included providing the basic architecture for the remote electronics unit (REU) sensor interface prototype developed by the team. That architecture came from a previous electronics generation: the now cancelled Lockheed Martin X-33 Spaceplane initially designed in the 1990s.
In the original X-33 design, Berger explained, each sensor interface used an assortment of sizeable analog parts for the front end signal receiving section. That section was supported by a digital microprocessor, memory chips and an optical bus interface -- all housed in a protective five-pound box.
The extreme environments team transformed the bulky X-33 design into a miniaturized sensor interface, utilizing silicon germanium. The resulting SiGe device weighs about 200 grams and requires no temperature or radiation shielding. Large numbers of these robust, lightweight REU units could be mounted on spacecraft or data-gathering devices close to sensors, reducing size, weight, power and reliability issues.
Berger said that BAE Systems is interested in manufacturing a sensor interface device based on the extreme environment team's discoveries.
Other space-oriented companies are also pursuing the new silicon-germanium technology, Cressler said. NASA, he explained, wants the intellectual-property barriers to the technology to be low so that it can be used widely.
"The idea is to make this infrastructure available to all interested parties," he said. "That way it could be used for any electronics assembly -- an instrument, a spacecraft, an orbital platform, lunar-surface applications, Titan missions – wherever it can be helpful. In fact, the process of defining such an NASA mission-insertion roadmap is currently in progress."
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]]>Biological and chemical sensing are active research areas because of their applications in clinical screening, drug discovery, food safety, environmental monitoring and homeland security. Using integrated photonics, the new class of sensors will be capable of detecting chemical agents -- such as toxins, pollutants and trace gases -- and biological agents -- such as proteins, viruses and antibodies -- simultaneously on the same chip.
"The proposed sensors will detect multiple biological and chemical threats on a compact integrated platform faster, less expensively and more sensitively than the current state-of-the-art sensors," said the center's leader Ali Adibi, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding the two-year $4.3 million center as one of its Centers in Integrated Photonics Engineering Research (CIPhER), which investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices or systems. For its center, Georgia Tech is working with researchers from Emory University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of California, Santa Cruz; and Yale University. The team also includes industry collaborators Rockwell Collins, Kotura, Santur Corporation and NanoRods.
To create an integrated chip that will simultaneously detect multiple biological and chemical agents, the researchers need to achieve three major goals:
• Design and fabricate photonic and optomechanical structures to sense differences in a sample's refractive index, Raman emission, fluorescence, absorption and mass;
• Functionalize the sensor surface with coatings that chemical and biological agents will attach to and create differences that can be detected; and
• Develop the sample preparation method and microfluidic sample delivery device, and connect the device to the coated photonic structure.
Adibi is leading the first thrust, which is primarily focused on fabricating the millimeter-square sensing structures and on-chip spectrometers that will enable multiplexing -- the detection of multiple agents using the same sensing modules. The sensors will detect changes in the refractive index, Raman emission, fluorescence, absorption spectra and optomechanical properties when a sample that includes specific biological or chemical particles interacts with the sensor coatings. Combining information obtained from the five different sensing modalities will maximize the sensor specificity and minimize its false detection rate, the researchers say.
"The goal is to achieve very high sensitivity for each modality and investigate the advantages of each modality for different classes of biological and chemical agents in order to develop a clear set of guidelines for combining different modalities to achieve the desired performance for a specific set of agents," explained Adibi.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemistry professor Timothy Swager is leading the second part of this project, which aims to design surface coatings that will achieve maximum sensor specificity in detecting multiple biological and chemical agents.
"We plan to develop glycan-based surface coatings to sense biological agents and polymer-based surface coatings to sense chemical agents," noted Adibi.
For the third thrust, which is being led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology electrical engineering associate professor Jongyoon Han, the researchers will develop optimal sample preparation and delivery techniques. Their goal is to maximize the biological or chemical particle concentration in the sample and limit detection time to minutes.
"In two years, we hope to have a lab-on-a-chip system that includes all of the sensing modalities with appropriate coatings and microfluidic delivery," said Adibi. "To show the feasibility of the technology, we plan to demonstrate the high sensitivity and high selectivity of each sensor individually and be able to use at least two of the sensing modalities simultaneously to detect two or three different chemical or biological agents."
In addition to those already mentioned, this center also includes Georgia Tech chemistry and biochemistry professor Mostafa El-Sayed, Georgia Tech materials science and engineering professor Kenneth Sandhage, Georgia Tech Nanotechnology Research Center senior research scientist David Gottfried, Emory University biochemistry chair Richard Cummings, University of California Santa Cruz electrical engineering professor Holger Schmidt, and Yale University electrical engineering associate professor Hong Tang.
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The five-year grant will be used to address key technical issues and advance the microneedle patch through a Phase I clinical trial. The grant will also be used to compare the effectiveness of traditional intramuscular injection of flu vaccine against administration of vaccine into the skin using microneedle patches. In animals, vaccination with dissolving microneedles has been shown to provide immunization better than vaccination with hypodermic needles.
"We believe that this technology will increase the number of people being vaccinated, especially among the most susceptible populations of children and the elderly," said Mark Prausnitz, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and the project's principal investigator. "If we can make it easier for people to be vaccinated and improve the effectiveness of the vaccine, we could significantly reduce the number of deaths caused every year by influenza."
Vaccine-delivery patches contain hundreds of micron-scale needles so small that they penetrate only the outer layers of skin. Their small size would allow vaccines to be administered without pain -- and could allow people to apply the patches themselves without visiting medical facilities.
While the ability to immunize large numbers of people without using trained medical personnel is a key advantage for the microneedle patch, the researchers have learned that administering the vaccine through the skin creates a different kind of immune response -- one that may protect vaccine recipients better.
"We have seen evidence that the vaccine works even better when administered to the skin because of the plethora of antigen presenting cells which reside there," said Ioanna Skountzou, co-principal investigator for the project and an assistant professor in Emory University's Department of Microbiology and Immunology. "This study will allow us to determine how we can optimize the vaccine to take advantage of those cells that are important in generating the body's immune response."
Among the issues to be addressed in the five-year study are:
• Developing an administration system that will be simple to use, intuitive and reliable. "Our goal is to make these patches suitable for self-administration, so that anybody could take a patch out of an envelope, put it on, and have it work with high reliability," Prausnitz said.
• Studying the long-term stability of vaccine used in the patches, and optimizing technology for incorporating it into the dissolving microneedles. "We need to put the vaccine into a dry form in this patch," said Prausnitz. "That will require different processing than is normally done with vaccines. We expect that this dry vaccine will provide enough stability that the patches can be stored without refrigeration."
• Evaluating the economic, regulatory, social and medical implications of a self-administered vaccine. PATH, an international nonprofit organization, will assist with this work, and will help strategically address any issues. "We will be assessing the barriers that may exist to introduction of a self-administered flu vaccine so we can anticipate those issues and develop possible solutions," said Darin Zehrung, leader of the vaccine delivery technologies group at PATH.
The funding will come from the Quantum program of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NBIB), which is part of the NIH. The initiative is designed to bring new medical technologies into clinical use.
While the funding focuses specifically on influenza vaccination, the lessons learned may advance other microneedle applications -- including vaccination efforts in developing countries where skilled medical personnel are limited and concerns about re-use of hypodermic needles are significant.
Additional design and development of the microneedle patch will largely be done at Georgia Tech, with vaccine development, immunological studies and the Phase I trial carried out at Emory University. The trial, to be conducted by the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center, is expected to take place during the final year of the grant, setting the stage for Phase II and Phase III clinical trials that would be required to obtain FDA approval.
Ultimately, the goal will be to produce an influenza vaccine delivery patch that could be made widely available. Prausnitz expects that will be done by an established company with the ability to manufacture and market the devices.
Microneedle drug and vaccine delivery systems have been under development at Georgia Tech and elsewhere since the 1990s. The technology got a significant boost in July of 2010 with publication of a study in Nature Medicine that showed mice vaccinated with dissolving microneedles were protected against influenza at least as well as mice immunized through traditional hypodermic needle injections.
The patches used in that study contained needles just 650 microns long, assembled into arrays of 100 needles. Pressed into the skin, the needles quickly dissolved into bodily fluids thanks to their hydrophilic polymer material, carrying the vaccine with them and leaving only a water-soluble backing. In contrast, use of hypodermic needles leaves the problem of "sharps" disposal.
Prausnitz hopes that the $10 million in NIH funding will help accelerate development of the microneedle patches to make them available for general use within five to ten years.
"This research will focus on optimizing the microneedle-based delivery of vaccines into the skin and understanding how this method affects immune responses both at the mucosal surfaces of the body and through the systemic response inside the body," added Skountzou. "Combined with the convenience of self-administration, painless application and absence of sharps waste, this novel immunization route could make the microneedle patch a powerful new weapon against infectious diseases."
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Among those representing the first black women to obtain degrees from Georgia Tech are Adesola Kujoure Nurudeen, Ph.D. in chemical engineering; Tawana Miller, first dual degree recipient to obtain a bachelor’s degree; and Grace Hammonds and Clemmie Whatley, the first recipients of master’s degrees in mathematics. Others honored included Alyce Martin Ware, retired publisher of the Atlanta Voice and Annie Bryant Smith, a retired educator from Kite, Ga., along with Bonnie Cameron, Yale University and New YorkUniversity School of Law; Shirley Marshall, Alabama State College and GeorgiaState University; and Anita Turner, Rust College and Atlanta University.
Georgia Tech is among the top producers of women and minority engineers. The recognition of these outstanding black women coincides with the 50th anniversary of the matriculation of black students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which celebrates the contributions that African-American students, staff and alumni have made to the Institute.
The Women’s Leadership Conference was held at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Student Center October 29-30.
]]>The study -- conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) -- examined factors that may have contributed to the striking state-by-state variation in U.S. H1N1 flu vaccination rates. The results of the study were revealed on Oct. 26 at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making.
"Health officials in states that reported lower H1N1 vaccination rates should learn from states with high vaccination rates during the 2009 event to increase their rates during the next pandemic or significant health emergency," said Julie Swann, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Swann also held a joint appointment at the CDC for six months last year through its Preparedness Modeling Unit.
CDC Immunization Services Division Branch Chief Pascale Wortley and Georgia Tech graduate student Carlo Davila Payan worked with Swann on this project.
Among American adults, H1N1 vaccine coverage ranged from a high of 34 percent in South Dakota to a low of nine percent in Mississippi. The research team found that states with higher past seasonal influenza vaccination coverage or use of other preventive health services in adults showed higher 2009 H1N1 vaccination rates.
"These findings suggest that an increase in health-seeking behavior may increase vaccination rates during a pandemic," noted Swann. "If we could encourage more adults to be vaccinated against flu each year, we might have more success in protecting them from the next pandemic."
Lower adult H1N1 vaccination coverage was observed in states where the disease circulated for a long period of time. That might have occurred because if someone in a household already had influenza, others in the household did not feel the need to get vaccinated, explained Swann.
In terms of supply chain factors, vaccination coverage was lower in states where more time was required to order allocated doses. The team noted that time lags in the system may be a function of efficiency or differences in system processes across states, suggesting monitoring and potential system design changes.
For high-risk adults -- those with underlying medical conditions that make them more susceptible to severe outcomes from influenza infection -- coverage ranged from 10 to 47 percent across the country. While the yearly acceptance of seasonal flu vaccination affected the likelihood of H1N1 vaccination for this group as well, the study found that states with a large percentage of individuals medically underserved by health professionals showed lower coverage for H1N1 immunization.
"This shows that the public health issues such as not having enough primary care providers or having high poverty in an area not only have an impact on daily primary care, but also emergency pandemic care as well," said Swann.
Among children aged six months to 17 years, vaccine coverage ranged from a high of 85 percent in Rhode Island to a low of 21 percent in Georgia. In this group, the researchers found that states with a higher percentage of children showed lower vaccination coverage. Conversely, a focus on school vaccination or a high number of doses sent to or administered in public access areas positively impacted the H1N1 vaccine coverage.
"Accounting for the relative size of a state's child population in allocating vaccine could improve vaccination coverage of children, in a scenario where children are targeted, especially if children of some ages require two doses of the vaccine, which was the case with the H1N1 vaccine," said Swann.
In terms of supply chain factors, vaccination for children was associated positively with the number of shipments per location. According to the research team, repeated distribution to the same sites could represent underlying system differences related to the efficiency of those states, the use of school vaccination programs or their ability to monitor vaccine use and redistribute to providers who were vaccinating quickly.
In this study, the researchers were able to explain more than 75 percent of the variation in state-specific vaccination coverage of adults or children with regression models that included only statistically significant variables.
Some of the state-specific data that the research team collected in their search for factors that influenced H1N1 vaccination coverage included:
• Demographic data -- e.g. race, education level and income
• State and government data -- e.g. number of counties and federal dollars per capita
• Health indicators -- e.g. seasonal flu vaccination rates and number of healthcare providers
• H1N1 surveys -- e.g. how the vaccine was allocated (by the state or locally) and the availability of doses in public settings
• CDC allocation and shipment data -- e.g. number of vaccination sites and peak week of Influenza-like illness activity
While the study found relevant factors, the researchers note that the recommendations of the study are based on data collected during a vaccine shortage situation and may not apply to a non-shortage situation. In addition, even though the team collected as much data as they could on state infrastructures and decision-making processes, complete data from every state was not available.
"Ultimately, the study suggests factors that public health agencies might consider monitoring in an emergency vaccination program with limited vaccine supply, and several other aspects public health systems could consider when designing systems," added Swann.
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]]>Putting this computing power into a small and energy-efficient package, and making it reliable and easier to program, are among the goals of the new DARPA Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) initiative. Georgia Tech researchers from three different units are supporting key components of this $100 million challenge, which will require development of revolutionary approaches not bound by existing computing paradigms.
If UHPC meets its ambitious eight-year goals, the new approaches and technologies it develops could redefine the way that computing systems are envisioned, designed and used.
"The opportunity we have is to go far beyond the current product roadmaps," said David Bader, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Computational Science and Engineering. "We really have the opportunity to change the industry and to design our applications with new computing architectures. For the first time in the history of computing, we will be able to work with a clean slate."
To attain the program's ambitious goals, DARPA funded four groups -- led by NVIDIA Corp., Intel Corp., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sandia National Laboratories -- to develop UHPC prototypes. A fifth group, led by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), will develop applications, benchmarking and metrics that will be used to drive UHPC system design considerations and support performance analysis of the developing system designs.
"Our team is developing a set of five difficult problems of a size and scope that the machines they are talking about should be able to accomplish," said Dan Campbell, a GTRI principal research engineer who is co-principal investigator of the benchmarking initiative. "Our challenge is picking the right problems and specifying them at the right level of abstraction to allow innovation and properly represent what the DoD will need in 2018."
The five problems highlight the unique computing needs of the U.S. military:
• Analysis of the vast streams of data originating with widespread sensor systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and new generations of radar systems. The data will be analyzed for nuggets of useful information in ways that are not possible today.
• A dynamic graph challenge, in which many entities interact to create a problem of "connecting the dots." That could mean analyzing relationships in social media to find possible adversaries, or understanding network traffic for cyber-security challenges.
• The decision tree, comparable to a chess game in which many possible interconnected options, each with complex implications, must be analyzed quickly. This could help field commanders or corporate CEOs make better decisions.
• Materials shock and hydrodynamics issues, challenges important to improving future generations of materials.
• Molecular dynamics simulations, which use high-performance computers to understand interactions between very large systems, such as protein folding.
"We need to be able to take in a lot more data and understand it a lot more thoroughly than we can now," said Mark Richards, a principal research engineer in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-principal investigator of the benchmarking team. "That might allow us to find adversaries we can't find now because we're unable to tease that information out of the data flow."
While the benefits of making such computing power widely available are obvious, how these machines will be designed, built and reliably operated is not.
"Meeting these very ambitious program goals will pose significant technical challenges," said Bader, who leads application development on the NVIDIA team and is part of the benchmarking group. "The technology roadmaps in such areas as interconnection networks, microprocessor design and technology fabrication will be pushed to their limits."
Meeting power limitations of just 57 kilowatts per rack -- the amount of electricity produced by a portable military generator -- may be the toughest among them. The fastest computer currently in operation requires seven megawatts of power.
"Reducing the power consumption means less energy per computation," noted Richards. "But as we lower the device voltage, we get closer to the physical noise. That will allow more errors due to the physics of the devices, and all kinds of things will have to be done to address that."
And the entire machine will have to fit into a 24-inch wide, 78-inch high and 40-inch deep cabinet.
But the physical implementation of the machines is just one part of the challenge, Bader noted. How people will work with them poses a perhaps more difficult challenge because it will require thinking about computers in a new way.
"Over the past 20 or 30 years, we've taken a single computing design and kept tweaking it through advances like miniaturizing parts," he said. "But we really haven't changed the global nature of how the machine works. To meet DARPA's power efficiency goals, we really will need to change the way we program the machine."
That also affects the humans who interact with these highly-parallel machines, which could have as many as a half-million separate threads operating at the same time. DARPA's initial goal is to build machines capable of petaflop speed -- a trillion operations per second -- which could lead into the next generation of exascale computers a thousand times more capable.
"We will need to find new ways of thinking about computers that will make it feasible for humans to comprehend what is going on inside," Campbell said. "It's a huge programming challenge."
To encourage collaboration in solving these complex problems, DARPA has embraced the idea of open innovation. It expects the organizations to work together on common critical topics, creating a collaborative environment to address the system challenges. New technology generated by the program -- believed to be today's largest DoD computing research initiative -- is likely to move quickly into industry.
"There is certainly an expectation among the companies that what they are doing in this project is going to change how we do mainstream computing," Bader said. "The technology transfer implications are certainly obvious."
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In this case, the mechanical energy comes from compressing a nanogenerator between two fingers, but it could also come from a heartbeat, the pounding of a hiker's shoe on a trail, the rustling of a shirt, or the vibration of a heavy machine. While these nanogenerators will never produce large amounts of electricity for conventional purposes, they could be used to power nanoscale and microscale devices -- and even to recharge pacemakers or iPods.
Wang's nanogenerators rely on the piezoelectric effect seen in crystalline materials such as zinc oxide, in which an electric charge potential is created when structures made from the material are flexed or compressed. By capturing and combining the charges from millions of these nanoscale zinc oxide wires, Wang and his research team can produce as much as three volts -- and up to 300 nanoamps.
"By simplifying our design, making it more robust and integrating the contributions from many more nanowires, we have successfully boosted the output of our nanogenerator enough to drive devices such as commercial liquid-crystal displays, light-emitting diodes and laser diodes," said Wang, a Regents' professor in Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering. "If we can sustain this rate of improvement, we will reach some true applications in healthcare devices, personal electronics, or environmental monitoring."
Recent improvements in the nanogenerators, including a simpler fabrication technique, were reported online last week in the journal Nano Letters. Earlier papers in the same journal and in Nature Communications reported other advances for the work, which has been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
"We are interested in very small devices that can be used in applications such as health care, environmental monitoring and personal electronics," said Wang. "How to power these devices is a critical issue."
The earliest zinc oxide nanogenerators used arrays of nanowires grown on a rigid substrate and topped with a metal electrode. Later versions embedded both ends of the nanowires in polymer and produced power by simple flexing. Regardless of the configuration, the devices required careful growth of the nanowire arrays and painstaking assembly.
In the latest paper, Wang and his group members Youfan Hu, Yan Zhang, Chen Xu, Guang Zhu and Zetang Li reported on much simpler fabrication techniques. First, they grew arrays of a new type of nanowire that has a conical shape. These wires were cut from their growth substrate and placed into an alcohol solution.
The solution containing the nanowires was then dripped onto a thin metal electrode and a sheet of flexible polymer film. After the alcohol was allowed to dry, another layer was created. Multiple nanowire/polymer layers were built up into a kind of composite, using a process that Wang believes could be scaled up to industrial production.
When flexed, these nanowire sandwiches -- which are about two centimeters by 1.5 centimeters -- generated enough power to drive a commercial display borrowed from a pocket calculator.
Wang says the nanogenerators are now close to producing enough current for a self-powered system that might monitor the environment for a toxic gas, for instance, then broadcast a warning. The system would include capacitors able to store up the small charges until enough power was available to send out a burst of data.
While even the current nanogenerator output remains below the level required for such devices as iPods or cardiac pacemakers, Wang believes those levels will be reached within three to five years. The current nanogenerator, he notes, is nearly 100 times more powerful than what his group had developed just a year ago.
Writing in a separate paper published in October in the journal Nature Communications, group members Sheng Xu, Benjamin J. Hansen and Wang reported on a new technique for fabricating piezoelectric nanowires from lead zirconate titanate -- also known as PZT. The material is already used industrially, but is difficult to grow because it requires temperatures of 650 degrees Celsius.
In the paper, Wang's team reported the first chemical epitaxial growth of vertically-aligned single-crystal nanowire arrays of PZT on a variety of conductive and non-conductive substrates. They used a process known as hydrothermal decomposition, which took place at just 230 degrees Celsius.
With a rectifying circuit to convert alternating current to direct current, the researchers used the PZT nanogenerators to power a commercial laser diode, demonstrating an alternative materials system for Wang's nanogenerator family. "This allows us the flexibility of choosing the best material and process for the given need, although the performance of PZT is not as good as zinc oxide for power generation," he explained.
And in another paper published in Nano Letters, Wang and group members Guang Zhu, Rusen Yang and Sihong Wang reported on yet another advance boosting nanogenerator output. Their approach, called "scalable sweeping printing," includes a two-step process of (1) transferring vertically-aligned zinc oxide nanowires to a polymer receiving substrate to form horizontal arrays and (2) applying parallel strip electrodes to connect all of the nanowires together.
Using a single layer of this structure, the researchers produced an open-circuit voltage of 2.03 volts and a peak output power density of approximately 11 milliwatts per cubic centimeter.
"From when we got started in 2005 until today, we have dramatically improved the output of our nanogenerators," Wang noted. "We are within the range of what's needed. If we can drive these small components, I believe we will be able to power small systems in the near future. In the next five years, I hope to see this move into application."
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]]>The launch of ATDC Gwinnett is a result of strategic collaboration between the two universities and Partnership Gwinnett, the community and economic development initiative led by the Gwinnett Chamber and more than 160 public and private partners.
"Creating new jobs and bringing innovation to market are top of mind for just about everyone," said Georgia Tech President G.P. "Bud" Peterson. "At Georgia Tech, we focus on innovation and serving as an economic engine for Georgia, and we are honored to collaborate with the University of Georgia and economic development organizations in Gwinnett County to expand our reach."
Peterson noted that 14 companies graduated from ATDC have located in Gwinnett County over the years, including Suniva -- the Southeast's first solar energy company. Using technology developed in Georgia Tech's University Center of Excellence in Photovoltaics, Suniva has been expanding its production and now has 150 workers at its manufacturing facility in Norcross.
He also noted the $12.7 billion economic impact of the University System of Georgia on the state, and the numerous awards won by ATDC over its 30-year history. "Last spring, ATDC was named by Forbes Magazine to its new list of the 10 technology incubators that are changing the world," Peterson said. "It is the only incubator in the Southeast to be included in the Forbes list."
Among the more than 300 companies currently in the ATDC program, 23 are located in Gwinnett County.
University of Georgia President Michael F. Adams emphasized the collaboration among institutions to facilitate economic development.
"This captures the spirit of two great institutions collaborating to provide meaningful economic development programs to enhance job and wealth creation in an important part of the state," he said. "We are very pleased to be working out of our Gwinnett campus with the ATDC and Georgia Tech on this endeavor."
Jim Maran, president & CEO of the Gwinnett Chamber, took note of how ATDC will contribute to the county's emphasis on technology development.
"Gwinnett has been working for years to bring a strong startup program to its community," he said. "The ATDC, together with Partnership Gwinnett's dedicated focus on startups and small business, will provide an even stronger environment to foster organic growth and the entrepreneurial foundation for which Gwinnett is already so well known."
ATDC operates two incubators in midtown Atlanta, and in a third in Savannah as part of Georgia Tech’s campus there. The University of Georgia Gwinnett campus offers graduate degrees, continuing education opportunities and services of its Small Business Development Center (SBDC) in Gwinnett County.
After brief remarks, the two presidents signed a memorandum of understanding describing the relationship and services of ATDC.
Stephen Fleming, a Georgia Tech vice president and executive director of the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute -- ATDC's parent organization -- reminded the audience that the goal of the new initiative was serving the people who grow new companies in Georgia.
"We're here to support the entrepreneurs that are building the companies that drive our economy," he said. "In just the last year, current ATDC member companies -- not including our graduate firms -- have raised $35 million in equity, brought in over $50 million in revenue and employ over 750 people in Georgia. These are jobs for our children, friends and neighbors who work, pay taxes and are part of the community."
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]]>That's one conclusion of the 2010 Georgia Manufacturing Survey, which also found that companies are preparing for post-recession growth, expanding export capabilities, addressing sustainability issues -- and still dealing with out-sourcing and in-sourcing. The survey, which included nearly 500 manufacturers, was conducted by Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, and Kennesaw State University, with support from the Georgia Department of Labor and accounting firm Habif, Arogeti & Wynne, LLP.
Georgia has approximately 10,000 manufacturers that provide nearly 350,000 jobs and account for 11 percent of the gross state product. Workers in manufacturing companies earn wages averaging nearly twice those of workers in retail companies.
The survey found a widening profitability gap between manufacturers that compete on the basis of innovation compared to those that use other competitive strategies. That gap has grown in each survey conducted since 2002.
"Companies that compete on the basis of innovation are much more profitable, pay higher wages and more likely to benefit from in-sourcing opportunities than firms that compete on low price," said Jan Youtie, the survey's director and a principal research associate in Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute. "Adoption of an innovation strategy can be useful to manufacturers regardless of industrial segment, and is especially important during difficult economic times."
As part of the survey, companies were asked to rank six competitive strategies for their importance to winning sales. More than half of the respondents mentioned "high quality," while approximately 20 percent chose "low price" or "adapting to customer needs." Fewer than 10 percent reported "innovation/new technology" as a primary competitive strategy.
Across all six strategies, innovation was associated with the highest mean return on sales: 14 percent, compared to just six percent for the low-price strategy. And those financial benefits extended to workers, whose annual salaries averaged $10,000 per year more at innovative manufacturers than at other companies.
The top five innovative tactics reported by respondents were (1) working with customers to create or design a product, process or other innovation, (2) signing a confidentiality agreement to access a new product or process, (3) working with suppliers to create or design a product, process or other innovation, (4) purchasing new equipment, and (5) conducting research and development activities in-house.
While manufacturers of technology products are most often associated with the strategy, innovative companies can be found in all industrial segments, said Philip Shapira, co-director of the survey and professor in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy.
"Many people think that innovation is something that has to be done in a lab, but our results show that innovation occurs more broadly, particularly as companies partner with customers and suppliers to take into account their needs for a new product or process," he explained. "While high technology companies tend to be innovative by their nature, innovation occurs across all segments, and every firm has opportunities to be innovative."
Companies often cite cost as a reason for not innovating, but Shapira noted that only 10 percent of companies take advantage of R&D tax credits; fewer still use investment tax credits. "While financial incentives can assist innovation, there is a greater need to build awareness and capabilities among more of the state's firms to undertake innovation," he said.
Though more than two-thirds of Georgia's manufacturers have cut jobs or lost sales in the recession, many of these companies are now looking toward the future with plans for locating new customers, boosting capital investment, expanding research and development and continuing to reduce costs.
"When we look at their plans, Georgia manufacturers are in an expansive mood, looking for new customers and getting ready for the next phase of economic growth," Youtie said.
The survey found that 70 percent of respondents were looking for new customers, 20 percent planned to expand capital investment, and 15 percent planned to increase expenditures on research and development. At the same time, 60 percent of respondents said they still planned to cut costs.
Another trend studied was growth in the number companies selling to international markets. More than half of the responding manufacturers said they were exporters -- and those manufacturers reported 50 percent higher profitability than non-exporters. Some 22 percent of respondents had increased their export sales since the last survey in 2008.
"We don't find much difference between exporting companies when comparing them by the amount they export," Youtie noted. "What seems to be important is the capability to export. We think there is some learning that takes place, and some capability that a company develops to become an exporter. That capability translates into improved performance across the board, in addition to creating new markets and different margins."
The survey also found that out-sourcing of work has leveled off, with approximately 16 percent of manufacturers affected by the loss of business in 2010. At the same time, the percentage of firms benefitting from in-sourcing -- movement of work to Georgia -- has grown to nearly 15 percent.
"Out-sourcing isn't going away, but it has stabilized," Youtie said. "In-sourcing appears to be growing, which creates opportunities for good manufacturers to benefit from consolidation of production from other U.S. facilities or even from overseas."
The study also looked at sustainability issues, and found that 60 percent of companies recycle and attempt to reduce waste -- one form of sustainability. However, just 11 percent of respondents had inventoried their carbon footprints or emissions, and fewer than five percent were using renewable energy.
The bottom line for manufacturers?
"The results of our survey can point manufacturers to a way forward for getting ready for the next phase," said Youtie. "Companies can develop innovation capabilities; they can look into exporting and they can collaborate more with suppliers and customers."
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]]>With more than 60 percent of the students and about half of the tenured and tenure-track faculty at the Georgia Tech, the College of Engineering is the largest program of its kind in the country. The committee is expected to meet for the first time later this month, where they will discuss the search process and receive a formal charge from the provost.
“The committee will be charged with articulating the qualities of leadership needed to implement the Institute’s new strategic plan; with screening and interviewing candidates; and with recommending finalists for the position,” Bras said. An executive search firm will be retained to help facilitate candidate identification and vetting.
Members of the search committee include:
Airplanes of this type -- called cruise-efficient, short take-off and landing (CESTOL) aircraft -- could use runways at much smaller airports, allowing expansion of commercial jet service to many more locations.
Enabling commercial jets to take off and land in ever-shorter distances is an ongoing goal for aircraft designers, and several approaches are under development. GTRI's research could result in a CESTOL aircraft comparable to a Boeing 737 in size, with a similar ability to carry 100 passengers at up to 600 miles per hour.
"To take off or land on a short runway, an aircraft needs to be able to fly very slowly near the runway," said Robert J. Englar, a principal research engineer who is leading the GTRI effort. "The problem is that flying slowly decreases the lift available for taking off and landing. What's needed is a powered-lift approach that combines low air speed with the increased lift capability required for successful CESTOL operation."
The work is part of the NASA Hybrid Wing-Body Low-Noise ESTOL Program. This four-year program, funded by NASA and led by California Polytechnic State University, includes GTRI and several other team members. GTRI's current work involves leadership of the aerodynamic and acoustic design for the program, along with development of large-scale models that will be used for wind-tunnel testing at government facilities.
At the heart of GTRI's powered-lift design is circulation control wing -- also known as blown-wing -- technology. In this type of system, high-speed jets of air are directed over the upper surface of the wings during take-off and landing, creating an unprecedented lift capability.
"Our design has to incorporate several trade-offs, yet the entire wing-engine powered-lift system has to perform all of its functions well," said Englar, who leads the aerodynamics portion of GTRI's work.
Specifically, he said, the new design must:
• Generate a high degree of lift on take-off and landing to allow short ground rolls and steep climb-out or approach flight angles;
• Yield lower drag at cruising speeds to achieve good fuel efficiency;
• Simplify the wing and downsize it for more-efficient cruise performance;
• Produce noise levels that are lower than a conventional passenger jet;
• Be less complex overall than conventional designs.
To satisfy those requirements, the GTRI team placed turbo-fan engines above the wing of the conceptual CESTOL aircraft, rather than below the wing as on most commercial aircraft, explained Rick Gaeta, a former GTRI senior research engineer who had led the acoustic portion of the research.
Over-the-wing placement is a key design element because it enables very high lift while still providing the engine thrust necessary for take-off and high-speed level flight. It also offers important reduced-noise benefits.
Based on this engine placement, the team's powered-lift design maximizes performance using several interrelated elements:
Novel Blown-Wing Design
In most fixed-wing aircraft, Englar explains, the upper surface of the wing is curved. That curvature forces air to flow faster over the top of the wing, which reduces pressure on the upper surface of the wing, increasing wing lift. Mechanical flaps increase aft curvature, enlarging the wing during take-off and landing, and augmenting lift by deflecting the ambient wind stream flowing over the wing.
But the lift generated by conventional wings isn't sufficient for the low flight speeds and steep ascents and descents required by CESTOL aircraft. The essential element in such extreme lift is circulation control / blown-wing technology. This approach can far exceed mechanical flaps in achieving high lift coefficient (a lift coefficient is a number that relates an aircraft's total lift to its wing area and flight speed).
The GTRI team has designed a blown wing that is relatively simple mechanically. Unlike a conventional wing, which uses multiple flap elements, GTRI's design uses only one small, relatively simple flap.
However, that single wing flap is used in tandem with a novel element based on circulation-control technology. A narrow slot, capable of pneumatically blowing out air, runs along the entire trailing edge of each wing, just above the flap. This system is powered by its own compressed air source located inside the wing.
The wing flap, which forms a sharp trailing edge during level flight to reduce drag, rotates downward on take-off and landing. When thus rotated, it forms a highly curved aft surface; then air from the slot can be blown over that curved surface to generate high lift.
This procedure, called flap-blowing, performs two functions: it increases air velocity over the top of the wing, and it deflects the ambient wind stream downward so that it curls under the wing. The combined forces generate a lift coefficient that can be two to four times higher than a conventional mechanical flap.
Entraining Jet Exhaust
To achieve even higher lift than flap-blowing alone, the GTRI design takes advantage of an additional phenomenon -- the interaction between the air coming from the wing slot and the exhaust of the plane's over-the-wing jet engines.
During take-off and landing, air flow from the slot interacts with the engine exhaust and pulls this powerful exhaust blast down onto the wing. This process, called entraining the exhaust, greatly increases the velocity of the air passing over the wing and results in highly augmented upward suction and lift.
"This strategy allows an aircraft to be flying at a very low speed, while the wing is seeing much higher relative wind speeds on its curved upper surface due to this blowing and thrust-entraining combination," Englar said. "We have measured lift coefficients between 8.0 and 10.0 on these pneumatic powered-lift wings at a level flight condition during testing. The normal lift coefficient on a conventional wing at a similar flight condition is less than 1.0."
Reduced Noise
The benefit of an above-the-wing engine configuration is not limited to providing good short takeoff and landing (STOL) performance. It also provides two potential sources of noise reduction: engine-noise shielding and reduced noise footprint in the community.
Gaeta explains the noise-shielding issue by noting that today's commercial jets have their engines under the wings. During take-off and approach, a great deal of noise from these jets propagates downward unimpeded, while engine sound that does travel upward bounces off the wing and then reflects downward.
"By putting the noise source above the wing, there is the potential to shield the ground from engine noise, at least partially," Gaeta said.
The critical design choice in noise shielding involves where to place the engine relative to the wing, he explained. Closer to the wing helps take-off and landing performance, but it increases noise due to viscous rubbing of the jet exhaust stream acting along the wing upper surface. Further away from the wing is better from a noise perspective, but not as effective for take-off and landing performance.
Finally, to the extent that placing the engine above the wing can shield exhaust noise, the engine needs to be placed as far forward as possible because maximum jet noise occurs at the exhaust exit, Gaeta said. Moreover, all of these design choices must not detract from the crucial issue of cruise performance.
The very nature of a STOL flight trajectory -- steep takeoff and approach angles -- offers another potential noise benefit. This trajectory keeps much of the offending noise closer to the airport environs.
Explained Gaeta: "By virtue of steeper takeoff and approach angles, the STOL aircraft can potentially keep its most offending noise within the airport boundary because it is farther from the ground when it passes over communities."
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]]>Sickle cell disease is a genetic condition present at birth that affects more than 70,000 Americans. It involves a single altered gene that produces abnormal hemoglobin -- the protein that carries oxygen in the blood. In sickle cell disease, red blood cells become hard, sticky and "C" shaped. Sickle cells die early, which causes a constant shortage of red blood cells. The abnormal cells also clog the flow in small blood vessels, causing chronic pain and other serious problems such as infections and acute chest syndrome.
"Even though researchers know sickle cell disease is caused by a single A to T mutation in the beta-globin gene, there is no widely available cure," said center director Gang Bao, the Robert A. Milton Chair in Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "By directly and precisely fixing the single mutation, we hope to reduce or eliminate the sickle cell population in an individual's blood stream and replace the sickle cells with healthy red blood cells."
The center is one of eight NIH Nanomedicine Development Centers established in 2005 and 2006, a key initiative of the NIH's long-term nanomedicine research goals. The centers have highly multidisciplinary scientific teams that include biologists, physicians, mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists. Through an intense competition, the NIH selected four centers for second phase funding, including the one led by Georgia Tech.
In addition to experts in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, researchers from Medical College of Georgia, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York University Medical Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Harvard University are also members of the center.
The gene correction approach proposed by the research team to treat sickle cell disease involves delivering engineered zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) -- genetic scissors that cut DNA at a specific site -- and DNA correction templates into the nuclei of hematopoietic stem cells isolated from the bone marrow of individuals with sickle cell disease.
The researchers chose hematopoietic stem cells because they are the precursors of all blood cells, including the cells rendered dysfunctional in sickle cell patients. Hematopoietic stem cells possess such potent regenerative potential that transplantation of even a single hematopoietic stem cell is sufficient to rebuild the entire blood system of an organism.
The researchers plan to engineer and optimize the ZFN proteins so they will induce a double-strand break in the DNA near the sickle cell disease mutation, thereby activating the gene for correction. The broken DNA ends will enter the homologous recombination repair pathway, which will use the genetic information provided by the donor template -- rather than the original flawed information -- to correct the mutation. When the gene-corrected hematopoietic stem cells are injected back in the body, they will produce healthy red blood cells to replace the sickle cells.
"This approach represents a significant paradigm shift in current gene targeting and gene therapy technology in that no viral-based vector or foreign DNA is used," explained Bao, who is also a Georgia Tech College of Engineering Distinguished Professor. "We think it's a promising approach because we do not need to fix all of the mutations in all cells; we only need to greatly reduce the sickle cell population by replacing those cells with healthy red blood cells."
There are significant challenges in achieving the goals of the center, including the need to dramatically increase the rate of homologous recombination-mediated gene correction, improve the activity and specificity of ZFNs to maximize gene correction efficiency and minimize potentially harmful off-target effects, deliver the components necessary for gene correction to hematopoietic stem cells with high efficiency and throughput, avoid unwanted genomic rearrangements and optimize the engraftment of ZFN-modified hematopoietic stem cells.
To increase the efficiency of gene correction in the hematopoietic stem cells, the proposed gene correction approach will require a shift in repair pathway choice from non-homologous end joining toward homologous recombination. To accomplish this, the researchers plan to use methods they developed in the last four years to visualize the assembly of repair complexes at double-strand break sites and develop interventions to shift pathway choice toward homologous recombination.
To control ZFN activity so that unwanted off-target effects or gene rearrangements can be minimized or avoided, the researchers plan to refine and optimize the design and production of the proteins and develop photoactivatable proteins for better temporal control of ZFN activity. In addition, by investigating the fate and dynamics of the engineered proteins and donor template in living cells, and the incidence and biological effects of undesired mutations and gene rearrangements, the research team will further improve the process.
With novel imaging probes and methods already developed in the Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines, the researchers will be able to observe and systematically optimize each step in the gene correction process. Once that is accomplished, the research team will demonstrate the gene correction approach in a mouse model of sickle cell disease. Their goal is to demonstrate that gene-corrected cells can reconstitute the mouse hematopoietic system and reverse the sickle cell disease phenotype, according to Bao.
"We want to focus on sickle cell disease to demonstrate this approach, but if we are successful, the same approach can be adopted to treat some of the other 6,000 estimated single gene disorders in the world today, such as cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs," noted Bao.
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]]>
Existing recycling processes use a combination of two inorganic acids known as "aqua regia" to dissolve noble metals, a class of materials that includes platinum, palladium, gold and silver. But because the metals are often dissolved together, impurities introduced in the recycling process may harm the efficiency of catalysts produced from the recycled materials. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new organic solvent process that may help address the problem -- and open up new possibilities for using these metals in cancer therapeutics, microelectronics and other applications.
The new Georgia Tech solvent system uses a combination of two chemicals -- thionyl chloride and a variety of organic reagents such as pyridine, N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), pyrimidine or imidazole. The concentrations can be adjusted to preferentially dissolve gold or palladium, and more importantly, no combination of the organic chemicals dissolves platinum. This ability to preferentially dissolve noble metals creates a customized system that provides a high level of control over the process.
"We need to be able to selectively dissolve these noble metals to ensure their purity in a variety of important applications," said C.P. Wong, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. "Though we don’t fully understand how it works yet, we believe this system opens a lot of new possibilities for using these metals."
A paper describing the research was published recently in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Catalyst systems that make use of more than one metal, such as palladium with a gold core, are becoming more widely used in industrial processes. To recycle those, the new solvent system -- dubbed "organic aqua regia" -- could first use a combination of thionyl chloride and DMF to dissolve out the gold, leaving hollow palladium spheres. Then the palladium spheres could be dissolved using a different combination.
So far, the researchers have demonstrated that the solvent system can selectively dissolve gold and palladium from a mixture of gold, palladium and platinum. They have also used it to remove gold from a mixture of gold and palladium.
Beyond recycling, the new solvent system could also provide new ways of producing nanometer-scale cancer chemotherapy agents that involve these metals. And the new solvent approach could have important implications for the electronics industry, which uses noble metals that must often be removed after specific processing steps. Beyond selectivity, the new approach also offers other advantages for electronics manufacturing -- no potentially harmful contamination is left behind and processing is done under mild conditions.
"In semiconductor production, people want to avoid having a metal catalyst remaining in devices, but in many cases, they cannot use existing water-based processes because these can damage the semiconductor oxides and introduce contamination with free ions in the aqueous solution," explained Wei Lin, a graduate research assistant in Wong's laboratory. "Use of this organic system avoids the problem of moisture."
Use of the selective process could also facilitate recycling of noble metals used in electronics manufacturing. Wire-bonding, metallization and interconnect processes currently use noble metals.
Noble metals are also the foundation for widely-used chemotherapy agents, but the chemistry of synthesizing them involves a complex process of surfactants and precursors. Wong believes the new Georgia Tech solvent process may allow creation of novel compounds that could offer improved therapeutic effects.
"We hope this will open up some new ways of making these important pharmaceutical compounds as well as novel gold and palladium catalytic systems," he said.
Lin discovered the new solvent system by accident in 2007 while using thionyl chloride in an unrelated project that involved bonding carbon nanotubes to a gold substrate. "I left my sample in the solution and went to lunch," he recalled. "Then I received a couple of phone calls and the sample stayed in the solution for too long. When I got it out, the gold was gone."
The researchers were intrigued by the discovery and pursued an explanation as they had time over the past three years. They tested other reagents mixed with the thionyl chloride, and learned the proportions necessary for selective dissolution of palladium and gold. They worked with other researchers at Georgia Tech, including nanotechnology pioneer Zhong Lin Wang, to develop a fundamental understanding of the process -- research that is continuing.
The chemicals used by the Georgia Tech research team are well known in organic chemistry, and are used today in polymer synthesis. Beyond their selectivity, the new solvent system is more environmentally friendly than traditional aqua regia -- which is a combination of concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids -- and can operate at mild conditions. Potential disadvantages compared to traditional aqua regia include higher costs and slower dissolution rates.
"We have opened up a new approach to noble metals using organic chemistry," Wong added. "We don't yet thoroughly understand the mechanism by which this works, but we hope to develop a more complete understanding that may lead to additional applications."
In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Rong-Wei Zhang, Seung-Soon Jang and Jung-Il Hong, all from the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.
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]]>These so-called "drive-by downloads" signal a shift away from using spam and malicious e-mail attachments to infect computers. Approximately 560,000 websites -- and 5.5 million Web pages on those sites -- were infected with malware during the fourth quarter of 2009.
A new tool that eliminates drive-by download threats has been developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and California-based SRI International. BLADE -- short for Block All Drive-By Download Exploits -- is browser-independent and designed to eliminate all drive-by malware installation threats. Details about BLADE were presented Oct. 6 at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
"By simply visiting a website, malware can be silently installed on a computer to steal a user's identity and other personal information, launch denial-of-service attacks, or participate in botnet activity," said Wenke Lee, a professor in the Georgia Tech's School of Computer Science. "BLADE is an effective countermeasure against all forms of drive-by download malware installs because it is vulnerability and exploit agnostic."
The BLADE development team includes Lee, Georgia Tech graduate student Long Lu, and Vinod Yegneswaran and Phillip Porras from SRI International. Funding for the BLADE tool was provided by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Army Research Office and U.S. Office of Naval Research.
To see a demonstration of how BLADE defends against drive-by downloads, watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9emHejh8hWE.
The researchers evaluated the tool on multiple versions and configurations of Internet Explorer and Firefox. BLADE successfully blocked all drive-by malware installation attempts from the more than 1,900 malicious websites tested. The software produced no false positives and required minimal resources from the computer. Major antivirus software programs caught less than 30 percent of the more than 7,000 drive-by download attempts from the same websites.
"BLADE monitors and analyzes everything that is downloaded to a user's hard drive to cross-check whether the user authorized the computer to open, run or store the file on the hard drive. If the answer is no to these questions, BLADE stops the program from installing or running and removes it from the hard drive," explained Lu.
Because drive-by downloads bypass the prompts users typically receive when a browser is downloading an unsupported file type, BLADE tracks how users interact with their browsers to distinguish downloads that received user authorization from those that do not. To do this, the tool captures on-screen consent-to-download dialog boxes and tracks the user's physical interactions with these windows. In addition, all downloads are saved to a secure zone on a user's hard drive so that BLADE can assess the content and prevent any malicious software from executing.
"Other research groups have tried to stop drive-by downloads, but they typically build a system that defends against a subset of the threats," explained Lee. "We identified the one point that all drive-by downloads have to pass through -- downloading and executing a file on the computer -- and we decided to use that as our choke point to prevent the installs."
The BLADE testing showed that the applications most frequently targeted by drive-by download exploits included Adobe Reader, Sun Java and Adobe Flash -- with Adobe Reader attracting almost three times as many attempts as the other programs. Computers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 became infected by more drive-by-downloads than those using versions 7 or 8, while Firefox 3 had a lower browser infection rate than all versions of Internet Explorer. Among the more than 1,900 active malicious websites tested, the Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States were the top three countries serving active drive-by download exploits.
Legitimate Web addresses that should be allowed to download content to a user's computer without explicit permission, such as a browser or plug-in auto-updates, can be easily white-listed by the user so that their functionality is not affected by BLADE.
The researchers have also developed countermeasures so that malware publishers cannot circumvent BLADE by installing the malware outside the secure zone or executing it while it is being quarantined.
While BLADE is highly successful in thwarting drive-by download attempts, the development team admits that BLADE will not prevent social engineering attacks. Internet users are still the weakest link in the security chain, they note.
"BLADE requires a user's browser to be configured to require explicit consent before executable files are downloaded, so if this option is disabled by the user, then BLADE will not be able to protect that user's Web surfing activities," added Lee.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. CNS-0716570, U.S. Army under Award No. W911NF-06-1-0316 and U.S. Navy under Award No. N00014-09-1-1042. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the principal investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF, U.S. Army or U.S. Navy.
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The 2010 physics prize was awarded for producing, isolating, identifying and characterizing graphene, a single atomic layer of carbon whose unique properties make the material attractive for electronic applications. Scientists at the University of Manchester were recognized for their work on graphene sheets peeled from blocks of graphite.
The work of the Georgia Tech group, headed by Professor Walt de Heer in the Georgia Tech School of Physics, was recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in its scientific background document on the physics prize. De Heer's group pioneered epitaxial techniques for growing large-scale graphene sheets by heating wafers of silicon carbide to drive off the silicon, leaving a thin layer of graphene.
The technique, which is now being used by research groups at companies such as IBM, has practical applications in large-scale production of electronic devices. On Oct. 3, the group published a paper in the journal Nature Nanotechnology describing a new technique used to produce an array of 10,000 graphene transistors.
"We believe that our technique, or one very much like it, will ultimately be used to manufacture future generations of graphene-based electronic devices," said de Heer. "Using techniques that are suitable for scaling up for mass production, we can grow graphene in the patterns that we need for electronic devices."
The Georgia Tech group holds a patent, filed in 2003, on fabricating electronic devices from these graphene layers.
Georgia Tech is home to a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and including collaborators from the University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Riverside and University of Michigan. The foundation focus of the center is research and development of epitaxial graphene.
"The unique properties of graphene portend considerable promise for future electronic and optical devices," said Dennis Hess, the center's director. "If graphene is to serve as a viable successor to silicon-based microelectronic devices and circuits, large scale production on a suitable substrate is required. Proof of concept of this approach has already been demonstrated by the fabrication of a 10,000 epitaxial graphene transistor array by Walt de Heer and his collaborators. This achievement is a significant advance toward realizing carbon-based electronics for the 21st century."
The Georgia Tech team also collaborates with researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on characterizing the unique properties of graphene. That work has led to several recent important papers, in journals such as Science and Nature Physics. The latter described for the first time how the orbits of electrons are distributed spatially by magnetic fields applied to layers of epitaxial graphene.
On Oct. 3 in the advance online publication of the journal Nature Nanotechnology, de Heer and collaborators described the development of a new "templated growth" technique for fabricating nanometer-scale graphene devices. The method addresses what had been a significant obstacle to the use of this promising material in future generations of high-performance electronic devices.
The technique involves etching patterns into the silicon carbide surfaces on which epitaxial graphene is grown. The patterns serve as templates directing the growth of graphene structures, allowing the formation of nanoribbons of specific widths without the use of e-beams or other destructive cutting techniques. Templated nanoribbon growth addresses the edge roughness that causes electron scattering.
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]]>Thefollowing Georgia Tech Ph.D. students will receive the fellowship, whichincludes a cash award (tuition, fees and stipend) and an introduction to an Intelmentor:
Recipientswere recently invited to the Ph.D. Fellowship forum at Intel where they met toptechnical leaders from across the country, as well as other Intel Fellows andsenior principal engineers.
Accordingto Intel, the Ph.D. Fellowship Program is very competitive, with students pre-selectedby their universities before applying for the award. Applicants are reviewed byIntel Fellows and senior technologists who choose the winners.
]]>Delivering short strands of RNA into cells has become a popular research area because of its potential therapeutic applications, but how to deliver them into targeted cells in a living organism has been an obstacle.
In the Oct. 10 advance online edition of the journal Nature Materials, researchers describe how they encapsulated short pieces of RNA into engineered particles called thioketal nanoparticles and orally delivered the genetic material directly to the inflamed intestines of animals. The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
"The thioketal nanoparticles we designed are stable in both acids and bases and only break open to release the pieces of RNA in the presence of reactive oxygen species, which are found in and around inflamed tissue in the gastrointestinal tract of individuals with inflammatory bowel diseases," said Niren Murthy, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
This work was done in collaboration with Emory University Division of Digestive Diseases professor Shanthi Sitaraman, associate professor Didier Merlin and postdoctoral fellow Guillaume Dalmasso.
The thioketal nanoparticles protect the small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) from the harsh environment of the gastrointestinal tract and target them directly to the inflamed intestinal tissues. This localized approach is necessary because siRNAs can cause major side effects if injected systemically.
In the paper, the thioketal nanoparticles were formulated from a new polymer -- poly-(1,4-phenyleneacetone dimethylene thioketal) (PPADT) -- and engineered to have a diameter of approximately 600 nanometers for optimal oral delivery.
For their experiments, the researchers used a mouse model of ulcerative colitis -- a debilitating inflammatory bowel disease in which the digestive tract becomes inflamed, causing severe diarrhea and abdominal pain that can lead to life-threatening complications.
The researchers orally administered thioketal nanoparticles loaded with siRNA that inhibits an inflammation-promoting cytokine called tumor necrosis factor - alpha (TNF-α). The nanoparticles traveled directly to the mouse colons where reactive oxygen species were being produced in excess and decreased the cytokine production levels there.
Tissue samples from the colons treated with siRNA delivered by these thioketal nanoparticles exhibited intact epitheliums, well-defined fingerlike "crypt" structures and lower levels of inflammation -- signs that the colon was protected against ulcerative colitis.
"Since ulcerative colitis is restricted to the colon, these results confirm that the siRNA-loaded thioketal nanoparticles remain stable in non-inflamed regions of the gastrointestinal tract while targeting siRNA to inflamed intestinal tissues," explained the paper's lead author Scott Wilson, a graduate student in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.
The paper showed that thioketal nanoparticles have the chemical and physical properties needed to overcome the obstacles of gastrointestinal fluids, intestinal mucosa and cellular barriers to provide therapy to inflamed intestinal tissues, he added.
The researchers are currently working on increasing the degradation rate of the nanoparticles and enhancing their reactivity with reactive oxygen species. The team also plans to conduct a biodistribution study to detail how the nanoparticles travel through the body.
"Polymer toxicity is something we'll have to investigate further, but during this study we discovered that thioketal nanoparticles loaded with siRNA have a cell toxicity profile similar to nanoparticles formulated from the FDA-approved material poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA)," added Murthy.
In the future, thioketal nanoparticles may become a significant player in the treatment of numerous gastrointestinal diseases linked to intestinal inflammation, including gastrointestinal cancers, inflammatory bowel diseases and viral infections, according to Murthy.
This project is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Award Nos. EEC-9731643 and NSF Career BES-0546962) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Award Nos. UO1 HL80711-01, R21 EB006418, RO1 HL096796-01, RO1 DK071594, R01 DK064711 and T32 GM08433). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF or NIH.
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]]>A finalist in theprosthetics/orthotics/controls category, Ghovanloo and his team from Georgia Techreceived the highest number of votes for their YouTube video about their workon the Tongue Drive System, an assistive technology that enablesindividuals with high-level spinal cord injuries to maneuver a poweredwheelchair or control a mouse cursor using simple tongue movements. Theresearch team is currently preparing for their second round of clinical trialson the Tongue Drive System, which will be conducted at the Shepherd Center inAtlanta and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
An assistantprofessor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ghovanloo specializesin biomedical device development. His maingoal for participating in this competition was to promote the use of the mostadvanced microelectronics technologies in the field of assistive devices andrehabilitation engineering. The Tongue Drive System utilizes the latest inmagnetic sensing technology combined with ultra-low power radio frequencytransceivers, advanced signal processing algorithms, and smartphones.
“Sometimes when you ask our studentsabout assistive devices, the first things that come to their minds are theirgrandma’s cane or the old manual wheelchair that they once saw at a hospital,” Ghovanloosaid. “The Tongue Drive System draws a totally different picture in thestudents’ minds about assistive technologies and their associated field as awhole. Whenever I get a chance, I never hesitate to remind my students thatthere are very few other areas in engineering in which they can leave such agreat impact in a lives of a group of human beings.”
The da Vinci Awards is a prestigiousinternational forum that recognizes the latest developments and research inadaptive and assistive technologies that enable equal access and opportunityfor all people, regardless of ability. Finalists representing the U.S., Canada,and Denmark were chosen from entries received from around the world. The awardswere created by and benefit the National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society'sMichigan Chapter.
The Tongue Drive System video may beviewed at http://bit.ly/tonguedrive.
]]>The technique involves etching patterns into the silicon carbide surfaces on which epitaxial graphene is grown. The patterns serve as templates directing the growth of graphene structures, allowing the formation of nanoribbons of specific widths without the use of e-beams or other destructive cutting techniques. Graphene nanoribbons produced with these templates have smooth edges that avoid electron-scattering problems.
"Using this approach, we can make very narrow ribbons of interconnected graphene without the rough edges," said Walt de Heer, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. "Anything that can be done to make small structures without having to cut them is going to be useful to the development of graphene electronics because if the edges are too rough, electrons passing through the ribbons scatter against the edges and reduce the desirable properties of graphene."
The new technique has been used to fabricate an array of 10,000 top-gated graphene transistors on a 0.24 square centimeter chip – believed to be the largest density of graphene devices reported so far.
The research was reported Oct. 3 in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery and Exploration (INDEX).
In creating their graphene nanostructures, De Heer and his research team first use conventional microelectronics techniques to etch tiny "steps" – or contours – into a silicon carbide wafer. They then heat the contoured wafer to approximately 1,500 degrees Celsius, which initiates melting that polishes any rough edges left by the etching process.
They then use established techniques for growing graphene from silicon carbide by driving off the silicon atoms from the surface. Instead of producing a consistent layer of graphene one atom thick across the surface of the wafer, however, the researchers limit the heating time so that graphene grows only on the edges of the contours.
To do this, they take advantage of the fact that graphene grows more rapidly on certain facets of the silicon carbide crystal than on others. The width of the resulting nanoribbons is proportional to the depth of the contour, providing a mechanism for precisely controlling the nanoribbons. To form complex graphene structures, multiple etching steps can be carried out to create a complex template, de Heer explained.
"By using the silicon carbide to provide the template, we can grow graphene in exactly the sizes and shapes that we want," he said. "Cutting steps of various depths allows us to create graphene structures that are interconnected in the way we want them to be."
In nanometer-scale graphene ribbons, quantum confinement makes the material behave as a semiconductor suitable for creation of electronic devices. But in ribbons a micron or more wide, the material acts as a conductor. Controlling the depth of the silicon carbide template allows the researchers to create these different structures simultaneously, using the same growth process.
"The same material can be either a conductor or a semiconductor depending on its shape," noted de Heer, who is also a faculty member in Georgia Tech’s National Science Foundation-supported Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). "One of the major advantages of graphene electronics is to make the device leads and the semiconducting ribbons from the same material. That's important to avoid electrical resistance that builds up at junctions between different materials."
After formation of the nanoribbons – which can be as narrow as 40 nanometers – the researchers apply a dielectric material and metal gate to construct field-effect transistors. While successful fabrication of high-quality transistors demonstrates graphene's viability as an electronic material, de Heer sees them as only the first step in what could be done with the material.
"When we manage to make devices well on the nanoscale, we can then move on to make much smaller and finer structures that will go beyond conventional transistors to open up the possibility for more sophisticated devices that use electrons more like light than particles," he said. "If we can factor quantum mechanical features into electronics, that is going to open up a lot of new possibilities."
De Heer and his research team are now working to create smaller structures, and to integrate the graphene devices with silicon. The researchers are also working to improve the field-effect transistors with thinner dielectric materials.
Ultimately, graphene may be the basis for a generation of high-performance devices that will take advantage of the material's unique properties in applications where the higher cost can be justified. Silicon will continue to be used in applications that don't require such high performance, de Heer said.
"This is another step showing that our method of working with epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide is the right approach and the one that will probably be used for making graphene electronics," he added. "This is a significant new step toward electronics manufacturing with graphene."
In addition to those already mentioned, the research has involved M. Sprinkle, M. Ruan, Y Hu, J. Hankinson, M. Rubio-Roy, B. Zhang, X. Wu and C. Berger.
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One long-considered solution is the use of lytic enzymes, which attack bacteria by piercing their cell walls. Lytic enzymes are proteins that are naturally present in viruses, bacteria and in body fluids such as tears, saliva and mucus. However, until now, largely ad-hoc methods have been used to calculate the enzymes' killing abilities.
New research published October 4, 2010 in IOP Publishing’s Physical Biology by scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland describes a pioneering method that can identify lytic enzymes for optimum bacteria killing characteristics.
In 1923, five years before discovering penicillin and laying the path for the development of antibiotics, Alexander Fleming had already noticed that a substance in mucus samples, lytic enzymes, could kill bacteria.
However, the success of antibiotics left the development of this finding in the shadows.
With the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, partially a result of antibiotics being a 'one-size-fits-all' therapy, Fleming's early discovery has been reinvigorated and lytic enzymes are back in the spotlight. Encouragingly, most lytic enzymes kill only a limited range of bacteria, unlike antibiotics, which allows researchers to target superbugs while potentially leaving beneficial bacteria intact.
To identify the bacteria-killing characteristics of lytic enzymes, Georgia Tech School of Biology assistant professor Joshua Weitz and graduate student Gabriel Mitchell teamed up with Daniel Nelson, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, to identify, on a microscopic scale, the rate at which these enzymes pierce cell walls leading to bacterial death.
The piercing of cell walls can be fatal to bacteria because of a bacterium's internal pressure; the piercing is analogous to removing the wire on a shaken-up bottle of champagne.
"While lytic enzymes and their associated antimicrobial activity have been studied for decades, their use as therapeutics has only recently been investigated in detail," explained Weitz. "We measured the amount of light passing through a bacterial solution, in much the same way as astrophysicists use light measurements for far-away galaxies: to infer processes at a far different scale based on interpreting the information contained in the light coming from them."
By measuring how lytic enzymes chemically clear a cloudy solution of living bacteria, the team was able to predict the cell level processes underlying bacterial death. In doing so, the researchers used the mathematical theory of inverse problems to overcome technical challenges in quantifying, for the first time, the microscopic killing properties of lytic enzymes.
The team was also able to estimate the extent to which genetically identical bacteria may be differentially susceptible to death via lytic enzymes.
"We believe we have taken the first step down a road which will allow us to identify more enzymes, choose those with the best activity, and engineer even higher activity, to develop an effective therapy against a wide range of dangerous superbugs," added Weitz.
The researchers hope their quest will result in "push button technology" to hasten the development of engineered enzymes for clinical use.
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Lieberman, one of four panelistsparticipating in the briefing, will focus her remarks on the research interestsof her lab, the value of that research and why Congress should care.
“I also plan to discuss those who doresearch, like students and postdocs, and how all of this activity helps informmy in-class teaching, along with working towards our nation's goals of havingan educated, skilled workforce,” Lieberman said.
Lieberman, one of two early-stageinvestigators on the panel, was selected to participate in the October 7briefing after being named a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences. She will bejoined by panelists from Boston University, John Hopkins University and theGeoffrey Beene Gives Back Alzheimer’s Initiative.
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A detailed understanding of the interactions inside cells -- where macromolecules can occupy as much as 40 percent of the available space -- could provide important information to the developers of therapeutic drugs and lead to a better understanding of how disease states develop. Ultimately, researchers hope to have a complete simulation of these cellular processes to help them understand a range of biological issues, from metabolism to cell division.
Sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the research was reported Oct. 11 in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We found that hydrodynamics -- perturbation of the solvent with eddies and wakes created by molecules in this crowded environment -- may be the dominant effect in intermolecular dynamics within cells," said Jeffrey Skolnick, director of the Center for the Study of Systems Biology at Georgia Tech. "The correlations created between molecules through this process have a lot of functional consequences for how collections of these molecules interact."
The motion of macromolecules within cells is normally random, occurring through Brownian motion that causes the molecules to diffuse through the cellular cytoplasm, which has viscosity similar to that of water. Researchers have studied the movement of fluorescent protein molecules injected into E. coli cells, but don’t yet understand the forces affecting that motion. However, the measurements show that the fluorescent molecules move about 15 times more slowly inside the cell than they do in a test tube.
Using simulations that allowed them to adjust the impacts of natural forces, Skolnick and collaborator Tadashi Ando analyzed the activity of 15 different molecules in a portion -- just one one-thousandth -- of an E. coli cell. By altering those simulated forces in the computer, they attempted to determine what may cause the reduction in diffusion speed.
The most logical reason for that slowed movement is the crowded nature of cells, but Skolnick and Ando found that bumping into other molecules accounted for only a portion of the reduced molecular diffusion.
"If you are in a crowded room and want to walk to the bar, the other people slow you down," explained Skolnick, who is Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar in computational systems biology. "In biological processes, if there are a lot of large molecules in the way, these protein molecules can't move as quickly. But our model showed that this crowding accounted for only about a third of the reduction measured experimentally."
The researchers also studied the hydrodynamic forces exerted by molecules on one another. These forces are comparable to the way in which the wake of a large boat on a lake affects smaller boats, or how a swimming whale might effect a school of small fish. The interaction causes correlated motion, which was known to be important in the movement of polymers and colloids studied earlier by chemists.
By turning off the other forces at work in their silicon world, the Georgia Tech researchers found that this correlated motion accounted for much more of the diffusion reduction than did the crowding.
"The hydrodynamic interactions create cooperative motion between the molecules," Skolnick explained. "We see long-lived correlations between the molecules, independent of size, in space and time. This suggests that these correlated motions may be extremely important in the dynamics of molecules."
The researchers also studied other possible causes for the slow-down but found that repulsion between molecules, variations in molecular shape and "stickiness" between molecules could not account for the dramatic reduction in diffusion rate.
Though the findings are interesting in themselves, their real importance may be in setting the stage for larger studies that would include the thousands of molecules known to be important to cellular operations. Researchers ultimately hope to model everything happening in the cell, including interactions with the cell membrane.
"This is the beginning of what will be a very complicated effort to develop the tools and approaches that will allow us to simulate a sufficiently useful caricature of a cell," Skolnick said. "From that, we will be able to learn the biological principles at work, and then study some 'what if' scenarios."
Those "what if" questions might one day help drug designers better understand how therapeutic compounds work within cells, for instance, or allow cancer researchers to see how cells change from a healthy state to a disease state.
"It would be great if we could study new drugs in a model set of cells to very quickly see what might be the side-effects and cross interactions to understand how we might minimize these problems," Skolnick noted. "The nice thing about a computer simulation is that if it is a reasonably faithful caricature, you can ask a lot of questions -- and get answers that help you understand what’s going on."
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]]>DesRoches was invited to share his expertise on earthquakeresilience in theUnited States focusing on the risks associated with and the effects ofapotential catastrophic earthquake event. His testimony highlighted hisbackgroundon the performance of built infrastructure in the Central andSoutheasternUnited States and his firsthand experience with the earthquake in Haiti.
An internationally recognized expert in reducing damage and loss fromearthquakes, DesRoches’ research focuses on earthquake-resistant designandretrofitting of bridges, protective systems for buildings and bridgesand theperformance of transportation networks. A native of Haiti, DesRochesled a team of earthquake experts to the island nation last winter tostudy thedamage from the major quake that struck there in January.
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The first case of sickle cell disease was identified in 1910 and today it affects more than 70,000 Americans. It is seen mostly in persons of African descent, but also in individuals of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Central and South American, and Asian Indian heritage. Approximately 10 percent of children with sickle cell disease suffer a stroke. Having experienced one stroke, they are at high risk of having another.
"Current therapies to prevent strokes in children with sickle cell disease have substantial side effects, so we need to create better ways to predict which patients need intervention," said Platt, who is also a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar. "My goal is to use experimental and clinical data to develop a mathematical model for predicting stroke risk in pediatric patients with sickle cell disease to allow for earlier intervention."
Now in its fourth year, the 2010 NIH Director's New Innovator Awards will support 52 exceptionally creative new investigators who propose highly innovative projects that have the potential for unusually high impact.
"NIH is pleased to be supporting early-stage investigators from across the country who are taking considered risks in a wide range of areas in order to accelerate research," said Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health. "We look forward to the results of their work."
Platt's research project will integrate cell biology, clinical pediatric hematology, enzyme kinetic modeling and dynamics, predictive statistical regression modeling, biomechanics, tissue remodeling and personalized medicine.
"Successful integration of all these areas would significantly advance the diagnosis and therapeutic intervention of strokes in children with sickle cell disease in a way that has not been seen in the one hundred years since this disease was first identified," said Platt.
The disease hits close to home for Platt, whose brother was recently diagnosed with sickle cell trait -- meaning he inherited a sickle cell gene from one of his parents and a normal gene from the other. In Georgia, one in every 1,300 children is born with sickle cell disease.
Sickle cell disease is a genetic condition present at birth. It involves an altered gene that produces abnormal hemoglobin -- the protein that carries oxygen in the blood. In sickle cell disease, red blood cells become hard, sticky and "C" shaped. Sickle cells die early, which causes a constant shortage of red blood cells.
The abnormal cells also clog the flow in small blood vessels, causing chronic pain and other serious problems such as infections and acute chest syndrome. Strokes, however, occur in large arteries with high blood flow rates and other biomechanical parameters known to cause plaque formation in atherosclerosis. The damage caused by sickled red blood cells in the arteries and links to remodeling of the arteries have not been extensively studied.
To understand the coordination of the mechanisms that produce structural changes in the arterial wall leading to stroke, Platt plans to model sickle cell disease from the molecular level to the human level based on clinical data, novel biomarkers and patient outcomes. First, he plans to develop a quantitative model that will detail the activation and inactivation of proteases -- enzymes that break down proteins -- in the artery walls of individuals with sickle cell disease.
"I will focus on incorporating different cathepsins, elastin and collagens into the model," said Platt. "I plan to use an assay recently developed in my laboratory that reliably detects and quantifies mature cathepsins using a technique called gelatin zymography."
After determining which proteases play a role in sickle cell disease, Platt will then determine how biomechanical conditions of sickle cell disease, such as altered blood flow and red blood cell stiffness, affect cell-mediated remodeling of arteries by these proteases. This will be done in collaboration with Coulter Department professor Gilda Barabino. With this information, Platt can link quantitative measures of blood flow and inflammatory markers found in sickle cell disease to the narrowing of artery openings and associated protease remodeling.
These markers will first be validated with animal models of sickle cell disease, in collaboration with Solomon Ofori-Acquah, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Emory University and the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Aflac Cancer Center and Blood Disorders Service. Further validation will come from blood samples collected from individuals with sickle cell disease, which will be provided by Beatrice Gee, medical director of the Hematology and Sickle Cell Program at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Hughes Spalding and an associate professor of clinical pediatrics at the Morehouse School of Medicine.
Overall, Platt will integrate biochemical and biomechanical mechanisms of cardiovascular disease with predictive mathematical models that robustly interpret clinical biomarkers to develop a personalized medicine protocol that will predict strokes in individuals with sickle cell disease and reveal new mechanisms for therapeutic targets. If these methods are successful, they could be expanded to broader categories of cardiovascular disease, such as atherosclerosis, myocardial infarctions and heart valve stenosis.
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]]>Bras’s research in the civil engineering subfields of hydrology and hydroclimatology has contributed to solving important societal problems by describing and forecasting floods and precipitation. He has also made major contributions to the study of deforestation’s impact on the hydrologic cycle and on the evolution of landscapes under different climatic forcings and climatic disturbances.
“Dr. Bras exemplifies the translational researcher, applying theoretical models to real-world situations. His focus is not only toward intellectual pursuits but also toward developing solutions,” said Drexel University Provost Mark Greenberg
Dr. Bras has served as advisor to many government and private institutions including: the Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation (NSF); Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, National Research Council; Earth Systems Sciences and Applications Committee of NASA and the NASA Advisory Committee; and National Academy of Sciences Committee on New Orleans Regional Hurricane Protection Projects. He is past president of the hydrology section of American Geophysical Union (AGU) and is presently a member of its board of directors.
Bras holds three degrees from MIT: a bachelor's in civil engineering (1972), a master’s in civil engineering (1974) and a science doctorate in water resources and hydrology (1975). His academic career began as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, and he joined the MIT faculty in July 1976.
Bras, a native of Puerto Rico, maintains an active international consulting practice. Presently he chairs a panel of experts that supervises the design and construction of a multibillion-dollar project to protect the City of Venice from flooding during unusually high tides. The project is scheduled for completion in 2014.
]]>CTISL researchers will develop cutting-edge capabilities that will allow trusted data to be sent across trusted networks to ensure effective missions for GTRI's customers. CTISL's work will focus on providing resilient command and control solutions to war fighters operating in contested environments, helping industry defend against cyber criminals, and safeguarding the nation's critical infrastructure.
"The consolidation of GTRI's key cyber researchers, programs and resources under a single umbrella of shared research objectives will be a powerful driver in the development of new cyber solutions and technologies that will have an immediate impact on the United States," said CTISL acting director Bo Rotoloni.
Rotoloni, who was previously the deputy director of GTRI"s Signature Technology Laboratory, brings to the job an understanding of GTRI's existing customers and a vision for developing new cyber research areas where the laboratory can apply its expertise. To develop and deploy advanced technologies to defend and deter cyber attacks against the United States, researchers in the new laboratory will pursue opportunities in various agencies within the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security; local, state and foreign ally governments; and commercial and private entities.
CTISL will also leverage basic research from across the Georgia Institute of Technology, as part of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC).
"At GTISC, real-world impact of our research programs is very important so we are excited that our faculty and students will be able to collaborate with researchers in the new Cyber Technology and Information Security Laboratory to help create cyber security solutions that will address real problems," said GTISC director Mustaque Ahamad, who is a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Computer Science. "GTRI's expertise in developing such solutions complements our basic research and by working together, Georgia Tech will be well positioned to play a leadership role in this important field."
The new research laboratory -- GTRI's eighth -- will be comprised of three divisions that will pursue an aggressive strategy to provide world-class support for enduring programs and integration of cutting-edge cyber solutions, emerging technology and policy, Rotoloni said. The three divisions include secure information systems, command and control mission assurance, and network vulnerability.
Researchers in the secure information systems division design, develop and deploy enterprise information systems requiring state-of-the-art database, platform and Internet security. They are currently providing secure applications and cross-domain extensible markup language (XML) guards to the U.S. Department of Defense to enable sharing of compartmented data between networks.
In the command and control mission assurance division, GTRI researchers will design and field resilient information systems. Cutting edge technologies, including secure network enclaves, virtualization, multi-level security, and adaptive quality of service management, will be applied to construct command and control systems for combat operations.
GTRI has been involved for more than six years with the U.S. military's Deployable Joint Command and Control system (DJC2) -- a self-contained, self-powered temporary headquarters facility. GTRI has been responsible for designing DJC2's information technology infrastructure since the initial prototype stage. The work has included networks, wired and wireless communications, as well as newer elements such as advanced peer-to-peer inter-networking convergence and satellite communication terminals. The GTRI team is currently developing a secure DJC2 wireless architecture, expected to become one of the few operational systems that is fully accredited for security.
The Network-Centric Test and Training System (NeTTS) was also developed by GTRI researchers for command and control mission assurance. NeTTS is a family of non-intrusive test tools for distributed, network-centric environments that support test and training through the creation of realistic virtual environments.
"NeTTS has been used by all four military services, providing support during pre-test planning, test conduct and post-test analysis of a wide variety of communication networks and systems," said Fred Wright, CTISL's deputy director and chief engineer.
In the network vulnerability division, researchers will concentrate on exploiting and reconstructing information in the form of signals, communication protocols, applications and embedded systems. The division will also support various government agencies in countering adversary information networks. Threat countermeasures span a wide range from radio-frequency jamming/denial-of-service to applied offensive computer network operations tactics.
In this research area, GTRI is developing techniques to simulate hostile intrusion attempts into networks and other critical areas, a practice called "red teaming" that uses a GTRI custom code library. Researchers have also developed a program called Spider Sense, which crawls the Internet and automatically exploits websites. Researchers are also working with GTISC to develop and apply novel approaches to automatically identify and analyze emerging cyber threats, such as botnets.
Rotoloni noted that GTRI has been working in the information security area since the 1990s. With this new laboratory, he says, it will continue to develop the latest technologies in signal and protocol exploitation, web crawling, malware analysis, reverse engineering of embedded systems and applications, enterprise networks, database applications, and perimeter guards.
"Our national security and way of life depend on our ability to operate effectively in the vulnerable domain of cyberspace," said Tom McDermott, interim director of GTRI. "With the creation of this new laboratory, GTRI is showing its commitment to solving our nation's most difficult challenges in cyberspace."
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]]>Atherosclerosis typically occurs in branched or curved regions of arteries where plaques form because of cholesterol build-up. Inflammation can alter the structure of plaques so they become more likely to rupture, potentially causing a blood vessel blockage and leading to heart attack or stroke.
The award will support the interdisciplinary Center for Translational Cardiovascular Nanomedicine as the second phase of the Program of Excellence in Nanotechnology (PEN), originally established in 2005 with funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH. This Center integrates the biomedical engineering expertise of Georgia Tech and the cardiology strengths of Emory University's School of Medicine. The broad and long-term goal of the PEN is to improve the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States.
"In the last five years, we developed a suite of nanotechnology approaches for diagnosing and treating cardiovascular disease and we have demonstrated their efficacy in terms of potential clinical application," said Gang Bao, the program's director and the Robert A. Milton Chair in Biomedical Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "For the next five years, we will focus on translating these technologies into clinical utility and we would like to have some of these nanotechnologies ready for human clinical trials by the end of this five-year period."
During the first five years of the PEN, the Georgia Tech and Emory University researchers have made contributions in nanotechnology development, basic cardiology research and inflammatory biomarker detection. The research team has published or submitted more than 80 peer-reviewed papers, filed nine patents and established three startup companies to commercialize the nanotechnologies.
'There is a great unmet need to develop innovative diagnostic modalities that inform the activity of the inflammatory disease and to guide evaluation of therapy," explained Bao, who is also a Georgia Tech College of Engineering Distinguished Professor. "Our nanotechnology toolbox will allow us to translate more mature nanotechnologies to clinical utility and evaluate new nanotechnologies that will provide unique functionalities and novel applications."
The second phase of the PEN will build on the foundation developed and progress made during the last five years to accomplish four goals:
• Using nanoparticle probes to image and characterize atherosclerotic plaques
• Diagnosing cardiovascular disease from a blood sample
• Designing new methods for delivering anti-atherosclerosis drugs and genes into the body
• Developing stem cell based therapies to repair damaged heart tissue
The researchers will use the suite of nanotechnologies they developed in the last five years -- including molecular beacons, magnetic nanoparticles, gold nanoparticles, quantum dots, polyketals and hydrocyanine dyes -- to accomplish these goals.
The first goal focuses on determining if an individual's atherosclerotic plaque will grow and rupture. Having this information would allow physicians to treat atherosclerosis more effectively.
"By using nanoparticle probes in vitro and in vivo, we hope to be able to detect early-stage cardiovascular disease," noted Bao, "but many important issues such as detection specificity, toxicity and safety still need to be addressed."
In addition to in vivo imaging of plaques using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), the research team is developing a laboratory diagnostic test for detecting cardiovascular disease from a blood sample. The presence or levels of specific micro-RNAs, reactive oxygen species or protein markers in the blood will be tested as an indication of the presence and stage of atherosclerosis. This diagnostic approach has the advantages of being fast, inexpensive and nontoxic.
Once atherosclerosis is detected in an individual, it needs to be treated. Several small molecule drugs have been identified as potent therapeutic agents for cardiovascular diseases, but their clinical utility is limited due to their water-repellant nature and short circulation half-life. A novel approach for targeted drug or gene delivery is to use nanoparticles to carry the small molecules into the body. This type of delivery system has the advantage of combining targeting, imaging and controlled release, and can be tailored to optimize circulation time and reduce toxicity.
"Delivering these small molecules in a specific, sufficient and sustained manner to localized vascular lesions may significantly improve the clinical outcomes of cardiovascular diseases," said Bao.
For the final goal, the research team will use stem cells to create a personalized treatment strategy for repairing damage caused by atherosclerosis. The researchers plan to use nanotechnologies to generate and deliver patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells to the injured vasculature and heart to repair the damage.
"Our goals are ambitious as we plan to further develop our nanoscale tools and nanocardiology knowledge base, to translate the new tools and nanotechnologies to clinical applications in diagnosing and treating cardiovascular disease, and to train the next generation of leaders in cardiovascular nanomedicine," added Bao.
Also contributing from the Coulter Department are professors Don Giddens, Xiaoping Hu, Hanjoong Jo, Shuming Nie, and W. Robert Taylor; associate professors Niren Murthy and May Dongmei Wang; and assistant professor Michael Davis. Giddens is also dean of Georgia Tech's College of Engineering. Taylor is also the director of Emory’s Division of Cardiology and a member of the Atlanta VA Medical Center’s Division of Cardiology.
Contributors from Emory University include Department of Medicine chair Wayne Alexander; Division of Cardiology professors David Harrison and Kathy Griendling, associate professor Young-sup Yoon and assistant professor Charles Searles Jr.; and Department of Radiology professor Mark Goodman. Katherine Ferrara, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of California, Davis, is also collaborating on the project.
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During outbreaks of serious infectious diseases, many individuals closely follow media reports and as a result, take precautions to protect themselves against the disease. These precautions may include staying home, getting vaccinated, avoiding crowds, using disinfectants, canceling travel plans and wearing face masks.
Known as "self-isolation," these precautions can significantly reduce the severity of an outbreak, according to mathematical modeling done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.
"The more forcefully the media provides information about pandemic infections and deaths, the more the total number of infections is reduced," said Howard Weiss, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Mathematics. "Media coverage also reduces the maximum number of infections at any particular time, which is important for allocating the resources needed for treating infectious diseases."
The benefit of publicly reporting disease outbreaks seems obvious, and public health officials in the United States have a policy of regularly communicating with the news media about such incidents. But according to Weiss, not all world governments choose to communicate so well -- and nobody had used rigorous mathematical techniques to study the impact of that communication before.
Epidemiologists use the S-I-R model to anticipate the effect of disease outbreaks. The basic model places individuals into one of three groups signified by each letter of the acronym:
• Susceptible individuals are those that are vulnerable to the disease;
• Infected individuals are those who have the disease;
• Removed individuals are those who are not in the other groups because they have been vaccinated, have isolated themselves from the population, have already recovered from the disease -- or have died.
Weiss and collaborator Anna Mummert, an assistant professor of mathematics at Marshall University, modified that model to take into account ways that individuals could move from the "Susceptible" group to the "Removed" group without passing through the "Infected" group. By "self-isolating" as a result of news media warnings, they reasoned, individuals could move directly into the "Removed" class because they are no longer susceptible.
"On a chart showing the number of infected people at any one time, as you increase the intensity of the media coverage, you substantially decrease the number of infections," Weiss noted. "We are assuming that people self-isolate at a rate that is proportional to the amount of media coverage, though we would like to study that in more detail."
The sooner the media coverage of a pandemic begins, the fewer individuals will ultimately be infected. But Weiss said the model shows that almost any media coverage is helpful at reducing the extent of a pandemic.
"Telling the public always helps, but the longer you wait, the less it helps," he said. "If you wait long enough, the effect of media coverage is essentially negligible."
In a paper about the model submitted to a biostatistics journal and posted on the Physics arXiv blog, Mummert and Weiss describe testing their model with a hypothetical outbreak of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever in Huntington -- a college community of about 50,000 residents.
They also tested the model on a long-term infection -- HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In the case of pandemics that occur over a long period of time, regular coverage by the news media may be required to maintain a lower infection rate.
In their model, Mummert and Weiss did not look at such issues as the quality of news coverage, or what may happen if news reports turn out to be false or overstated. They also didn't study the effect of individuals occasionally leaving their isolation to purchase food or medicine, for instance.
The paper cites the case of a false rumor spread across the Internet in 2003 about a restaurant worker in New York's Chinatown who had supposedly died of the SARS infection. That rumor led to a decrease in travel to that area.
Likewise, they note, a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2003 to avoid nonessential travel to SARS-infected nations led to a dramatic reduction in travel to those areas.
Weiss acknowledges that strong communications about such dreaded diseases as Ebola could create public panic. In those rare cases, public health officials will have to weigh the benefits against the risks.
"In general, our advice to public health officials anywhere in the world is not to hold back," he added. "They should get out the news about infectious disease outbreaks loudly and quickly. It's clear that vigorous media reporting can have a substantial effect on reducing the impact of an outbreak."
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]]>The Times Higher Education, a British publication, used anew methodology for its 2010-2011 World University Rankings. It was developedafter consultation with 50 sector leaders, the publication’s editorial boardand website feedback. The new methodology, with data supplied by ThomsonReuters, places less importance on reputation and heritage than in previousyears and gives more weight to hard measures of excellence in all three coreelements of a university’s mission – research, teaching and knowledgetransfer. It is also the only global ranking system that includes asection dedicated to the teaching and learning environment, including thefirst-ever global survey of institutions’ teaching reputations. In all, theranking system includes 13 separate performance indicators across five broadcategories:
Essentially arrays of tiny test tubes, microplates have been used for decades to simultaneously test multiple samples for their responses to chemicals, living organisms or antibodies. Fluorescence or color changes in labels associated with compounds on the plates can signal the presence of particular proteins or gene sequences.
The researchers hope to replace these microplates with modern microelectronics technology, including disposable arrays containing thousands of electronic sensors connected to powerful signal processing circuitry. If they're successful, this new electronic biosensing platform could help realize the dream of personalized medicine by making possible real-time disease diagnosis -- potentially in a physician’s office -- and by helping select individualized therapeutic approaches.
"This technology could help facilitate a new era of personalized medicine," said John McDonald, chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute in Atlanta and a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biology. "A device like this could quickly detect in individuals the gene mutations that are indicative of cancer and then determine what would be the optimal treatment. There are a lot of potential applications for this that cannot be done with current analytical and diagnostic technology."
Fundamental to the new biosensing system is the ability to electronically detect markers that differentiate between healthy and diseased cells. These markers could be differences in proteins, mutations in DNA or even specific levels of ions that exist at different amounts in cancer cells. Researchers are finding more and more differences like these that could be exploited to create fast and inexpensive electronic detection techniques that don't rely on conventional labels.
"We have put together several novel pieces of nanoelectronics technology to create a method for doing things in a very different way than what we have been doing," said Muhannad Bakir, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "What we are creating is a new general-purpose sensing platform that takes advantage of the best of nanoelectronics and three-dimensional electronic system integration to modernize and add new applications to the old microplate application. This is a marriage of electronics and molecular biology."
The three-dimensional sensor arrays are fabricated using conventional low-cost, top-down microelectronics technology. Though existing sample preparation and loading systems may have to be modified, the new biosensor arrays should be compatible with existing work flows in research and diagnostic labs.
“We want to make these devices simple to manufacture by taking advantage of all the advances made in microelectronics, while at the same time not significantly changing usability for the clinician or researcher,” said Ramasamy Ravindran, a graduate research assistant in Georgia Tech’s Nanotechnology Research Center and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
A key advantage of the platform is that sensing will be done using low-cost, disposable components, while information processing will be done by reusable conventional integrated circuits connected temporarily to the array. Ultra-high density spring-like mechanically compliant connectors and advanced "through-silicon vias" will make the electrical connections while allowing technicians to replace the biosensor arrays without damaging the underlying circuitry.
Separating the sensing and processing portions allows fabrication to be optimized for each type of device, notes Hyung Suk Yang, a graduate research assistant also working in the Nanotechnology Research Center. Without the separation, the types of materials and processes that can be used to fabricate the sensors are severely limited.
The sensitivity of the tiny electronic sensors can often be greater than current systems, potentially allowing diseases to be detected earlier. Because the sample wells will be substantially smaller than those of current microplates -- allowing a smaller form factor -- they could permit more testing to be done with a given sample volume.
The technology could also facilitate use of ligand-based sensing that recognizes specific genetic sequences in DNA or messenger RNA. "This would very quickly give us an indication of the proteins that are being expressed by that patient, which gives us knowledge of the disease state at the point-of-care," explained Ken Scarberry, a postdoctoral fellow in McDonald's lab.
So far, the researchers have demonstrated a biosensing system with silicon nanowire sensors in a 16-well device built on a one-centimeter by one-centimeter chip. The nanowires, just 50 by 70 nanometers, differentiated between ovarian cancer cells and healthy ovarian epithelial cells at a variety of cell densities.
Silicon nanowire sensor technology can be used to simultaneously detect large numbers of different cells and biomaterials without labels. Beyond that versatile technology, the biosensing platform could accommodate a broad range of other sensors – including technologies that may not exist yet. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of different sensors could be included on each chip, enough to rapidly detect markers for a broad range of diseases.
"Our platform idea is really sensor agnostic," said Ravindran. "It could be used with a lot of different sensors that people are developing. It would give us an opportunity to bring together a lot of different kinds of sensors in a single chip."
Genetic mutations can lead to a large number of different disease states that can affect a patient's response to disease or medication, but current labeled sensing methods are limited in their ability to detect large numbers of different markers simultaneously.
Mapping single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), variations that account for approximately 90 percent of human genetic variation, could be used to determine a patient's propensity for a disease, or their likelihood of benefitting from a particular intervention. The new biosensing technology could enable caregivers to produce and analyze SNP maps at the point-of-care.
Though many technical challenges remain, the ability to screen for thousands of disease markers in real-time has biomedical scientists like McDonald excited.
"With enough sensors in there, you could theoretically put all possible combinations on the array," he said. "This has not been considered possible until now because making an array large enough to detect them all with current technology is probably not feasible. But with microelectronics technology, you can easily include all the possible combinations, and that changes things."
Papers describing the biosensing device were presented at the Electronic Components and Technology Conference and the International Interconnect Technology conference in June 2010. The research has been supported in part by the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), Georgia Tech's Integrative BioSystems Institute (IBSI) and the Semiconductor Research Corporation.
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]]>Georgia Tech is one of the largestproducers of Hispanic engineers in the country, a status achieved through thehigh quality and reputation of its engineering programs, combined with targeted recruitment and retention programsfor Hispanic students, according to Georgia Tech Dean of Engineering DonGiddens.
“We are consistently working to fostera learning environment that builds on the talents and contributions ofeveryone,” said Giddens. “In this environment, Hispanic students, as well asall of our students, can succeed and grow as they prepare to be engineers oftomorrow.”
Not only does the Office of Hispanic Initiatives (OHI) assist with therecruitment of high-achieving, talented Hispanic/Latino students to GeorgiaTech, OHI also provides programs that help them grow academically, personallyand professionally and prepares them for success after graduating.
]]>The co-branded season pass will go on sale September 20 at the Georgia Tech box office. The Woodruff Arts Center will also host a special open house for Georgia Tech students on September 30 to introduce them to the arts center complex.
“We are delighted to partner with the Woodruff Arts Center in offering Tech students so many opportunities to take advantage of the outstanding arts environment in Atlanta,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. “Between the High, the Atlanta Symphony and the Alliance Theatre, Tech students will be able to greatly enrich their college experience as they prepare to become leaders in their communities and good global citizens.”
According to Woodruff Arts Center CEO Joe Bankoff, the expanded relationship with Georgia Tech is a natural expansion of their arts education mission. “There is a clear and proven connection between involvement in the arts and academic achievement. At the Woodruff, we are committed to making the arts accessible to students and are thrilled to be partnering with Georgia Tech to provide extensive and inexpensive access to our artistic offerings.”
Georgia Tech students will be able to enjoy an exciting season. The High Museum of Art is currently featuring the Dali: The Late Work exhibition with the Titian and Golden Age of Venetian Painting exhibition opening October 17. The Alliance Theatre has “The Second City: Miracle on 1280 Peachtree Street,” and “Bring it On: The Musical” scheduled, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra‘s season opening September 23.
Additional details regarding the Georgia Tech – Woodruff season pass include:
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]]>Brown has been on the faculty at Georgia Tech since 2006. Previous to that she had a distinguished career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At ORNL, she led several national scenario studies of climate change technology and policy options and held various leadership positions. Her current research addresses the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, the design of policy options to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the evaluation of energy programs and policies . At Georgia Tech, her research projects have included an assessment of the $3 billion/year multi-agency R&D portfolio comprising the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program, analysis of the geography of metropolitan carbon footprints, development of a national climate change technology deployment strategy, and an assessment of the cost and availability of supply- and demand-side electricity resources in the Southeast.
The senate also confirmed to the TVA board, Barbara S. Haskew, a professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University, Neil G. McBride, a long-time public-interest lawyer, Bill Sansom, a former chairman of the TVA Board and president and chief executive officer of Knoxville-based H.T. Hackney Company. The four join current members of the board: Current members of the TVA Board of Directors are Chairman Dennis Bottorff of Nashville, Tenn.; Mike Duncan of Inez, Ky.; Tom Gilliland, of Blairsville, Ga.; William Graves of Memphis, Tenn., and Howard Thrailkill of Huntsville, Ala.
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The developments move quantum information networks -- which securely encode information by entangling photons and atoms -- closer to a possible prototype system.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology reported the findings Sept. 26 in the journal Nature Physics, and in a manuscript submitted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. The research was sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.
The advances include:
• Development of an efficient, low-noise system for converting photons carrying quantum information at infrared wavelengths to longer wavelengths suitable for transmission on conventional telecommunications systems. The researchers have demonstrated that the system, believed to be the first of its kind, maintains the entangled information during conversion to telecom wavelengths -- and back down to the original infrared wavelengths.
• A significant improvement in the length of time that a quantum repeater -- which would be necessary to transmit the information -- can maintain the information in memory. The Georgia Tech team reported memory lasting as long as 0.1 second, 30 times longer than previously reported for systems based on cold neutral atoms and approaching the quantum memory goal of at least one second -- long enough to transmit the information to the next node in the network.
• An efficient, low-noise system able to convert photons of telecom wavelengths back to infrared wavelengths. Such a system would be necessary for detecting entangled photons transmitted by a quantum information system.
"This is the first system in which such a long memory time has been integrated with the ability to transmit at telecom wavelengths," said Brian Kennedy, a co-author of the Nature Physics paper and a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. "We now have the crucial aspects needed for a quantum repeater."
The conversion technique addresses a long-standing issue facing quantum networks: the wavelengths most useful for creating quantum memory aren't the best for transmitting that information across optical telecommunications networks. Wavelengths of approximately 1.3 microns can be transmitted in optical fiber with the lowest absorption, but the ideal wavelength for storage is 795 nanometers.
The wavelength conversion takes place in a sophisticated system that uses a cloud of rubidium atoms packed closely together in gaseous form to maximize the likelihood of interaction with photons entering the samples. Two separate laser beams excite the rubidium atoms, which are held in a cigar-shaped magneto-optical trap about six millimeters long. The setup creates a four-wave mixing process that changes the wavelength of photons entering it.
"One photon of infrared light going in becomes one photon of telecom light going out," said Alex Kuzmich, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics and another of the Nature Physics paper's co-authors. "To preserve the quantum entanglement, our conversion is done at very high efficiency and with low noise."
By changing the shape, size and density of the rubidium cloud, the researchers have been able to boost efficiency as high as 65 percent. "We learned that the efficiency of the system scales up rather quickly with the size of the trap and the number of atoms," Kuzmich said. "We spent a lot of time to make a really dense optical sample. That dramatically improved the efficiency and was a big factor in making this work."
The four-wave mixing process does not add noise to the signal, which allows the system to maintain the information encoded onto photons by the quantum memory. "There are multiple parameters that affect this process, and we had to work hard to find the optimal set," noted Alexander Radnaev, another co-author of the Nature Physics paper.
Once the photons are converted to telecom wavelengths, they move through optical fiber -- and loop back into the magneto-optical trap. They are then converted back to infrared wavelengths for testing to verify that the entanglement has been maintained. That second conversion turns the rubidium cloud into a photon detector that is both efficient and low in noise, Kuzmich said.
Quantum memory is created when laser light is directed into a cloud of rubidium atoms confined in an optical lattice. The energy excites the atoms, and the photons scattered from the atoms carry information about that excitation. In the new Georgia Tech system, these photons carrying quantum information are then fed into the wavelength conversion system.
The research team took two different approaches to extending the quantum memory lifetime, both of which sought to mix the two levels of atoms involved in encoding the quantum information. One approach, described in the Nature Physics paper, used an optical lattice and a two-photon process. The second approach, described in the Physical Review Letters submission, used a magnetic field approach pioneered by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The general purpose of quantum networking is to distribute entangled qubits -- two correlated data bits that are either "0" or "1" -- over long distances. The qubits would travel as photons across existing optical networks that are part of the existing global telecommunications system.
Because of loss in the optical fiber that makes up these networks, repeaters must be installed at regular intervals to boost the signals. For carrying qubits, these repeaters will need quantum memory to receive the photonic signal, store it briefly, and then produce another signal that will carry the data to the next node, and on to its final destination.
"This is another significant step toward improving quantum information systems based on neutral atoms," Kuzmich said. "For quantum repeaters, most of the basic steps have now been made, but achieving the final benchmarks required for an operating system will require intensive optical engineering efforts."
In addition to those already mentioned, the research team also included Y.O. Dudin, R. Zhao, H.H. Jen, J.Z. Blumoff and S.D. Jenkins.
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]]>Aerospace Engineering Chair VigorYang also provided an overview of the school, which receives approximately 30percent of its research funding from NASA.
While on campus, Bolden had theopportunity to view NASA-funded research in the combustion lab and in the high-powerelectric propulsion lab, and to speak to Georgia Tech faculty and studentsabout NASA’s future.
According to Yang, Bolden and NASAteam members have been working effectively in advancing the nation's spacemissions and goals. Bolden’s emphasis on the importance of technologydevelopment will make NASA a major source of scientific and technologicalinnovation, in addition to its primary function as an operational agency.
"Georgia Tech will benefitsignificantly from such a move," concluded Yang.
Aerospace Engineering Chair VigorYang also provided an overview of the school, which receives approximately 30percent of its research funding from NASA.
]]>Held annually in Gainesville, Fla., the Sept. 30 – Oct. 3 event was hostedby Grassroots Motorsports (GRM) magazine.The competition required competitors to buy and build a race car for less thanthe dollar amount of the calendar year. The cars competed in three differentevents including autocross, drag and concours.
The 2010 race marks the first time Wreck Racing placed in the eventcategories. In addition, the team’s best overall finish in previous years was12th place. A full recap of this year's competition, along with photos andinformation about the event, will be featured in the April 2011 edition of Grassroots Motorsports magazine.
Wreck Racing is a volunteer student organization, comprised of more than 35students representing schools across campus.
]]>The devices, which include transistors and diodes, could be used in nanometer-scale robotics, nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS), micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and microfluidic devices. The mechanical action used to initiate the strain could be as simple as pushing a button, or be created by the flow of a liquid, stretching of muscles or the movement of a robotic component.
In traditional field-effect transistors, an electrical field switches -- or "gates" -- the flow of electrical current through a semiconductor. Instead of using an electrical signal, the new logic devices create the switching field by mechanically deforming zinc oxide nanowires. The deformation creates strain in the nanowires, generating an electric field through the piezoelectric effect -- which creates electrical charge in certain crystalline materials when they are subjected to mechanical strain.
"When we apply a strain to a nanowire placed across two metal electrodes, we create a field, which is strong enough to serve as the gating voltage," said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. "This type of device would allow mechanical action to be interfaced with electronics, and could be the basis for a new form of logic device that uses the piezoelectric potential in place of a gate voltage."
Wang, who has published a series of articles on the devices in such journals as Nano Letters, Advanced Materials and Applied Physics Letters, calls this new class of nanometer-scale device "piezotronics" because they use piezoelectric potential to tune and gate the charge transport process in semiconductors. The devices rely on the unique properties of zinc oxide nanostructures, which are both semiconducting and piezoelectric.
The transistors and diodes add to the family of nanodevices developed by Wang and his research team, and could be combined into systems in which all components are based on the same zinc oxide material. The researchers have previously announced development of nanometer-scale generators that produce a voltage by converting mechanical motion from the environment, and nanowire sensors for measuring pH and detecting ultraviolet light.
"The family of devices we have developed can be joined together to create self-powered, autonomous and intelligent nanoscale systems," Wang said. "We can create complex systems totally based on zinc oxide nanowires that have memory, processing, and sensing capabilities powered by electrical energy scavenged from the environment."
Using strain-gated transistors fabricated on a flexible polymer substrate, the researchers have demonstrated basic logic operations -- including NOR, XOR and NAND gates and multiplexer/demultiplexer functions -- by simply applying different types of strain to the zinc oxide nanowires. They have also created an inverter by placing strain-gated transistors on both sides of a flexible substrate.
"Using the strain-gated transistor as a building block, we can build complicated logic," Wang added. "This is the first time that a mechanical action has been used to create a logic operation."
A strain-gated transistor is made of a single zinc oxide nanowire with its two ends -- the source and drain electrodes -- fixed to a polymer substrate by metal contacts. Flexing the devices reverses their polarity as the strain changes from compressive to tensile on opposite sides.
The devices operate at low frequencies -- the kind created by human interaction and the ambient environment -- and would not challenge traditional CMOS transistors for speed in conventional applications. The devices respond to very small mechanical forces, Wang noted.
The Georgia Tech group has also learned to control conductivity in zinc oxide nanodevices using laser emissions that take advantage of the unique photo-excitation properties of the material. When ultraviolet light from a laser strikes a metal contact attached to a zinc oxide structure, it creates electron-hole pairs which change the height of the Schottky barrier at the zinc oxide-metal contact.
These conductivity-changing characteristics of the laser emissions can be used in tandem with alterations in mechanical strain to provide more precise control over the conducting capabilities of a device.
"The laser improves the conductivity of the structure," Wang noted. "The laser effect is in contrast to the piezoelectric effect. The laser effect reduces the barrier height, while the piezoelectric effect increases the barrier height."
Wang has called these new devices fabricated by coupling piezoelectric, photon excitation and semiconductor properties "piezo-phototronic" devices.
The research group has also created hybrid logic devices that use zinc oxide nanowires to control current moving through single-walled carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes, which were produced by researchers at Duke University, can be either p-type or n-type.
The research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In addition to Wang, the research team includes Wenzhuo Wu, Yaguang Wei, Youfan Hu, Weihua Liu, Minbaek Lee, Yan Zhang, Yanling Chang, Shu Xiang, Lei Ding, Jie Liu and Robert Snyder.
"Our work with strain-gated devices provides a new approach to logic operations that performs mechanical-electrical actions in one structural unit using a single material," Wang noted. "These transistors could provide new processing and memory capabilities in very small and portable devices."
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]]>Reported Sept. 9 in the journal Nature, the new research raises several intriguing questions about the fundamental physics of this exciting material and reveals new effects that may make graphene even more powerful than previously expected for practical applications.
Led by NIST Fellow Joseph Stroscio, the research team included scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, Seoul National University, and the University of Texas at Austin.
Graphene is one of the simplest materials -- a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like lattice -- yet it has many remarkable and surprisingly complex properties. Measuring and understanding how electrons carry current through the sheet is a key to achieving its technological promise in wide-ranging applications, including high speed electronics and sensors.
For example, the electrons in graphene act as if they have no mass and are almost 100 times more mobile than in silicon. Moreover, the speed with which electrons move through graphene is not related to their energy, unlike materials such as silicon where more voltage must be applied to increase their speed, which creates heat that is detrimental to most applications.
To fully understand the behavior of graphene's electrons, scientists must study the material under an extreme environment of ultra-high vacuum, ultra-low temperatures, and large magnetic fields. Under these conditions, the graphene sheet remains pristine for weeks.
NIST has recently constructed the world’s most powerful and stable scanning-probe microscope, with an unprecedented combination of low temperature (as low as 10 millikelvin, or 10 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero), ultra-high vacuum, and high magnetic field. In the first measurements made with this instrument, the international team has used its power to resolve the finest differences in the electron energies in graphene, atom-by-atom.
"Going to this resolution allows you to see new physics," said Young Jae Song, a postdoctoral researcher who helped develop the instrument at NIST and make these first measurements.
And the new physics the team saw raises a few more questions about how the electrons behave in graphene than it answers.
Because of the geometry and electromagnetic properties of graphene's structure, an electron in any given energy level populates four possible sublevels, called a "quartet." Theorists have predicted that this quartet of levels would split into different energies when immersed in a magnetic field, but until recently there had not been an instrument sensitive enough to resolve these differences.
"When we increased the magnetic field at extreme low temperatures, we observed unexpectedly complex quantum behavior of the electrons," said NIST Fellow Joseph Stroscio.
What is happening, according to Stroscio, appears to be a "many-body effect" in which electrons interact strongly with one another in ways that affect their energy levels.
One possible explanation for this behavior is that the electrons have formed a "condensate" in which they cease moving independently of one another and act as a single coordinated unit.
The new experiments also showed surprising stability in the quartet states, an issue that warrants further study, said Phillip First, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics and one of the study's co-authors.
"The experiment shows that these magnetic configurations become especially stable when any one of the quartet states is completely filled with electrons, which indicates the importance of many-body correlations," he said. "However, the most surprising thing is the observation of new stable states that occur when a quartet state is exactly half filled. That's pretty remarkable, and we still need an explanation."
Graphene has attracted strong interest as a potential material for future electronic devices, and this new work reinforces that expectation.
"If our hypothesis proves to be correct, it could point the way to the creation of smaller, very-low-heat producing, highly energy efficient electronic devices based upon graphene," said Shaffique Adam, a postdoctoral researcher who assisted with theoretical analysis of the measurements.
In addition to First, Georgia Tech researchers contributing to the paper included Walt de Heer, Yike Hu and David Torrance. The research was supported in part by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD)(KRF-2006-214-C00022), the National Science Foundation (DMR-0820382 [MRSEC], DMR-0804908, DMR-0606489), the Welch Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (NRI-INDEX program).
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]]>Developed by Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering assistant professor Maysam Ghovanloo and his students in the GT-Bionics Lab, the Tongue Drive System is an assistive technology that enables individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries to maneuver a powered wheelchair or control a mouse cursor using simple tongue movements. The research team is currently preparing for their second round of clinical trials on the Tongue Drive System, which will be conducted at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
As a finalist in the prosthetics/orthotics/controls category, the Tongue Drive System is eligible for the special "Leo" People's Choice Award presented to the finalist receiving the highest number of "thumbs up" votes for its YouTube video. Create or log into a YouTube account to vote for the Tongue Drive System’s video: http://bit.ly/tonguedrive. Voting ends at midnight on Sunday, Sept. 26, 2010.
The da Vinci Awards were named after Leonardo da Vinci because of his documented talents as an inventor, philosopher, engineer, architect and artist. Finalists representing the U.S., Canada and Denmark were chosen from entries received from around the world. The awards were created by and benefit the National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society's Michigan Chapter.
Finalists and their innovative technologies will be honored on Sept. 30, 2010 at a special awards event at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, with the 2010 da Vinci Award winners announced live that evening. Tickets and additional information about the gala are available at http://www.davinciawards.org/about/overview.
To read more about the Tongue Drive System, visit http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/tonguedrive2/ and http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/tonguedrive/.
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These technologies will be used to enable new approaches for identifying children at risk for autism and other developmental delays. In addition, these methods may potentially improve the delivery and evaluation of treatment.
The award -- one of only 10 given out by the NSF since 2008 -- provides up to $2 million in funding each year for five years and is designed to push boundaries in computer science. This project will push the limits by catalyzing a new scientific discipline called computational behavioral science, which will draw equally from computer science and psychology to transform the study of human behavior.
"There is a great deal of creativity in the computer science research community today," said Deborah Crawford, acting assistant director of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at NSF. "Our intentions with the Expeditions in Computing program are to stimulate and use that creativity to expand the horizons of computing. For example, several of the projects will be exploring new computational approaches to some of the most vexing problems we face in the science and engineering enterprise as well as in the larger society."
Autism affects one of every 110 children in the United States and the long-term outcomes for a child who is at risk for autism can be significantly improved if the child is treated at an early age. As a result, it is widely accepted that all children should be screened for developmental delays as early in life as possible.
"Direct observation of a child by highly trained specialists is an important step in assessing risk for developmental disorders, but such an approach cannot be easily scaled to the large number of individuals needing evaluation and treatment," said the project's lead principal investigator James Rehg, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing.
For this project, the researchers will design vision, speech and wearable sensor technologies to analyze child behavior. Data will be collected from interactions between caregivers and children, children playing and socializing in a daycare environment, and clinicians interacting with children during individual therapy sessions. Multiple sensing technologies are necessary to obtain a comprehensive and integrated portrait of expressed behavior.
"People use eye gaze, hand gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice to convey engagement and regulate social interactions," said co-principal investigator Gregory Abowd, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. "In addition, physiological responses, such as increased heart rate, can impact the expression of these behaviors."
Cameras and microphones will provide an inexpensive and noninvasive way to measure eye gaze and facial and body expressions, along with speech and non-speech utterances. Wearable sensors will measure physiological variables such as heart rate and skin conductivity, which contain important clues about levels of internal stress and arousal that are linked to behavior.
The research team will also develop capabilities for synchronizing the signals from the microphones, cameras and on-body sensors. By developing and using models of social interactions, the researchers will analyze the sensor data to quantify engagement.
As part of this award, the researchers will use a behavioral screening instrument called Rapid-ABC, which is currently under development by Abowd, Emory University School of Medicine assistant professor of psychiatry Opal Ousley, and Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing senior research scientist Rosa Arriaga. The researchers intend to utilize the information gathered from the microphones, cameras and on-body sensors to automate some of the scoring for the Rapid-ABC test.
"We hope that by incorporating this screening protocol into well-child doctor visits for children less than two years old, we can reduce the average age of autism diagnosis, which is currently about four years old," explained Arriaga.
In the future, the researchers hope to expand their work beyond autism to other developmental disorders and the general study of child behavior.
"While autism is our focus right now, this project addresses general social, communicative and repetitive behaviors, so the technologies we develop will have applicability to other childhood disorders, such as Down syndrome or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," added Rehg.
In addition to Georgia Tech, this project includes investigators and collaborators at Boston University, Carnegie Mellon, the Emory Autism Center, the Marcus Autism Center -- an affiliate of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Southern California. Outreach activities include collaborations with the Atlanta Autism Consortium and major autism research centers in Atlanta, Boston, Pittsburgh, Urbana Champaign and Los Angeles.
Other Georgia Tech participants include co-principal investigators Mark Clements, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Agata Rozga, a research scientist in the School of Interactive Computing; as well as School of Interactive Computing postdoctoral fellow Mario Romero.
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]]>The work is part of a $19.5 million federally-funded project -- headed by the Morehouse School of Medicine’s National Center for Primary Care (NCPC) -- to help primary-care providers in smaller practices adopt comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) systems. The project is being coordinated by the Georgia Health Information Technology Regional Extension Center (GA-HITREC).
Georgia Tech is also helping establish a group purchasing program that health care providers can use to more simply and easily obtain their EHR software.
"The ultimate goal is higher quality, more cost-effective health care for Georgia," said Stephen Fleming, a Georgia Tech vice president and executive director of its Enterprise Innovation Institute, which will provide the services. "This will not only benefit individual citizens of the state directly, but will also make Georgia more attractive to companies of all sizes because health care costs are often the second-largest expense, after payroll, for business and industry across the board."
The Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) will receive approximately $2.8 million for its contributions to the project.
The GA-HITREC project will help as many as 5,200 primary-care providers in smaller practices select electronic health record systems, properly install the software and implement new workflow processes that achieve meaningful use of the technology. Using its existing statewide network of regional technical assistance offices, Georgia Tech will be among several organizations providing direct support to providers as they adopt the technology.
"The effort will include an assessment tool to help determine what each provider practice needs to do to achieve meaningful use as defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This would include education and training, changes in clinical and administrative processes, addressing computer hardware and facility issues, and providing connectivity to emerging health information exchanges," explained Steve Rushing, director of Georgia Tech’s health@ei2 program. "Staff from the Enterprise Innovation Institute will conduct one-on-one and group presentations to explain electronic health records, assist in selecting EHR products and conduct follow-up to ensure that new systems are meeting the mandated criteria."
Some $20 billion in funding through the "Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act" (HITECH) will support similar programs nationwide to encourage the deployment of interconnected electronic health records. Funding for the program is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.
"The widespread adoption and meaningful use of EHRs can significantly impact the gaps in disparities among our nation’s communities," said Dr. Dominic Mack, director of GA-HITREC and deputy director of the National Center for Primary Care. "A major goal of the federal initiatives is to put underserved communities on an equal playing field when it comes to health information technology (HIT). I think with valuable partners such as Georgia Tech, we are on the right path."
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) was established by executive order in 2004 with the goal of laying the policy and standards groundwork for such a nationwide health records system. The objectives are to cut $10 billion per year from the government’s health care costs, and to generate additional savings through improvements in quality of care and care coordination, and through reductions in medical errors and duplicative care.
Across the United States and in Georgia, use of comprehensive electronic health records systems is currently limited, with less than 10 percent of hospitals and doctors using networked systems able to provide meaningful support for higher quality care. Over the coming decade, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget expects that initiatives such as the Morehouse program will boost usage of the systems to 90 percent for doctors and 70 percent for hospitals.
"A comprehensive electronic health records system is important for the long-term management of chronic health problems such as diabetes and heart disease," said Mark Braunstein, assistant director of the Health Systems Institute, a program operated jointly by Georgia Tech and Emory University. "As much as 75 percent of U.S. health care dollars now pay for this type of care, and without adoption of technology for more coordination of care, that cost will continue to grow as the population ages."
Care for chronic diseases takes place over years, is often provided by many different sources and -- ultimately -- the outcome depends heavily on patient behavior.
"We need health information infrastructure that will allow every doctor to know what other providers are doing to efficiently and effectively care for a patient with chronic disease," Braunstein explained. "If most physicians are still using paper records, this will be virtually impossible."
By adopting electronic records capable of so-called "meaningful use," the initiative will also help doctors stay current with new information on the best and most cost-effective methods.
"With the rapid advances in medical knowledge, it is very difficult for physicians -- particularly rural primary-care physicians who must treat virtually all medical problems in their communities -- to keep up," Braunstein noted. "Helping every physician successfully adopt technology that can help them stay current is a top priority."
In a study released earlier this year, EI2 also documented that the state's health information technology industry includes more than 100 companies and employs approximately 10,000 people. Investments in electronic health record systems will therefore have an additional economic development benefit beyond helping control health care costs.
"Georgia businesses stand to benefit substantially from this national investment in health information infrastructure," Fleming noted.
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]]>"We have developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and we have designed techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to reduce its chance of being discovered," said Ronald Arkin, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing.
The results of robot experiments and theoretical and cognitive deception modeling were published online on Sept. 3 in the International Journal of Social Robotics. Because the researchers explored the phenomena of robot deception from a general perspective, the study's results apply to robot-robot and human-robot interactions. This research was funded by the Office of Naval Research.
In the future, robots capable of deception may be valuable for several different areas, including military and search and rescue operations. A search and rescue robot may need to deceive in order to calm or receive cooperation from a panicking victim. Robots on the battlefield with the power of deception will be able to successfully hide and mislead the enemy to keep themselves and valuable information safe.
"Most social robots will probably rarely use deception, but it's still an important tool in the robot's interactive arsenal because robots that recognize the need for deception have advantages in terms of outcome compared to robots that do not recognize the need for deception," said the study's co-author, Alan Wagner, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
For this study, the researchers focused on the actions, beliefs and communications of a robot attempting to hide from another robot to develop programs that successfully produced deceptive behavior. Their first step was to teach the deceiving robot how to recognize a situation that warranted the use of deception. Wagner and Arkin used interdependence theory and game theory to develop algorithms that tested the value of deception in a specific situation. A situation had to satisfy two key conditions to warrant deception -- there must be conflict between the deceiving robot and the seeker, and the deceiver must benefit from the deception.
Once a situation was deemed to warrant deception, the robot carried out a deceptive act by providing a false communication to benefit itself. The technique developed by the Georgia Tech researchers based a robot's deceptive action selection on its understanding of the individual robot it was attempting to deceive.
To test their algorithms, the researchers ran 20 hide-and-seek experiments with two autonomous robots. Colored markers were lined up along three potential pathways to locations where the robot could hide. The hider robot randomly selected a hiding location from the three location choices and moved toward that location, knocking down colored markers along the way. Once it reached a point past the markers, the robot changed course and hid in one of the other two locations. The presence or absence of standing markers indicated the hider's location to the seeker robot.
"The hider's set of false communications was defined by selecting a pattern of knocked over markers that indicated a false hiding position in an attempt to say, for example, that it was going to the right and then actually go to the left," explained Wagner.
The hider robots were able to deceive the seeker robots in 75 percent of the trials, with the failed experiments resulting from the hiding robot’s inability to knock over the correct markers to produce the desired deceptive communication.
"The experimental results weren't perfect, but they demonstrated the learning and use of deception signals by real robots in a noisy environment," said Wagner. "The results were also a preliminary indication that the techniques and algorithms described in the paper could be used to successfully produce deceptive behavior in a robot."
While there may be advantages to creating robots with the capacity for deception, there are also ethical implications that need to be considered to ensure that these creations are consistent with the overall expectations and well-being of society, according to the researchers.
"We have been concerned from the very beginning with the ethical implications related to the creation of robots capable of deception and we understand that there are beneficial and deleterious aspects," explained Arkin. "We strongly encourage discussion about the appropriateness of deceptive robots to determine what, if any, regulations or guidelines should constrain the development of these systems."
This work was funded by Grant No. N00014-08-1-0696 from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of ONR.
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]]>In the Aug. 8 advance online edition of the journal Nature Physics, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describe for the first time how the orbits of electrons are distributed spatially by magnetic fields applied to layers of epitaxial graphene.
The research team also found that these electron orbits can interact with the substrate on which the graphene is grown, creating energy gaps that affect how electron waves move through the multilayer material. These energy gaps could have implications for the designers of certain graphene-based electronic devices.
"The regular pattern of energy gaps in the graphene surface creates regions where electron transport is not allowed," said Phillip N. First, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics and one of the paper’s co-authors. "Electron waves would have to go around these regions, requiring new patterns of electron wave interference. Understanding such interference will be important for bi-layer graphene devices that have been proposed, and may be important for other lattice-matched substrates used to support graphene and graphene devices."
In a magnetic field, an electron moves in a circular trajectory -- known as a cyclotron orbit -- whose radius depends on the size of the magnetic field and the energy of electron. For a constant magnetic field, that's a little like rolling a marble around in a large bowl, First said.
"At high energy, the marble orbits high in the bowl, while for lower energies, the orbit size is smaller and lower in the bowl," he explained. "The cyclotron orbits in graphene also depend on the electron energy and the local electron potential -- corresponding to the bowl -- but until now, the orbits hadn’t been imaged directly."
Placed in a magnetic field, these orbits normally drift along lines of nearly constant electric potential. But when a graphene sample has small fluctuations in the potential, these "drift states" can become trapped at a hill or valley in the material that has closed constant potential contours. Such trapping of charge carriers is important for the quantum Hall effect, in which precisely quantized resistance results from charge conduction solely through the orbits that skip along the edges of the material.
The study focused on one particular electron orbit: a zero-energy orbit that is unique to graphene. Because electrons are matter waves, interference within a material affects how their energy relates to the velocity of the wave -- and reflected waves added to an incoming wave can combine to produce a slower composite wave. Electrons moving through the unique "chicken-wire" arrangement of carbon-carbon bonds in the graphene interfere in a way that leaves the wave velocity the same for all energy levels.
In addition to finding that energy states follow contours of constant electric potential, the researchers discovered specific areas on the graphene surface where the orbital energy of the electrons changes from one atom to the next. That creates an energy gap within isolated patches on the surface.
"By examining their distribution over the surface for different magnetic fields, we determined that the energy gap is due to a subtle interaction with the substrate, which consists of multilayer graphene grown on a silicon carbide wafer," First explained.
In multilayer epitaxial graphene, each layer's symmetrical sublattice is rotated slightly with respect to the next. In prior studies, researchers found that the rotations served to decouple the electronic properties of each graphene layer.
"Our findings hold the first indications of a small position-dependent interaction between the layers," said David L. Miller, the paper's first author and a graduate student in First's laboratory. "This interaction occurs only when the size of a cyclotron orbit -- which shrinks as the magnetic field is increased -- becomes smaller than the size of the observed patches."
The origin of the position dependent interaction is believed to be the "moiré pattern" of atomic alignments between two adjacent layers of graphene. In some regions, atoms of one layer lie atop atoms of the layer below, while in other regions, none of the atoms align with the atoms in the layer below. In still other regions, half of the atoms have neighbors in the underlayer, an instance in which the symmetry of the carbon atoms is broken and the Landau level -- discrete energy level of the electrons -- splits into two different energies.
Experimentally, the researchers examined a sample of epitaxial graphene grown at Georgia Tech in the laboratory of Professor Walt de Heer, using techniques developed by his research team over the past several years.
They used the tip of a custom-built scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) to probe the atomic-scale electronic structure of the graphene in a technique known as scanning tunneling spectroscopy. The tip was moved across the surface of a 100-square nanometer section of graphene, and spectroscopic data was acquired every 0.4 nanometers.
The measurements were done at 4.3 degrees Kelvin to take advantage of the fact that energy resolution is proportional to the temperature. The scanning-tunneling microscope, designed and built by Joseph Stroscio at NIST's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, used a superconducting magnet to provide the magnetic fields needed to study the orbits.
According to First, the study raises a number of questions for future research, including how the energy gaps will affect electron transport properties, how the observed effects may impact proposed bi-layer graphene coherent devices -- and whether the new phenomenon can be controlled.
"This study is really a stepping stone in long path to understanding the subtleties of graphene's interesting properties," he said. "This material is different from anything we have worked with before in electronics."
In addition to those already mentioned, the study also included Walt de Heer, Kevin D. Kubista, Ming Ruan, and Markus Kinderman from Georgia Tech and Gregory M. Rutter from NIST. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the W.M. Keck Foundation. Additional assistance was provided by Georgia Tech's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC).
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]]>The research team plans to develop a system that will excavate brain tumor cells by directing them away from their location in the interior of the brain to a more external location where they can be removed or killed. Nanofiber-based polymer thin films coated with biochemical cues will be aligned in the brain to provide a corridor for tumor cells to follow to a gel-based ‘sink’ where they will be captured and safely removed or encouraged to die through chemical signaling.
“We believe this is the first attempt to exploit the invasive, migrating properties of brain tumors by engineering a path for the tumors to move away from the primary site to a location where treatment can occur,” said lead investigator Ravi Bellamkonda, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Collaborating with Bellamkonda on this project are Tobey MacDonald, director of the pediatric neuro-oncology program at the Aflac Cancer Center and Blood Disorders Service of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and an associate professor of pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine; and Barun Brahma, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. The initial partnership between the researchers began with seed funding from the Georgia Cancer Coalition and Ian’s Friends Foundation.
The National Cancer Institute is providing more than $1 million for the EUREKA grant. For the project, Bellamkonda, MacDonald and Brahma are focusing on treating medulloblastomas -- highly malignant brain tumors that account for more than 20 percent of pediatric brain tumors.
“Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor we see in children, but unfortunately the five-year survival rates for children with this cancer only range from 50 to 70 percent and the majority of survivors have a significantly reduced quality of life as a result of treatment-related toxicities,” said MacDonald, who is also a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar. “An increasing number of survivors are also at risk for developing secondary malignancies as a result of the treatment we now administer. Clearly we have to do a much better job at treating these tumors; however, improving survival while reducing the toxic effects of treatment will require a highly innovative approach.”
Medulloblastoma treatment currently involves surgery followed by radiation therapy to the entire brain and spine and up to one year of intensive intravenous chemotherapy. However, radiation is often delayed or omitted altogether in young children due to its debilitating long-term side effects on the developing central nervous system.
These changes to the timing of radiation administration can adversely impact survival. And while surgery is a mainstay of treatment, it too can cause a significant loss of cognitive and neurological function due to the critical areas of the brain that may be involved by the tumor’s spread but require an extensive surgical area to remove as much of the tumor as possible.
This EUREKA grant aims to address the urgent need to develop therapies to safely treat invasive medulloblastomas in children.
“Our plan is to deliver the tumor to the drug -- by directing tumor cells to a specially engineered gel that can be removed or designed to kill the cells -- rather than the current strategy of delivering the drug to the tumor, which is problematic due to the irregular vasculature and poor diffusivity of the tumor tissue,” explained Bellamkonda, who is also a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar.
The researchers plan to design a polymer thin film system that will include topographical and biochemical cues similar to those that guide the initial brain tumor invasion. The thin films will be rolled up and deployed with minimally invasive catheters. Because neural tissue will not be suctioned and the films are very thin, there should be minimal tissue and tumor disruption.
The films will also be non-toxic to the patient because they will be engineered with biocompatible, stable polymers. In previous studies, the polymers have been implanted in the nervous systems of small animals for more than 16 weeks with no adverse tissue reactions.
“This research represents a radical approach to treating invasive tumors that is based on the universal properties and mechanics of cell motility and the migration characteristic of metastasis, regardless of the molecular and genetic origins of the tumor,” added Bellamkonda.
If successful, this approach would identify a new and innovative way to treat pediatric medulloblastomas and has the potential to open a new avenue for the treatment of other invasive solid tumors, such as brain stem tumors. These cancers are incurable because they are located in an inoperable region and/or they are resistant or inaccessible to the delivery of chemotherapy agents.
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]]>While stem cell research is on the verge of broadly impacting many elements of the medical field -- regenerative medicine, drug discovery and development, cell-based diagnostics and cancer -- the bio-process engineering that will be required to manufacture sufficient quantities of functional stem cells for these diagnostic and therapeutic purposes has not been rigorously explored.
"Successfully integrating knowledge of stem cell biology with bioprocess engineering and process development into single individuals is the challenging goal of this program," said Todd McDevitt, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and a Petit Faculty Fellow in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences at Georgia Tech.
McDevitt is leading the IGERT with Robert M. Nerem, professor emeritus of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Nerem is also director of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center (GTEC) for Regenerative Medicine, which will administer this award.
Ph.D. students funded by Georgia Tech's stem cell bio-manufacturing IGERT will receive interdisciplinary educational training in the biology, engineering, enabling technologies, commercialization and public policy related to stem cells. Their research efforts will focus on developing innovative engineering approaches to bridge the gap between basic discoveries made in stem cell biology and therapeutic stem cell-based technologies.
"This program provides a unique opportunity for engineers to generate standardized and quantitative methods for stem cell isolation, characterization, propagation and differentiation," said Nerem. "These techniques must be developed in a scalable manner to efficiently produce sufficient numbers of stem cells and derivatives in accessible formats in order to yield a spectrum of novel therapeutic and diagnostic applications of stem cells."
The Georgia Tech program is centered around three main research thrusts, which focus on several critical technologies that must be developed to enable the application and use of stem cell-based products:
• Creating reproducible, controlled and scalable methods to expand and differentiate stem cells with defined phenotypes and epigenetic states.
• Developing reliable, rapid and quantifiable methods to characterize the composition and function of stem cells to be generated.
• Designing low-cost systems capable of producing large populations of defined stem cells and derivatives.
Students in the program will be able to take advantage of the core facilities provided by the new Stem Cell Engineering Center at Georgia Tech, which is directed by McDevitt. Technologies developed by the students supported through this IGERT will be rapidly integrated into academic and industrial stem cell practices and cell-based products.
The award will support 30 new Ph.D. students over the next five years and brings together more than two dozen faculty members from Georgia Tech, Emory University, the University of Georgia and the Morehouse School of Medicine. In addition, plans are being made for students to participate in international research collaborations with the National University of Ireland at Galway, Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge and the University of Toronto.
"We anticipate this program will produce the future leaders and innovators in the field of stem cell bio-manufacturing who will contribute significantly at the interface of stem cell engineering, biology and therapy," added McDevitt.
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]]>High-energy lasers -- one type of directed energy weapon -- can be mounted on aircraft to deliver a large amount of energy to a far-away target at the speed of light, resulting in structural and incendiary damage. These lasers can be powerful enough to destroy cruise missiles, artillery projectiles, rockets and mortar rounds.
Before these weapons can be used in the field, the lasers must be tested and evaluated at test ranges. The power and energy distribution of the high-energy laser beam must be accurately measured on a target board, with high spatial and temporal resolution.
Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a system to measure a laser's power and spatial energy distribution simultaneously by directing the laser beam onto a glass target board they designed. Ultimately, the reusable target board and beam diagnostic system will help accelerate the development of such high-energy laser systems and reduce the time required to make them operational for national security purposes.
"The high-energy laser beam delivers its energy to a small spot on the target -- only a couple inches in diameter -- but the intensity is strong enough to melt steel," said GTRI senior research scientist David Roberts. "Our goal was to develop a method for determining how many watts of energy were hitting that area and how the energy distribution changed over time so that the lasers can be optimized."
GTRI teamed with Leon Glebov of Orlando-based OptiGrate to design and fabricate a target board that could survive high-energy laser irradiation without changing its properties or significantly affecting the beam. The researchers selected OptiGrate’s handmade photo-thermo-refractive glass -- a sodium-zinc-aluminum-silicate glass doped with silver, cerium and fluorine -- for the target board.
"This glass is unique in that it is transparent, but also photosensitive like film so you can record holograms and other optical structures in the glass, then 'develop' them in a furnace," explained Roberts.
The researchers tweaked the optical characteristics of the glass so that the board would resist degradation and laser damage. OptiGrate also had to create a new mold to produce four-inch by four-inch pieces of the glass -- a size four times larger than OptiGrate had ever made before.
During testing, the four-inch-square target board is secured between a test target and a high-energy laser, and the beam irradiance profile on the board is imaged by a remote camera. The images are then analyzed to provide a contour map showing the power density -- watts per square inch -- at every location where the beam hit the target.
"We can also simultaneously collect power measurements as a function of time with no extra equipment," noted Roberts. "Previously, measuring the total energy delivered by the laser required a ball calorimeter and temperature measurements had to be collected as the laser heated the interior of the ball. Now we can measure the total energy along with the total power and power density anywhere inside the beam more than one hundred times per second."
GTRI's prototype target boards and a high-energy laser beam profiling system that uses those boards were delivered to Kirtland Air Force Base's Laser Effects Test Facility in May. The researchers successfully demonstrated them using the facility's 50-kilowatt fiber laser and measured power densities as high as 10,000 watts per square centimeter without damaging the beam profiler.
Scaling the system up to larger target board sizes is possible, according to Roberts.
GTRI research engineer Tim Norwood, GTRI research scientist Nathan Meraz and Georgia Tech mechanical engineering undergraduate student Matthew Vickers also contributed to this research.
This project is supported by U.S. Army Award No. N61339-06-C-0046. The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of the U.S. Army.
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]]>Power plants produce approximately one-third of all carbon dioxide emitted in the United States each year. The researchers will attempt to use the unique high-density properties of hollow fibers to develop cost-effective techniques for removing large volumes of the greenhouse gas from the emissions.
In one project, awarded directly to Georgia Tech, researchers are developing hollow-fiber composite membranes that will use nanoporous metal-organic framework materials to separate carbon dioxide from the flue gases. In the other project, Georgia Tech researchers are assisting colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in developing hollow-fiber sorbents that will soak up carbon dioxide like a sponge -- then release it when heated.
Both will take advantage of the very high surface-to-volume properties of hollow fibers spun from polymers. For the membrane project, researchers envision providing a million square meters of membrane area within a moderately-sized building using the compact footprint allowed by the fibers.
"The challenge with this is to have a technology that not only physically works, but that can be built on a large scale and operated inexpensively," said David Sholl, who leads the membrane project as a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "If we are successful, this technology could have a very significant impact on trying to reduce carbon emissions from the combustion of coal."
Capturing carbon dioxide emissions at power plants makes sense because the emissions are concentrated there, Sholl says. But current technology, which involves bubbling stack gases through an aqueous solution and then removing the carbon dioxide, would consume at least a third of the energy produced by each power plant.
Membranes could theoretically separate the carbon dioxide from other gases with less energy input. But no existing membrane materials can do the job while being robust enough to operate in the hostile flue-gas environment -- and inexpensive enough for the large areas needed.
"The volume is truly incredible any way you look at it – how much coal is burned or how much gas is produced per second," said Sholl, who is a Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar in energy sustainability. "With a really good membrane, we would need something like a million square meters of area per power plant. That amount sounds impossible, but it's something already being done in water desalination facilities."
Hollow fibers no thicker than a hair are the key to providing sufficient membrane surface area, said William Koros, who is working on both projects as a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
"Depending on the details of the design, the contact area that can be packaged into a cubic meter of membrane or sorbent volume can be hundreds or thousands of times higher than could be achieved through competitive approaches," said Koros, who is a Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar in membrane science and technology. "This would allow us to fit the new carbon capture materials into already-cramped power plants."
Sholl and his colleagues are using computational techniques to screen the nearly 5,000 compounds that could be used in the metal-organic framework materials, which are sub-micron-scale crystals that will be added to the fibers to separate the carbon dioxide from other gases. Using the computational techniques, they hope to cut the number of candidate materials to as few as 50 that would be synthesized and tested.
"We are trying to connect the computational screening and prediction to a material that can actually be used in a membrane," said Carson Meredith, also a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "We will study these compounds in a rapid way, measuring just the key properties of interest."
Those properties include permeance -- the ability to allow carbon dioxide through -- and selectivity, which will allow it to exclude other gases. That screening should cut the number of candidates to a handful that would actually be used to make membranes for more detailed testing, Sholl said.
At the end of the two-year grant period, the researchers expect to have produced and tested hollow-fiber membranes at the laboratory scale. They would then partner with a manufacturer to produce bundles of the fibers for a pilot-scale test.
Power plant flue gases contain nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxides, as well as moisture, which can combine to cause corrosion. Moisture alone can also cause problems for some membranes. In addition, flue gases contain trace amounts of compounds such as chlorine and mercury that could also harm the membranes.
"We won't really know what the contaminants will do until we put the membrane into the flue-gas stream," Sholl said. "A key issue will be to show that these materials will work today and tomorrow, and for a long time afterward. The robustness of the materials in a real environment is something that we have to understand."
A carbon capture system based on the hollow-fiber membranes could potentially remove as much as 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from plant emissions. But that would come at a cost: even in the best-case calculations, removal would require at least 10 percent of the plant's energy.
"The reality is that all countries around the world are going to burn coal for the foreseeable future," Sholl added. "We really don't have a choice because we don’t have other good sources of baseline load at the level we get from coal. Any technology to economically capture carbon from these facilities could have a big impact."
In addition to those already mentioned, the membrane project includes Krista Walton, Christopher Jones and Sankar Nair, all professors in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The projects are funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).
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]]>Georgia Tech researchers are investigating whether this new calculating power might change the security landscape worldwide. They're concerned that these desktop marvels might soon compromise a critical part of the world’s cyber-security infrastructure -- password protection.
"We've been using a commonly available graphics processor to test the integrity of typical passwords of the kind in use here at Georgia Tech and many other places," said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). "Right now we can confidently say that a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate -- and as GPU power continues to go up every year, the threat will increase."
Designed to handle the ever-growing demands of computer games, today’s top GPUs can process information at the rate of nearly two teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion floating-point operations per second). To put that in perspective, in the year 2000 the world's fastest supercomputer, a cluster of linked machines costing $110 million, operated at slightly more than seven teraflops.
Graphics processing units are so fast because they're designed as parallel computers. In parallel computing, a given problem is divided among multiple processing units, called cores, and these multiple cores tackle different parts of the problem simultaneously.
Until recently, multi-core graphics processors -- which are made by either Nvidia Corp. or by AMD’s ATI unit -- were hard to use for anything except producing graphics for a monitor. To solve a non-graphics problem on a GPU, users had to couch their problems in graphical terms, a difficult task.
But that changed in February 2007, when Nvidia released an important new software-development kit. These new tools allow users to directly program a GPU using the popular C programming language.
"Once Nvidia did that, interest in GPUs really started taking off," Boyd explained. "If you can write a C program, you can program a GPU now."
This new capability puts power into many hands, he says. And it could threaten the world's ubiquitous password-protection model because it enables a low-cost password-breaking technique that engineers call "brute forcing."
In brute forcing, attackers use a fast GPU (or even a group of linked GPUs) -- combined with the right software program -- to break down passwords that are blocking them from a computer or a network. The intruders' high-speed technique basically involves trying every possible password until they find the right one.
For many common passwords, that doesn't take long, said Joshua L. Davis, a GTRI research scientist involved in this project. For one thing, attackers know that many people use passwords comprised of easy-to-remember lowercase letters. Code-breakers typically work on those combinations first.
"Length is a major factor in protecting against brute forcing a password," Davis explained. "A computer keyboard contains 95 characters, and every time you add another character, your protection goes up exponentially, by 95 times."
Complexity also adds security, he says. Adding numbers, symbols and uppercase characters significantly increases the time needed to decipher a password.
Davis believes the best password is an entire sentence, preferably one that includes numbers or symbols. That's because a sentence is both long and complex, and yet easy to remember. He says any password shorter than 12 characters could be vulnerable -- if not now, soon.
Would-be password crackers have other advantages, says Carl Mastrangelo, an undergraduate student in the Georgia Tech College of Computing who is working on the password research. A computer stores user passwords in an encrypted "hash" within the operating system. Attackers who locate a password hash can besiege it by building a rainbow table, which is essentially a database of all previous attempts to compromise that password hash.
"Generating a rainbow table takes a long time," Mastrangelo explained. "But if an attacker wants to crack many passwords quickly, once he’s built a rainbow table it might then only take about 10 minutes per password rather than several days."
Software programs designed to break passwords are freely available on the Internet, Boyd says. Such programs, combined with the availability of GPUs, mean it's only a matter of time before the password threat will be immediate.
Boyd hopes his password work will increase awareness of the GPU's potential for harm as well as benefit. One result of this research, he says, could be GPU-based workstations that would offer rapid assessments of a given password's real-world security strength.
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]]>Implants coated with "flower bouquet" clusters of an engineered protein that mimics the body's own cell-adhesion material fibronectin made 50 percent more contact with the surrounding bone than implants coated with protein pairs or individual strands. The cluster-coated implants were fixed in place more than twice as securely as plugs made from bare titanium -- which is how joints are currently attached.
Researchers believe the biologically-inspired material improves bone growth around the implant and strengthens the attachment and integration of the implant to the bone. This work also shows for the first time that biomaterials presenting biological sequences clustered together at the nanoscale enhance cell adhesion signals. These enhanced signals result in higher levels of bone cell differentiation in human stem cells and promote better integration of biomaterial implants into bone.
"By clustering the engineered fibronectin pieces together, we were able to create an amplified signal for attracting integrins, receptors that attached to the fibronectin and directed and enhanced bone formation around the implant," said Andres Garcia, professor in Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
Details of the new coating were reported in the August 18 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Arthritis Foundation, and the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute through the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues.
Total knee and hip replacements typically last about 15 years until the components wear down or loosen. For many younger patients, this means a second surgery to replace the first artificial joint. With approximately 40 percent of the 712,000 total hip and knee replacements in the United States in 2004 performed on younger patients 45-64 years old, improving the lifetime of the titanium joints and creating a better connection with the bone becomes extremely important.
In this study, Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry professor David Collard and his students coated clinical-grade titanium with a high density of polymer strands -- akin to the bristles on a toothbrush. Then, García and Tim Petrie -- formerly a graduate student at Georgia Tech and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington -- modified the polymer to create three or five self-assembled tethered clusters of the engineered fibronectin, which contained the arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) sequence to which integrins binds.
To evaluate the in vivo performance of the coated titanium in bone healing, the researchers drilled two-millimeter circular holes into a rat's tibia bone and pressed tiny clinical-grade titanium cylinders into the holes. The research team tested coatings that included individual strands, pairs, three-strand clusters and five-strand clusters of the engineered fibronectin protein.
"To investigate the function of these surfaces in promoting bone growth, we quantified osseointegration, or the growth of bone around the implant and strength of the attachment of the implant to the bone," explained García, who is also a Woodruff Faculty Fellow at Georgia Tech.
Analysis of the bone-implant interface four weeks later revealed a 50 percent enhancement in the amount of contact between the bone and implants coated with three- or five-strand tethered clusters compared to implants coated with single strands. The experiments also revealed a 75 percent increase in the contact of the three- and five-strand clusters compared to the current clinical standard for replacement-joint implants, which is uncoated titanium.
The researchers also tested the fixation of the implants by measuring the amount of force required to pull the implants out of the bone. Implants coated with three- and five-strand tethered clusters of the engineered fibronectin fragment displayed 250 percent higher mechanical fixation over the individual strand and pairs coatings and a 400 percent improvement compared to the unmodified polymer coating. The three- and five-cluster coatings also exhibited a twofold enhancement in pullout strength compared to uncoated titanium.
Georgia Tech bioengineering graduate students Ted Lee and David Dumbauld, chemistry graduate students Subodh Jagtap and Jenny Raynor, and research technician Kellie Templeman also contributed to this study.
This work was partly funded by Grant No. R01 EB004496-01 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and PHS Grant UL1 RR025008 from the Clinical and Translational Science Award program, NIH, National Center for Research Resources. The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NIH.
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]]>Bringing many minds to bear on a given program can lead to software that is both high quality and low cost, or even free. For example, the Linux operating system, which licenses its basic source code for free, is now used to run many servers in companies, government and academia.
The U.S. military is interested in open source, too, because it offers the potential for increased speed and flexibility, among other advantages. Scientists and engineers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are working with military agencies to maximize the open-source potential.
The efforts include helping make source-code tools and applications available and practical for military use, and supporting the Second Annual Working Group (WG2) Aug. 2-5 in Washington, D.C. The first meeting of the Military Open Source (Mil-OSS) working group was held at Georgia Tech in August of 2009, attracting more than 120 people from the military, industry and academia and featuring some 40 speakers.
"The military generally needs software changed quickly, but proprietary programs must be modified by the software's owners, which can take a long time," said Joshua L. Davis, co-founder of the community, coordinator of the event and a GTRI research scientist. "Open-source changes can be tackled by any member of a programming community and are usually delivered quickly, sometimes in hours."
Moreover, he added, the fact that open-source programs could be modified quickly in the field might become very important to the military.
Unlike proprietary programs, open-source software is developed collaboratively by programmers around the world, as in the case of Linux. Open-source web sites, such as SourceForge.net, allow software users and programmers to locate and develop open source programs. SourceForge recently reported more than 230,000 registered software projects and more than two million registered users.
There is a military equivalent of Sourceforge -- www.forge.mil. This secure site supports collaborative development and use of open-source and DoD-community software. Forge.mil, led by the Defense Information Systems Agency, requires users to have specific DoD certificates to register.
"Mil-OSS is an effort to build a grass-roots group across the DoD, potentially with international partners at some point," Davis said. "The aim is to bring software developers from the military and its contractors together to find opportunities for re-use and collaboration."
Davis envisions a soldier in a war zone having an urgent computing need that he or she can't provide -- perhaps a plug-in to add a needed feature. That soldier would place a request on the Mil-OSS website; a programmer in the U.S. could see it, write some code to satisfy the need, and then make that code available to the soldier.
"That's the way open source is done now in the civilian world," Davis said. "This approach could allow the military to be more effectively included in the collaboration process."
GTRI has already developed a secure web site that lets qualified users download the source code for software tools that are used to test tactical radio systems. The site allows GTRI personnel to communicate and collaborate with customers and other partners.
Davis is also developing a site that could become a repository for all open-source programs produced by Georgia Tech engineers and scientists.
"Basically, this site will publish work being done throughout Georgia Tech and will give folks from industry and the military a place to look at our capabilities," Davis said. "Also, by concentrating all that functionality in one searchable repository, we can give GTRI and Georgia Tech people a place to look for existing programs and help avoid redundancy in software development."
The August Mil-OSS gathering will address the push for military adoption of open-source software and technology and its associated collaborative innovation philosophies. This year's conference will focus on cyber security, among other topics, and is non-classified -- open to all interested parties.
Registration cost for the conference is $450 for attendees and $350 for speakers. The event will take place at the Waterview Conference Center in Washington.
For complete information on registration, attendance and other topics, visit http://www.mil-oss.org/.
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]]>The book, Principles of Modern Radar: Basic Principles, was authored by 15 radar engineers and scientists -- 12 of whom are associated or formerly associated with Georgia Tech. The 960-page work, published by SciTech Publishing Inc., was edited by Georgia Tech researchers Mark A. Richards, James A. Scheer and William A. Holm.
"The genesis of this publication can be found in the highly-respected Georgia Tech professional education short course entitled Principles of Modern Radar, which was first offered over 40 years ago," said Holm, a principal research scientist with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the associate vice provost for Distance Learning and Professional Education at Georgia Tech. "This book will be used to support that course, or any course that offers a complete, comprehensive introduction to radar technology."
The new work, he added, should not be confused with a 1987 text, also entitled Principles of Modern Radar and written by some of the same authors. The current publication is an entirely new effort handled by a different publisher.
"Radar technology has progressed very extensively during the last 20 years," said Richards, who is a principal research engineer in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the book's editor-in-chief. "The action today is in signal processing – that's where the technology has developed most significantly."
Consequently, he said, the new book provides an extensive treatment of signal processing along with thorough overviews of radar technology, subsystems and phenomenology. It also covers such cutting-edge transmitter-receiver technologies as phased-array radars and radar exciters.
Scheer noted that Principles of Modern Radar: Basic Principles is actually the first of a two-volume series. A volume on advanced radar concepts, largely by the same team of authors, is expected to be published by SciTech in 2011.
"The rapid evolution of hardware computing power has enabled software signal-processing techniques that can do so much more with a given radar signal, and this new work reflects that tremendous change," said Scheer, a retired GTRI engineer who continues to work and teach at Georgia Tech. "I would call it a comprehensive presentation of radar technology that also contains a relatively high level of signal-processing content. It can serve as a basic-principles text for radar courses or as a reference for practicing engineers."
In addition to the three editors, chapter contributors for Principles of Modern Radar: Basic Principles include: Christopher Bailey, GTRI; William Dale Blair, GTRI: Joseph A. Bruder, GTRI; Nicholas C. Currie, GTRI; Randy J. Jost, Utah State University; Byron M. Keel, GTRI; David G. Long, Brigham Young University; Jay Saffold, Research Network Inc., formerly with GTRI; Paul E. Schmid, Engineering Systems Inc.; John Shaeffer, formerly with GTRI; Gregory A. Showman, GTRI, and Tracy Wallace, GTRI.
More information on Principles of Modern Radar: Basic Principles can be found on the Web at http://www.scitechpub.com/pomr/.
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]]>Carbon nanoparticles activated by bursts of laser light trigger the tiny blasts, which open holes in cell membranes just long enough to admit therapeutic agents contained in the surrounding fluid. By adjusting laser exposure, the researchers administered a small-molecule marker compound to 90 percent of targeted cells -- while keeping more than 90 percent of the cells alive.
The research was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Institute of Paper Science and Technology at Georgia Tech. It will be reported in the August issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
"This technique could allow us to deliver a wide variety of therapeutics that now cannot easily get into cells," said Mark Prausnitz, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "One of the most significant uses for this technology could be for gene-based therapies, which offer great promise in medicine, but whose progress has been limited by the difficulty of getting DNA and RNA into cells."
The work is believed to be the first to use activation of reactive carbon nanoparticles by lasers for medical applications. Additional research and clinical trials will be needed before the technique could be used in humans.
Researchers have been trying for decades to drive DNA and RNA more efficiently into cells with a variety of methods, including using viruses to ferry genetic materials into cells, coating DNA and RNA with chemical agents or employing electric fields and ultrasound to open cell membranes. However, these previous methods have generally suffered from low efficiency or safety concerns.
With their new technique, which was inspired by earlier work on the so-called "photoacoustic effect," Prausnitz and collaborators Prerona Chakravarty, Wei Qian and Mostafa El-Sayed hope to better localize the application of energy to cell membranes, creating a safer and more efficient approach for intracellular drug delivery.
Their technique begins with introducing particles of carbon black measuring 25 nanometers -- one millionth of an inch -- in diameter into the fluid surrounding the cells into which the therapeutic agents are to be introduced. Bursts of near-infrared light from a femotosecond laser are then applied to the fluid at a rate of 90 million pulses per second. The carbon nanoparticles absorb the light, which makes them hot. The hot particles then heat the surrounding fluid to make steam. The steam reacts with the carbon nanoparticles to form hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
The two gases form a bubble which grows as the laser provides energy. The bubble collapses suddenly when the laser is turned off, creating a shock wave that punches holes in the membranes of nearby cells. The openings allow therapeutic agents from the surrounding fluid to enter the cells. The holes quickly close so the cell can survive.
The researchers have demonstrated that they could get the small molecule calcein, the bovine serum albumin protein and plasmid DNA through the cell membranes of human prostate cancer cells and rat gliosarcoma cells using this technique. Calcein uptake was seen in 90 percent of the cells at laser levels that left more than 90 percent of the cells alive.
"We could get almost all of the cells to take up these molecules that normally wouldn’t enter the cells, and almost all of the cells remained alive," said Prerona Chakravarty, the study's lead author. "Our laser-activated carbon nanoparticle system enables controlled bubble implosions that can disrupt the cell membranes just enough to get the molecules in without causing lasting damage."
To assess how long the holes in the cell membrane remained open, the researchers left the simulated therapeutics out of the fluid when the cells were exposed to the laser light, then added the agents one second after turning off the laser. They saw almost no uptake of the molecules, suggesting that the cell membranes resealed themselves quickly.
To confirm that the carbon-steam reaction was a critical factor driving the nanoblasts, the researchers substituted gold nanoparticles for the carbon nanoparticles before exposure to laser light. Because they lacked the carbon needed for reaction, the gold nanoparticles produced little uptake of the molecules, Prausnitz noted.
Similarly, the researchers substituted carbon nanotubes for the carbon nanoparticles, and also measured little uptake, which they explained by noting that the nanotubes are less reactive than the carbon black particles.
Experimentation further showed that DNA introduced into cells through the laser-activated technique remained functional and capable of driving protein expression. When plasmid DNA that encoded for luciferase expression was introduced into the cancer cells, production of luciferase increased 17-fold.
For the future, the researchers plan to study use of a less expensive nanosecond laser to replace the ultrafast femtosecond instrument used in the research. They also plan to optimize the carbon nanoparticles so that nearly all of them are consumed during the exposure to laser light. Leftover carbon nanoparticles in the body should produce no harmful effects, though the body may be unable to eliminate them, Prausnitz noted.
"This is the first study showing proof of principle for laser-activation of reactive carbon nanoparticles for drug and gene delivery," he said. "There is a considerable path ahead before this can be brought into medicine, but we are optimistic that this approach can ultimately provide a new alternative for delivering therapeutic agents into cells safely and efficiently."
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]]>“Our research team seeks to understand how certain molecules in a complex mixture can work together to form highly ordered assemblies that exhibit chemical properties similar to those associated with biological molecules,” said Nicholas V. Hud, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “Such a process was likely an essential and early stage of life, so we are also working to understand what chemicals were present on the prebiotic Earth and what processes helped these chemicals form the complex substances ultimately needed for life.”
Hud will direct the effort, which is known as the Center for Chemical Evolution. The five-year grant will support research in more than 15 laboratories at institutions including Georgia Tech, Emory University, the Scripps Research Institute, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Jackson State University, Spelman College, Furman University and the SETI Institute.
All of the researchers will work together to accomplish the Center for Chemical Evolution’s three main research goals:
Representatives from some of the partner institutions and the National Science Foundation (NSF) were on hand to mark the occasion with remarks and a ribbon cutting.
“The Georgia Research Alliance is proud to have at least two of our universities, Georgia Tech and Emory, collaborating with others on this project," said Susan Shows, senior vice president of the Georgia Research Alliance. "There are many groundbreaking programs under way on our campuses – more than my company can support in many cases. So when federal agencies put competitive funding into a program, it makes it easy for the GRA to know where to invest its strategic dollars."
Other speakers included: Charles Liotta, interim chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech; Pat Marsteller, director of the Emory College Center for Science Education at Emory University; Loren Williams, director of Tech’s NASA Ribosome Center; Katherine Covert, NSF program director for Integrative Chemistry Activities; and Matthew Platz, incoming director of the NSF Division of Chemistry.
]]>“There has been a long history with our alumni going out to be leaders in the PTFE field,” said Griffin. “Their work and accomplishments have continued to assure us that the school has consistently been one of the best in the country. While the school name will change, the importance that these alumni have in working with our faculty and students will continue.”
Students will still be able to study textile and fiber engineering under the new school. The new school will be the largest MSE program in the country with more than 55 faculty members and will serve as the hub of materials-related research at Georgia Tech. MSE is currently nationally ranked seventh in the undergraduate programs and eighth in graduate programs by U.S. News and World Report.
“The new school will be able to produce graduates who are well-rounded in the fundamentals of materials science and engineering, and who are prepared to meet the related needs of industry and government,” said Snyder. “They will be able to do this by specializing in tracks in virtually all areas of material types, functions, and phenomena.”
“We applaud the efforts of the faculty from both the schools to move in a direction that will respond to industry, academic and research needs and trends of the future,” said Don Giddens, Dean of the College of Engineering. “By merging the two schools, the opportunities for students and faculty alike will be broadened and go far beyond what is currently available.”
President Bud Peterson and Executive Vice President for Research Stephen Cross will open and close the day’s exchange. In between, forum participants will discuss the capital needed to move an idea from the lab to the marketplace, university strategies to support commercialization, and universities and regional economic development.
The invitation-only meeting is one of four such innovation forums. The University of Massachusetts, the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan have hosted each of the previous events.
In a statement on the forum, Locke said, “Universities have long been a critical driver of innovation in the U.S. We are committed to working with university leaders to increase the economic impact of our nation’s investment in research and development to help drive economic growth and job creation.”
Other administration officials planning to attend the forum are John Fernandez, assistant secretary of commerce for economic development; Travis Sullivan, director of the Commerce Department’s Office of Policy and Strategic Planning; and Patrick Gallagher, who directs the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In September 2009, Obama released his national innovation strategy, designed to promote sustainable growth and the creation of quality jobs. One part of the strategy — to invest in the building blocks of American innovation — has been implemented through increased support for fundamental research at U.S. universities by doubling the budgets of agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
]]>The Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI) will receive $1.3 million from the Economic Development Administration, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. That money will be matched by $1.3 million from the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), a public-private organization that supports development of technology industry in Georgia.
GCMI is a partnership of four of Georgia's leading research and health care organizations: the Georgia Institute of Technology, Saint Joseph's Translational Research Institute (SJTRI), Piedmont Healthcare, and the GRA. The Center will bring together the core members of the medical device community, including universities, research centers and clinicians; established drug and device companies; investors, and early-stage companies.
"One of Georgia's major research strengths is the ability to bring engineering together with the biosciences to create new solutions for health care problems," said Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. "The Global Center for Medical Innovation will help move innovations from the laboratory through the functional prototype stage, while coordinating the other commercialization activities necessary to bring them to market."
To be located in an existing building on 14th Street near the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta, the new facility will advance innovations that can be the basis for new products and new life-science companies. By providing comprehensive support services in one location, the Center will reduce the cost of developing and converting innovations into functional prototypes and clinical products.
"Investments being made in Georgia's research universities are creating the knowledge and innovation needed to grow our medical device industry," noted Mike Cassidy, president and CEO of the GRA. "We are supporting GCMI because it will help convert this knowledge and innovation into commercial products that will create jobs, new investments and new companies for Georgia."
The Economic Development Administration expects the center to generate $72 million in new investments and create or save 161 jobs.
The grants will support renovation of the facility to house design, material and mechanical engineering resources, along with state-of-the-art rapid and functional prototyping equipment capable of producing a wide range of medical devices for development, pre-clinical testing and clinical studies. Within the next two months, the Center will request proposals and bids for architectural and engineering services needed for the new facility.
Because of the research strengths of the participating institutions, the Center's initial focus will be on cardiology, orthopedics and pediatrics.
"Medical device companies in the Southeast have long been at a disadvantage compared to competitors elsewhere that have access to long-established support networks," said Nicolas Chronos, M.D., president of the Saint Joseph's Translational Research Institute. "This new center will help level the playing field, creating a single entity that will work with companies on comprehensive development activities. It will also provide a single location for investors seeking qualified medical device companies, and allow innovations created by multiple institutions to be combined to create more useful devices."
Projects developed in the Center could be hosted at SJTRI’s new 18-bed, hospital-based facility for phase one and "first in human" testing. The facility, scheduled to open in July, will focus on industry and government translational projects.
Bringing together physicians who have experience in treating patients with scientists and engineers on the cutting edge of technology will facilitate the development of revolutionary new devices that meet real-world medical needs.
"Physicians who treat patients every day have a very real understanding of the need for new technology, but they usually lack the resources to translate their ideas and solutions into new medical devices," said Jay S. Yadav, M.D., a cardiologist with Piedmont Heart Institute Physicians and CEO of Atlanta medical device company CardioMEMS. "By working with our partners in GCMI, we can meet the needs of our patients while creating new business opportunities."
Obtaining financing for new products and new companies is always a challenge for medical device innovators. The new Center will help advance device and technology innovations far enough to interest investors.
"With the difficult economy and increasing pressure to minimize risk, few investors or potential partners are willing to consider new medical device concepts without working prototypes that have undergone rigorous development and pre-clinical testing," noted William Schaeffer, a consultant working with GCMI. "The new prototyping center will offer the equipment and services necessary to bring new devices and technology to the stage at which they can attract interest from investors."
GCMI grew out of a decade or more of experience commercializing discoveries from laboratories at the partner institutions.
"For many years we have seen the need for a prototyping center that would provide medical device innovators with the support they need to quickly bring new innovations to market," said Wayne Hodges, executive director of the Center. "Our new facility will allow intellectual property developed in Atlanta, Georgia and the Southeast to remain here and provide long-term benefit as these innovations move into new products and new companies."
While the Center is being organized by Atlanta-based organizations, it is expected to attract device developers from the Southeast, strengthening Atlanta's role as a hub for medical technology development.
"We believe that this new facility will help expand the nucleus of medical device companies already here, making metro Atlanta, the state of Georgia and the Southeast a new hub for the world’s medical device industry," Schaeffer added.
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Writer: John Toon
]]>“Georgia Tech has long provided America with some of its top technological talent,” said Locke. “It is quickly turning Atlanta into a magnet for innovators and entrepreneurs.” He gave as an example Georgia Tech’s critical role in a decision announced Wednesday by HydroPhi Technology, a hydrogen energy company, to establish its headquarters, R&D center and factory in the Atlanta area, creating 300 jobs.
Locke talked about the important role that research universities have as drivers of economic activities. “The challenge is to make this high level of performance of commercialization and job creation the standard nationwide,” he said.
]]>Patches containing micron-scale needles that carry vaccine with them as they dissolve into the skin could simplify immunization programs by eliminating the use of hypodermic needles -- and their "sharps" disposal and re-use concerns. Applied easily to the skin, the microneedle patches could allow self-administration of vaccine during pandemics and simplify large-scale immunization programs in developing nations.
Details of the dissolving microneedle patches and immunization benefits observed in experimental mice were reported July 18th in the advance online publication of the journal Nature Medicine. Conducted by researchers from Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, the study is believed to be the first to evaluate the immunization benefits of dissolving microneedles. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"In this study, we have shown that a dissolving microneedle patch can vaccinate against influenza at least as well, and probably better than, a traditional hypodermic needle," said Mark Prausnitz, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Just 650 microns in length and assembled into an array of 100 needles for the mouse study, the dissolving microneedles penetrate the outer layers of skin. Beyond their other advantages, the dissolving microneedles appear to provide improved immunity to influenza when compared to vaccination with hypodermic needles.
"The skin is a particularly attractive site for immunization because it contains an abundance of the types of cells that are important in generating immune responses to vaccines," said Richard Compans, professor of microbiology and immunology at Emory University School of Medicine.
In the study, one group of mice received the influenza vaccine using traditional hypodermic needles injecting into muscle; another group received the vaccine through dissolving microneedles applied to the skin, while a control group had microneedle patches containing no vaccine applied to their skin. When infected with influenza virus 30 days later, both groups that had received the vaccine remained healthy while mice in the control group contracted the disease and died.
Three months after vaccination, the researchers also exposed a different group of immunized mice to flu virus and found that animals vaccinated with microneedles appeared to have a better "recall" response to the virus and thus were able to clear the virus from their lungs more effectively than those that received vaccine with hypodermic needles.
"Another advantage of these microneedles is that the vaccine is present as a dry formulation, which will enhance its stability during distribution and storage," said Ioanna Skountzou, an Emory University assistant professor.
Pressed into the skin, the microneedles quickly dissolve in bodily fluids, leaving only the water-soluble backing. The backing can be discarded because it no longer contains any sharps.
"We envision people getting the patch in the mail or at a pharmacy and then self administering it at home," said Sean Sullivan, the study’s lead author from Georgia Tech. "Because the microneedles on the patch dissolve away into the skin, there would be no dangerous sharp needles left over."
The microneedle arrays were made from a polymer material, poly-vinyl pyrrolidone, that has been shown to be safe for use in the body. Freeze-dried vaccine was mixed with the vinyl-pyrrolidone monomer before being placed into microneedle molds and polymerized at room temperature using ultraviolet light.
In many parts of the world, poor medical infrastructure leads to the re-use of hypodermic needles, contributing to the spread of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B. Dissolving microneedle patches would eliminate re-use while allowing vaccination to be done by personnel with minimal training.
Though the study examined only the administration of flu vaccine with the dissolving microneedles, the technique should be useful for other immunizations. If mass-produced, the microneedle patches are expected to cost about the same as conventional needle-and-syringe techniques, and may lower the overall cost of immunization programs by reducing personnel costs and waste disposal requirements, Prausnitz said.
Before dissolving microneedles can be made widely available, however, clinical studies will have to be done to assure safety and effectiveness. Other vaccine formulation techniques may also be studied, and researchers will want to better understand why vaccine delivery with dissolving microneedles has been shown to provide better protection.
Beyond those already mentioned, the study involved Jeong-Woo Lee, Vladimir Zarnitsyn, Seong-O Choi and Niren Murthy from Georgia Tech, and Dimitrios Koutsonanos and Maria del Pilar Martin from Emory University.
"The dissolving microneedle patch could open up many new doors for immunization programs by eliminating the need for trained personnel to carry out the vaccination," Prausnitz said. "This approach could make a significant impact because it could enable self-administration as well as simplify vaccination programs in schools and assisted living facilities."
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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon, Georgia Tech (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu), Holly Korschun, Emory University (404-727-3990) (hkorsch@emory.edu) or Abby Vogel Robinson, Georgia Tech (404-385-3364) (abby@innovate.gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
]]>"By replacing a hydrogen atom with a deuterium atom during the synthesis of several fluorescent probes, we increased the stability and shelf life of the dyes, and also improved their ability to detect smaller concentrations of reactive oxygen species," said Niren Murthy, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen that has a single proton and single neutron in its nucleus. Its atomic weight is therefore twice that of the much more common hydrogen atom, which lacks a neutron.
When Murthy and Coulter Department postdoctoral fellow Kousik Kundu designed and synthesized various fluorescent probes with deuterium instead of hydrogen, the dyes were not as susceptible to spontaneous degradation by air and light as their hydrogen counterparts, which made them significantly more accurate at detecting reactive oxygen species in cells and animals. The researchers studied probes that included dihydroethidium (DHE) -- the current "gold standard" for imaging reactive oxygen species -- and hydrocyanines.
Details of the research were published in the early view of the journal Angewandte Chemie International on July 20. The work was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
The study showed that while the standard fluorescent probe DHE was 60 percent oxidized by air and light after 10 days in storage, its deuterium counterpart was only 20 percent oxidized during that same time. These findings could have significant implications for companies that produce fluorescent probes and other compounds, according to Murthy, because commercializing and shipping the modified probes will be easier.
Another advantage for scientists using deuterium-containing fluorescent probes is that after reacting with reactive oxygen species, the probes produce the same fluorescent dye that their hydrogen counterparts produce.
"This is important from a practical standpoint because scientists have developed protocols with DHE and other fluorescent probes that they will be able to continue using by simply substituting the more stable and accurate deuterated version into the assay," explained Murthy.
Fluorescent probes detect reactive oxygen species by undergoing a chemical process called amine oxidation. The mechanism of amine oxidation for reactions involving reactive oxygen species differs significantly from reactions involving air and light. In addition, reactions with deuterium-containing probes occur at a much slower rate because deuterium is a heavier atom.
Murthy and Kundu decided to use these mechanistic and kinetic differences to selectively slow the oxidation of the fluorescent probes by air and light while maintaining their reactivity with cellular reactive oxygen species. To test the selective suppression of oxidation, the researchers examined the kinetic isotope effect -- a value that measures the ratio of the rate of a chemical reaction with hydrogen compared to the same reaction with deuterium to air and radical oxidation.
They investigated the ability of the deuterium-containing probes to compete with a common enzyme for superoxide -- a reactive oxygen species that is a form of molecular oxygen with one extra electron. The researchers found that the probes' oxidation mechanism with superoxide was different than for spontaneous oxidation because the two reactions exhibited different values for the kinetic isotope effect. Kinetic isotope effect values for spontaneous oxidation ranged from 3.7-4.7, whereas values for superoxide oxidation were between 2.5-2.8 for many different types of deuterium-containing fluorescent dyes, including DHE.
"This was the key experiment that demonstrated that there was a much larger difference in the way the hydrogen and deuterium compounds reacted to spontaneous oxidation than how they dealt with oxidation by a reactive oxygen species," explained Murthy.
Murthy's collaborators W. Robert Taylor and Sarah Knight tested the ability of both types of dyes to detect reactive oxygen species inside cells. Since the deuterium-containing probes were less affected by air and light and background fluorescence was suppressed, the researchers found that the dyes more accurately detected small amounts of reactive oxygen species. Knight is an Emory University postdoctoral fellow and Taylor is a professor in the Coulter Department, the director of Emory's Division of Cardiology, and a member of the Atlanta VA Medical Center's Division of Cardiology.
Following the cellular experiments, Knight and Coulter Department postdoctoral fellow Seungjun Lee investigated whether the kinetic isotope effect would similarly improve the ability of H-Cy7 -- a hydrocyanine dye developed by Murthy -- to detect radical oxidants in vivo. In experiments, the deuterium-containing version of Cy7 generated a 10-fold difference in fluorescence intensity versus control probes compared to only a five-fold difference for the hydrogen probe.
"This new process of replacing hydrogen with deuterium is potentially valuable because the positive results are universal among many different types and classes of probes," explained Murthy. "All of the modified probes generated less background fluorescence, while maintaining high reactivity with reactive oxygen species and generating similar levels of fluorescence in cells and animals stimulated to produce them."
Murthy indicated that although the kinetic isotope effect had been used to improve drug stability, it has never been used to improve probe development.
"Based on our results, we anticipate numerous applications of deuterated radical oxidant probes in biology and an increased application of the kinetic isotope effect in biological probe development," added Murthy.
This project is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Award Nos. EEC-9731643 and NSF Career BES-0546962) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Award Nos. UO1 HL80711-01, R21 EB006418, RO1 HL096796-01 and RO1 HL090584). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF or NIH.
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Writer: Abby Vogel Robinson
]]>Researchers from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University have devised a way to exploit the properties of extracellular DNA to create an imaging agent for injured tissue. Niren Murthy and Mike Davis recently published a paper in Organic Letters describing the creation of “Hoechst-IR.” This imaging agent essentially consists of the DNA-binding compound Hoechst 33258 (often used to stain cells before microscopy), attached to a dye that is visible in the near-infrared range. A water-loving polymer chain between the two keeps the new molecule from crossing cell membranes and binding DNA inside the cell.
Murthy’s group teamed up with Davis to show that after an artificial heart attack, mice injected with Hoechst-IR have the compound accumulate in the heart’s necrotic zone – where cardiac muscle cells are dying. They also demonstrated accumulation of the compound in the lungs of mice in a model of sepsis.
Murthy says his group is exploring other applications of this approach.
”We are currently looking at the synthesis of new molecules with new applications,” he said, “We believe this approach will be quite powerful and we are excited by the possible future directions our research will take this platform.”
]]>404-894-6016
]]>Launched in 2007, Tech Promise is designed to help academicallyqualified Georgia students whose families have an annual income of less than$33,300 (150 percent of the federal poverty level) earn their college degreedebt-free. To date, 93 studentshave graduated from Georgia Tech with the support of the program.
Picking up where Georgia’s HOPE scholarship and otherfinancial aid options leave off, the program is individually tailored for eachapplicant. Assistance includes scholarships, grants, and job opportunities thatallow eligible in-state students to attend Georgia Tech without the burden ofstudent loan debt.
Jillian Wilms, a junior chemical engineering major fromGainesville, Georgia, believes the program has given her opportunities that shemay not have had otherwise.
“I am pretty sure I would not have gone to a majoruniversity,” said Wilms. “I meetthe same qualifications as every other student. Tech Promise gives me theopportunity to have the same experience and not worry about money, but focus onmy education.”
Wilms is also enhancing her experience on campus by conducting10-12 hours a week of lab research focused on whether bacterialproteins can inhibit certain receptors on cancer cells as part of a work-studyassignment available through Tech Promise.
“Overall, the Tech Promise program has filled a verynecessary hole that often was a roadblock to students ultimately deciding tocome to Georgia Tech,” said Undergraduate Admission Director Rick Clark. “The program is giving students, likeJillian, the opportunity to have a cohesive four-year experience at GeorgiaTech and remain debt free, bringing in students that may not have necessarily havethought Georgia Tech was an option for them.”
Marie Mons, director, of Scholarships and Financial Aid,says the program plays an important role in keeping students on campus.
“If you study hard and get admitted to Georgia Tech and yourfamily is in a situation where you need the Tech Promise program, then we wantto make sure we put together a program that will help students not only get toTech but to graduate,” said Mons. “Thekey to the Tech Promise program is not only recruitment, but also retention.”
According to Mons, those interested in the Tech PromiseScholarship Program must first concentrate on being academically prepared. She’s hoping that news of the programwill inspire middle school and high school students who are interested inGeorgia Tech to study hard and work on their academics. The next step is to apply to GeorgiaTech.
An annual application is required for Tech Promise, andindividual evaluations are conducted to calculate each candidate’s specificfinancial needs. Students may reapply for up to four academic years (eightsemesters) of full-time enrollment. Levels of support/award in subsequent yearsare based on the student’s family’s financial situation and academic standing.The funding made available through Tech Promise will cover the published costof attendance at Georgia Tech.
For more information, visit the Tech Promise website at promise.gatech.edu.
]]>Sawczuk will lead activities of the ATDC -- Georgia Tech’s internationally-known accelerator for startup companies -- which helps Georgia technology entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies. ATDC also manages services designed to commercialize technology emerging from Georgia Tech laboratories and help Georgia companies win Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants.
Sawczuk has served the ATDC as assistant director for biosciences since October of 2009. Prior to that, she was CEO of Zygogen LLC, an Atlanta-based biotechnology company that advanced the use of zebrafish for drug screening. Before co-founding that company, she served in drug discovery, biotechnology consulting, and business development roles for several organizations in the Boston, Research Triangle Park and Southern California areas.
"It is an exciting time to be part of ATDC as this successful startup accelerator begins its fourth decade of helping Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build science and technology companies," Sawczuk said. "With the economy encouraging more people to start companies and ATDC’s membership now open to a broader group of enterprises, the organization has never been more important to the state’s entrepreneurs."
Sawczuk holds a master's degree in molecular and cellular biology from Harvard Medical School, an M.B.A. from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and a bachelor's degree in social and behavior sciences from Johns Hopkins University. She has served in a variety of positions with Georgia BIO, and as a member of the external review committee for the Georgia Research Alliance VentureLab Program.
Startup companies play a key role in creating new jobs and new economic activity for the state, region and nation, noted Stephen Fleming, a Georgia Tech vice president and executive director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute.
"Startups play an essential role in creating new jobs and growing the economy," he said. "We are proud of the many companies that have emerged from ATDC during its 30-year history, and we look to Nina to help Georgia Tech maintain its vital role in building Georgia’s economy."
ATDC is a startup accelerator that helps Georgia technology entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies. Founded in 1980, ATDC has helped create millions of dollars in tax revenues by graduating more than 120 companies, which together have raised more than a billion dollars in outside financing.
A year ago, ATDC expanded its mission by merging with Georgia Tech's VentureLab and with the Georgia SBIR Assistance Program. The change enabled ATDC to greatly extend its reach to serve more technology companies along multiple growth paths and at all stages of development. ATDC has opened its membership to all technology entrepreneurs in Georgia, from those at the earliest conception stage to the well-established, venture-fundable companies.
The program currently has more than 300 members within Georgia's technology community and recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. Forbes Magazine recently named ATDC to its new list of the "ten technology incubators that are changing the world." ATDC was the only incubator in the Southeast to be included on the Forbes list.
ATDC is part of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) at Georgia Tech, which helps Georgia enterprises improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology and innovation. ATDC currently has three facilities; two at Georgia Tech's main campus in Atlanta, and one at Georgia Tech's satellite campus in Savannah. It also conducts programming at other locations in metro Atlanta and beyond.
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Writer: John Toon
]]>The intent of OHR’s EmploymentLifecycle Survey Strategy is to have a core set of questions that are identicalthroughout the employment lifecycle, from new hire through mid-career, andfinally to exit. This will enable the Institute to identify attrition areas ofrisk as well as assess employee engagement.
]]>Rick Cavallaro, who earned a degree in aerospace engineering from Tech in 1984, is hoping to prove his theory on Friday using a vehicle he helped design and build. The attempted feat will take place in the dry El Mirage Lake bed in San Bernardino County, Calif.
His project has has been the source of frustration and debate for both engineers and physicists. But Cavallaro claims his vehicle has already traveled more than twice as fast than the wind during one test.
"It's so counterintuitive to so many people," Cavallaro said. "People on the Internet are saying it can't be done."
The vehicle – dubbed the Blackbird – is being sponsored by Google and Joby Energy and was helped constructed with assistance from San Jose State University.The North American Land Sailing Association will be on hand Friday to certify the results.
Cavallaro has been documenting the process and preparations at his website, www.fasterthanthewind.org, and hopes to quell the doubts of naysayers while opening up fascinating new possibilities regarding the potential of wind power.
"We don't claim it's perpetual motion," he said. "We're not saying we've solved all the transportation problems. But these are interesting new applications involving harvesting wind power."
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Mechanical engineering graduate Adam Christensen is working in the office of Washington State Congressman Jay Inslee who represents the North Seattle and the Puget Sound area. Tony Dickherber, a bioengineering graduate, is working with the National Cancer Institute while Richard Simmons and Jaqueline Tront are both assigned to the State Department.
Over the past few decades, ASME Federal Fellows have distinguished themselves as key advisors on standards, nanotechnology, risk analysis, critical infrastructure, energy, education, aerospace, manufacturing, technology development and other national issues of the day. More information on the ASME Federal Fellows program can be found at the link below.
]]>At Georgia Tech funding will be used for radiation detection and nuclear materials equipment to enhance nuclear education and research. Fellowship winners will receive $50,000 a year for three years to help pay for graduate studies and research, while each scholarship student will receive $5,000 to help cover the education costs for the coming year.
]]>Peterson and his wife, Val, are traveling the state from north to south July 12 – 16. Stops will include Young Harris, Athens, Watkinsville, Greensboro, Perry, Warner Robins, Fort Valley, Lyons, Vidalia and Albany.
This is the second annual state tour for the Petersons. As new residents of Georgia, Peterson initiated the visits last year to provide an opportunity to meet face-to-face with alumni, students, state leaders and other friends to share updates on Georgia Tech and to listen to questions and concerns. Stops for the 2009 tour included Columbus, Macon, Savannah, Brunswick and Augusta.
In order to receive the daily report, you must have a Georgia Tech e-mail address. Since Georgia Tech has purchased the rights only for internal distribution of the news featured in the News Buzz, it may not be legally republished or distributed to persons or entities outside the Institute
The Daily News Buzz is available upon request by e-mailing Lisa Grovenstein at lisa.grovenstein@comm.gatech.edu.
Despitea 3.8 percent increase in Georgia’s net revenue collections for June 2010 (thefinal month of FY10), revenues dropped 9.1 percent over FY09. As aresult, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget (OPB) advised all stateagencies that beginning in August, OPB will withhold 4 percent of the monthlyagency allocation.
Inaddition, current economic conditions have necessitated that the state utilizethe last of the federal stimulus funding to offset budget deficits, thusleaving none of this stimulus funding available for use in FY11. As a result ofthis loss and the additional 4 percent cut, Georgia Tech will begin thiscurrent fiscal year with a $12.2 million reduction in the FY11 budget. This isin addition to the cuts sustained by Georgia Tech over the past two fiscalyears, which have totaled $67 million, or 24 percent of the total stateappropriation base.
Whilethis is certainly not good news, in anticipation of continued declines inrevenues, we have been tracking the state revenue numbers and preparing for thepossibility of reductions in both the FY11 and FY12 budgets. In response to therequest from the University System of Georgia, we are assessing the impact of thesereductions to our state allocation and preparing budgets that incorporate 4, 6 and 8percent reductions to the original FY11 budget, for submission to the Board of Regentsin early August. It is important to note that these reductions are to thestate appropriation, which only provides a portion of our funding, making theactual projected reduction below the 4 to 8 percent range.
We have communicated thissituation to the vice presidents and deans and will keep you informed as wedevelop a strategy for handling the reduction planning. Foremost in ourefforts will be to ensure that we preserve the core mission of the Institutewhile maintaining our investment in the future.
I thank you for yourcontinued patience and support as we analyze the impact of these planningscenarios on the Institute and prepare for the coming year.
G. P. “Bud” Peterson,President
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But although these adsorbent materials do a good job of trapping the carbon dioxide, commonly-used techniques for separating the CO2 from the amine materials -- thereby regenerating them for re-use -- seem unlikely to be suitable for high-volume industrial applications.
Now, researchers have demonstrated a relatively simple regeneration technique that could utilize waste steam generated by many facilities that burn fossil fuels. This steam-stripping technique could produce concentrated carbon dioxide ready for sequestration in the ocean or deep-earth locations -- while readying the amine materials for further use.
"We have demonstrated an approach to developing a practical adsorption process for capturing carbon dioxide and then releasing it in a form suitable for sequestration," said Christopher Jones, a professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The research was reported online June 23, 2010 in the early view version of the journal ChemSusChem. The work was supported by New York-based Global Thermostat, LLC., a company that is developing and commercializing technology for the direct capture of carbon dioxide from the air.
Amine sorbents are often regenerated through a process that involves a change in temperature to supply the energy required to break the amine-carbon dioxide chemical bonds.
For convenience, researchers commonly remove the CO2 by heating the amine material in the presence of a flowing gas such as nitrogen or helium. That removes the carbon dioxide, but mixes it with the flowing gas -- regenerating the material, but leaving the CO2 mixed with nitrogen or helium.
Another approach is to heat the material in a carbon dioxide stream, but that is less efficient and can lead to fouling of the amine.
Jones and his team from Georgia Tech, SRI International and Global Thermostat took a different approach, heating the sorbent amine in steam at a temperature of approximately 105 degrees Celsius, causing the carbon dioxide to separate from the material. The steam can then be compressed, condensing the water and leaving a concentrated flow of carbon dioxide suitable for sequestration or other use -- such as a nutrient for algae growth.
Because most coal-burning facilities generate steam, some of that might be bled off to achieve the separation and regeneration without a significant energy penalty. "In many facilities, steam at this temperature would have no other application, so using it for this purpose would not have a significant cost to the plant," Jones noted.
The researchers studied three common formulations of the amine material: Class 1 adsorbents based on porous supports impregnated with monomeric or polymeric amines, Class 2 adsorbents that are covalently linked to a solid support, and Class 3 adsorbents based on porous supports upon which aminopolymers are polymerized in-situ, starting from an amine-containing monomer.
The adsorbents were studied through three cycles of carbon dioxide adsorption and steam-stripping. The researchers found differences in how each material was affected by the steam-stripping; performance of the most stable material actually improved, while the least stable material suffered a 13 percent efficiency decline.
"Steam-stripping is widely used in other separation processes, but has never been reported for use with supported amine materials, perhaps due to concerns about sorbent stability," Jones said. "We reported three uses of the materials in the paper and have only tested them through five or six uses, but we expect the materials could be used many more times. To be practical, the amine-containing materials need to be useful through thousands of cycles."
Pilot-scale carbon dioxide separation facilities are already in operation using amines dissolved in water. Because of the energy required to regenerate the liquid solutions, many researchers have been examining solid amines -- but the work so far has focused mostly on improving the efficiency of the materials, he added.
Though much remains to be done before solid amine materials can be used in large-scale applications, Jones believes the study demonstrates that improved materials can be developed with properties tailored for the steam regeneration process.
"We believe there is potential for development of materials that will be stable for long-term use during regeneration using this technique," he said. "This study lays the groundwork for an array of future studies that will lead to an understanding of the structural changes induced by steam-stripping."
In addition to Jones, the research team included Wen Li, Sunho Choi and Jeffery Drese from Georgia Tech, Marc Hornbostel and Gopala Krishnan from SRI International, and Peter M. Eisenberger of Global Thermostat, LLC.
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Writer: John Toon
]]>“Our research team seeks to understand how certain molecules in a complex mixture can work together to form highly ordered assemblies that exhibit chemical properties similar to those associated with biological molecules,” said Nicholas V. Hud, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “Such a process was likely an essential and early stage of life, so we are also working to understand what chemicals were present on the prebiotic Earth and what processes helped these chemicals form the complex substances ultimately needed for life.”
Hud will direct the effort, which is known as the Center for Chemical Evolution. The five-year grant will support research in more than 15 laboratories at institutions including Georgia Tech, Emory University, the Scripps Research Institute, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Jackson State University, Spelman College, Furman University and the SETI Institute.
All of the researchers will work together to accomplish the Center for Chemical Evolution’s three main research goals:
“We will work backward from the complex substances found in living organisms today, such as proteins and DNA, and make materials that are a little bit different and simpler in chemical structure,” explained Hud. “We will then strive to determine if there were possibly chemicals and conditions on the early Earth that would have given rise to these and similar substances.”
In addition, the researchers will translate technological developments into commercially viable products. Facundo Fernandez, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is leading the Center’s commercialization efforts.
For the first research theme, which is being led by Georgia Tech chemistry professor Thomas Orlando, creating a model inventory of the chemicals present on the early Earth will require the development of new tools and approaches for analyzing and sorting complex mixtures.
“Complex mixtures are found in many chemical industries -- including petroleum, food and pharmaceuticals,” said Fernandez. “The instruments and protocols we develop to sort through the complex mixtures that result from model prebiotic chemical reactions are going to be valuable to these industries too.”
Charles Liotta, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is leading the second research theme, which involves exploring alternative media that could have facilitated the assembly of complex substances in the prebiotic world. This research could produce environmentally-friendly procedures leading to new chemical processes, according to the team.
In the third research theme, led by David Lynn, chair of the Department of Chemistry at Emory University, and Ram Krishnamurthy, an associate professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute, methods will be developed to create polymers and assemblies that mimic natural macromolecules, such as DNA and proteins. The resulting methods could be used as a platform to create a range of substances with broad commercial applications across the spectrum of therapeutics, diagnostics and drug delivery materials. Lynn will also lead the Center’s education and public outreach programs.
The research efforts of the Center will build on the knowledge and results gained during the past three years, during which time a smaller group of laboratories were funded by the National Science Foundation to conduct collaborative research projects and to develop a larger center.
Research progress made during the initial phase of funding includes a paper published June 14 in the journal ChemBioChem. Center laboratories showed for the first time that guanine, a component of DNA, could be produced from formamide (H2NCOH), a simple chemical known to exist in outer space.
Previous research had shown that the other three building blocks of nucleic acids -- cytosine, adenine and uracil -- could be synthesized by heating formamide in the presence of mineral catalysts, but not guanine.
Center researchers produced guanine from formamide by subjecting the sample to ultraviolet light during the heating process. The results also demonstrated that guanine, adenine and another building block called hypoxanthine could be produced at lower temperatures than previously reported.
“Our ultimate goal is to create a complete chemical pathway showing how relatively simple substances can interact with the environment and each other to spontaneously produce complex assemblies that exhibit properties normally associated with biological substances, and perhaps shed some light on the earliest stages of life on Earth,” noted Hud.
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Writer: Abby Vogel Robinson
]]>Scientists at Emory University School of Medicine, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania described the device in an article published this week in the journal Analytical Chemistry.
What a patient with a tumor wants to know after surgery can be expressed succinctly: "Did you get everything?" Statistics indicate that complete removal, or resection, is the single most important predictor of patient survival for most solid tumors.
"This technology could allow a surgeon to directly visualize where the tumors are, in real time. In addition, a post-surgery scan could check tumor margins," said Shuming Nie, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "A major challenge is to completely remove the tumor as well as identify lymph nodes that may be involved."
The SpectroPen can be used to detect fluorescent dyes, and also scattered light from tiny gold particles, a technology that Nie and his colleagues have been refining.
The particles consist of polymer-coated gold, coupled to a reporter dye and an antibody that sticks to molecules on the outsides of tumor cells more than it sticks to normal cells. Through an effect called surface-enhanced Raman scattering, the gold in the particle greatly amplifies the signal from the reporter dye. Nie and his team have been able to show that the particles can detect tumors smaller than one millimeter grafted into rodents.
The SpectroPen combines a near-infrared laser and a detector for fluorescence or scattered light. It is connected by a fiber optic cable to a spectrometer that can record fluorescence and Raman signals.
In the Analytical Chemistry paper, the researchers used the pen to detect the dye indocyanine green, infused intravenously into mice with implanted human breast cancer cells. The dye accumulates at a higher rate in tumor cells because of the leaky blood vessels and membranes surrounding tumors. The SpectroPen’s signal from the tumor is ten times higher than from normal tissue. Indocyanine green has been approved by the FDA for purposes such as measuring cardiac output and liver function.
The cancer cells had a gene from fireflies added, so that tumors glow after the mice are given a "luciferin" solution. This allowed the scientists to check that the outline of the tumor seen through the SpectroPen matched the glow.
"Our in vivo studies demonstrate that the tumor borders can be precisely detected preoperatively and intraoperatively, and that the contrast signals are strongly correlated with tumor bioluminescence," Nie said.
In the laboratory, the fluorescence and Raman signals are resolvable when the nanoparticles are buried 5-10 mm deep in fresh animal tissues. However, the gold nanoparticles are 40 to 50 times more sensitive than fluorescent dyes.
Future plans include in vivo tests of the nanoparticle contrast agents, along with the SpectroPen.
The research was carried out by an interdisciplinary team of senior investigators including May Wang, Coulter Department at Georgia Tech and Emory University; Sunil Singhal, University of Pennsylvania; and James Provenzale and Brian Leyland-Jones, Emory University. They are developing an integrated spectroscopic and wide-field color imaging system for image-guided surgery and cancer detection during surgery using animal models.
Provenzale and surgeons at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine are currently using this device to operate on dogs with naturally occurring tumors. Singhal, who is director of the Thoracic Surgery Research Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, is applying to conduct clinical trials involving patients with lung cancer.
The research was supported by a Grand Opportunities (GO) grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the NIH Director’s Office, and by the NCI Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE) at Emory and Georgia Tech.
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Writer: Emory University
]]>The GTRI system, called the Collaborative Unmanned Systems Technology Demonstrator (CUSTD), employs two small-scale aircraft and a full-size automobile to perform a complex, interactive mission without human intervention. The demonstration system uses onboard computers running advanced collaborative-vehicle software -- along with novel sensors and open standards-based communications and interfaces -- to create an autonomous system with unique capabilities.
GTRI's CUSTD system will take part in Robotics Rodeo 2010, scheduled for Oct. 12-15 at Fort Benning, Ga. The Rodeo is hosted by the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC), based near Detroit. A number of invited robotic-research teams will demonstrate their work at the event.
"We believe our system represents the leading edge of demonstrating collaborative autonomous vehicle capabilities," said Lora Weiss, a principal research engineer who is a member of GTRI's Unmanned and Autonomous Systems team. "This system demonstrates not only the collaborative interoperability possible among dissimilar vehicles, but also the numerous sensing technologies that can be included onboard as interchangeable payloads -- chemical and infrared sensors, still and video cameras, and sophisticated signal- and data-processing."
The GTRI system uses two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have nine-foot wingspans, seven-pound scientific-instrument payloads, and global positioning systems (GPS) for navigation. The unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is a full-size Porsche Cayenne.
The aircraft require human guidance during takeoff, but while aloft they become autonomous for both navigation and target-locating tasks. The Porsche -- the same “Sting” vehicle entered by Georgia Tech in the DARPA Urban Challenge -- is fully autonomous.
"The vehicles' very dissimilarity helps them collaborate effectively," said Charles Pippin, a GTRI research scientist who led the CUSTD effort.
Fast-moving unmanned air vehicles, he explained, can find targets over a wide area, but their altitude and the limitations of their lightweight sensors can lessen the quality of gathered data. However, the UAVs can call in an unmanned ground vehicle -- equipped with large, complex sensors and cameras -- to analyze the target location more fully.
Personnel from several GTRI units have participated in the CUSTD effort, said Pippin, who like Weiss is a member of GTRI's Unmanned and Autonomous Systems team. CUSTD's current capabilities are based on extensive research and testing, including more than 50 test flights conducted at Fort Benning and other locations throughout the past year.
A demonstration opportunity such as the Robotics Rodeo, Pippin said, allows researchers to dramatize how well multiple autonomous robots can now collaborate.
"It's hard to illustrate the effectiveness of collaborative interoperability and autonomy algorithms in a simulation," he said. "When onlookers see the technology demonstrated on hardware platforms, then it becomes very real."
In a typical CUSTD scenario, the two aircraft search for an existing target over a wide area. When one plane spots the target, it radios its location using GPS coordinates to the unmanned ground vehicle, which then finds its way around buildings and along roads to the target.
At the same time, the unmanned air vehicle over the target can ask the second aircraft to fly to the target and use its sensors to further analyze the situation. Such flexibility can be important, Pippin said, because UAVs are often outfitted with different sensors due to weight and cost considerations.
One technique that is still under development at GTRI -- and is proving valuable for vehicle collaboration -- is called market-based auctions, Pippin said. This approach uses an "auction" type of algorithm that lets robotic vehicles "bid" on a given task. Using this method, unmanned vehicles can autonomously divide up work on the spot in the most efficient way.
In an auction-technology scenario, an unmanned air vehicle over a target might send out a bid to other nearby UAVs, asking which among those airplanes that are outfitted with a particular sensor is closest to the target. The UAV that best complies with both requirements – equipment and proximity -- wins the bid.
In a GTRI experiment, unmanned air vehicles using a market-based approach reduced the travel required to complete a task by nearly 50 percent. The result was a substantial saving in both time and fuel.
Weiss explained that GTRI's CUSTD system is standards compliant, an important consideration in current defense-technology development. All GTRI autonomous-system designs now comply with the Standard Interface of the Unmanned Control System for NATO UAV interoperability (STANAG 4586) and with the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) scripting language.
"By developing these systems to be STANAG and JAUS compliant, we're building in future interoperability with other unmanned systems produced by different vendors," Weiss said. "If upcoming systems are going to be able to communicate, as well as operate with the control-system designs now being developed, they’ll need to be standards compliant."
The CUSTD system also makes use of FalconView™, a Windows-based mapping application developed by GTRI for the Department of Defense. FalconView supports many map types, such as aeronautical charts, satellite images and elevation maps. FalconView can be used by a ground-based station to monitor and control the system.
In the past several years, GTRI has been bringing autonomous vehicle research under one umbrella that includes all aspects of systems-payload, sensor, autonomy logic and collaborative operations. Research now also includes unmanned underwater vehicles and space vehicles.
The Robotics Rodeo will consist of two separate events. The Extravaganza is open to the public. The Robotic Technology Observation, Demonstration and Discussion (RTOD2), closed to the public, allows research teams to demonstrate their technologies to government observers and contractors.
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Writer: Rick Robinson
]]>All speaker stations will be tested simultaneously playing the following test message at least two times or more to ensure valid testing. Then each speaker station will be individually tested.
The test message is:
"Attention. Attention. This is a test of the Georgia Tech Emergency Notification System. This is only a test. This is a test of the Georgia Tech Emergency Notification System. This is only a test.”
The Siren Warning System is comprised of seven speaker stations located across campus. Designed to notify people who are outdoors, the system complements the Georgia Tech Emergency Notification System (GTENS) which delivers time-sensitive emergency messages in the form of e-mail, voice mail and text messages to the campus community.
The SWS will only be used for emergency situations, monthly testing or special testing.
For more information on emergency preparedness, visit
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]]>U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced the selected projects on Monday. The projects announced are based in 18 states with 36 percent of projects led by universities, 33 percent by small businesses, 24 percent by large businesses, five percent by national labs and two percent by non-profits. These awards complete ARPA-E’s grants under its Recovery Act funding. In three rounds of awards since last year, the agency has selected a total of 117 projects for $349 million in funding, supporting research that can deliver breakthrough changes in how the U.S. generates, stores and utilizes energy.
The Georgia Tech projects, partners and respective funding are as follows:
ARPA-E received 529 initial concept papers and encouraged approximately 164 applicants to submit full applications. Multiple review panels composed of leading U.S. science and technology experts reviewed each proposal and made recommendations based on scientific and technical merit and the potential to dramatically advance national energy and economic goals. Potential additional applications for funding innovative research projects are pending further review.
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