As pump prices gyrate and global temperatures rise, the world’s dependence on hydrocarbon fossil fuels looks increasingly precarious. Elevated greenhouse gas levels and a string of particularly destructive storms have created new interest in ways to reduce impacts on the world’s environment and slow climate change.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, young companies arising from the Institute’s $500 million-per-year research program are developing cleaner, more-sustainable technologies. Focusing mainly on cleaner production or more efficient use of energy, these ventures are converting research discoveries into applications with broad benefits.
“Clean technologies have very significant environmental and economic promise,” says Stephen Fleming, vice provost of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, and director of its Commercialization Services Division. “Several companies based on Georgia Tech research are producing clean-tech products today here in Georgia or are knocking at that door, and numerous others show real promise.”
Commercialization Services identifies, evaluates and promotes Georgia Tech research discoveries that show commercial potential. Most such discoveries fall into two categories: those that may be licensed to established corporations, and those few – about one in 10 – that can provide foundations for new companies.
The VentureLab program of the Georgia Research Alliance supports development of those companies through grants and other assistance that helps them get started. Here are some highlights of Georgia Tech’s “green” companies:
Suniva Inc. began manufacturing high-efficiency crystalline-silicon photovoltaic cells in October 2008 at a 73,000-square-foot facility in Norcross, Ga. Suniva is the Southeast’s first maker of solar cells, and it has plans to expand quickly.
Using technology based on the research of Georgia Tech Regents’ professor Ajeet Rohatgi, the company is presently manufacturing its ARTisun™ solar cells at a rate of 32 megawatts (MW) annually – which would produce enough electricity to supply about 6,300 homes, Rohatgi says.
Suniva plans to triple its annual output to nearly 100 MW. The company currently employs about 70 people and expects to add more staff as it grows.
Suniva uses a patented technology it calls Star™ to extract maximum performance from wafers of mono-crystalline silicon, a material often used for solar power generation.
A solar cell contains several layers, and every layer plays a role in the cell’s overall efficiency. Rohatgi has studied solar cells in depth for some 30 years, learning how to optimize each layer to get maximum output – at the least cost.
“We want to be right at the sweet spot,” explains Rohatgi, who is both Suniva’s founder and chief technology officer. “We want cells that are highly efficient but low in cost, and that can generate power at a cost comparable to the power you buy from the electric company.”
Rohatgi’s solar-cell research has received significant funding over many years from the U.S. Department of Energy.
“Suniva is a shining example of how government support for research can lead to very real job creation,” notes Robert Knotts, director of federal relations for Georgia Tech. “It’s a strong reminder of why we should invest in research.”
Suniva’s current solar-cell output falls in the 17- to 18-percent efficiency range, which Rohatgi classifies as high, especially among lower-cost cells. But the company is continuing to improve its technology, and recently the National Renewable Energy Laboratory certified a new Suniva cell and cell structure at 20 percent efficiency.
Suniva is a graduate of Georgia Tech’s Commercialization Services, which evaluates the commercial potential of technology developed at Georgia Tech and helps faculty members and other research staff form companies based on their research. In early 2008, Suniva joined the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), Georgia Tech’s science and technology incubator. It graduated from that program in April 2009.
To date, Suniva has received total funding of $55.5 million from several venture capital organizations, including Menlo Park, Calif.-based New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Even more significant, Suniva now has contracts worth more than $1 billion through 2013.
Rohatgi, who runs the University Center of Excellence for Photovoltaic Research and Education in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, gained one important advantage early on: first-class management.
“With the help of NEA and Commercialization Services, Suniva has assembled a great management team with enormous experience in running technology manufacturing companies,” he says. “Being able to put together such a well-established team played a big role in my decision to start the company.”
Suniva’s chairman and CEO, John W. Baumstark, is a technology-industry veteran with wide experience that includes serving as CEO of DWL before its acquisition by IBM and as chief operating officer of TRADEX Technologies before and during its acquisition by Ariba Inc. for $5.6 billion in 2000.
The company’s vice president of manufacturing, Stephen P. Shea, ran BP Solar’s manufacturing line for many years. Daniel L. Meier, vice president of research and development, has worked for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and has managed R&D for two other companies.
“In the next two to three years, we expect the quality-price balance of our product will put us at grid parity at a dollar per watt,” Baumstark says. That means power from Suniva cells would cost about the same as buying power from an electric company.
Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN) is using cutting-edge computer models to develop weather and climate forecasts on time scales from days to decades. The three-year-old company caters to clients needing forecast products beyond the traditional five-day forecasts provided by the National Weather Service, such as energy and insurance companies.
CFAN’s capabilities include proprietary extended-range hurricane forecasting. They’ve been providing this service for an energy-sector company for two years. CFAN’s forecasts help that company manage both its energy-production and energy-trading activities in advance of a storm.
Last summer, CFAN correctly informed this energy-sector client that Hurricane Ike would strike Houston directly. What’s more, CFAN did so a week before the storm hit land, several days ahead of other forecasters.
“Our clients took a direct hit on this one,” says Judith Curry, professor and chair of the Georgia Tech School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and a CFAN principal. “They used our forecasts for all their storm-related logistics, including evacuation.”
Companies in the retail sector also have a strong stake in accurate hurricane forecasts, she explains. For example, building supply companies want to move plywood and other materials to the correct hurricane target area. Sending it to the wrong spot can mean a financial loss.
Other CFAN clients include the insurance sector, which wants weather models that anticipate storm and flooding risks over the next 10 to 30 years. Insurance companies seek such data, Curry says, because they believe that ongoing climate change will alter future weather patterns.
CFAN’s secret?
“Let’s just say we have a proprietary multi-model statistical dynamical method that includes European weather models,” says Peter J. Webster, a School of Earth and Atmospheric Science professor who is also a CFAN principal. “We give a customized forecast product to each client. They come to us with a particular problem requiring particular forecasting, and we come up with a product just for them.”
Like most Georgia Tech companies, CFAN has its roots in a research project. Webster was developing flood forecasts for the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, an organization that works to prevent loss of life from storm-related flooding in such vulnerable countries as Bangladesh.
That work brought the team to the attention of Ben Hill, a technology advisor for Georgia Tech Commercialization Services. He told them their research might have the right stuff to be the basis of a new company.
Today CFAN has a scientific staff of eight, income approaching seven figures and good prospects.
The company has also worked with the World Bank, helping the Caribbean adapt to climate change. At issue: finding ways for those regions to deal with rising sea levels, more hurricanes and less rainfall.
Says Curry: “The whole issue of climate services is becoming potentially a growth area as companies, resources managers and agencies grapple with climate variability and change.”
RideCell aims to make existing urban transportation more efficient by making it more accessible.
This young company covers both the private and public sides of the street. It uses technology that’s already in the hands of millions – mobile phones and global positioning system (GPS) chips – to offer on-demand car pooling that’s safe as well as flexible. It can also supply mobile-phone users with the kind of information – including schedules and actual in-route arrival times – that increases the usability of public transit systems like MARTA and localized systems such as Georgia Tech’s Stinger buses.
“Think of it as accessing all modes of transit via your mobile phone, in real time,” says RideCell CEO Dave Kaufman. “We want to make car pooling, van pooling and MARTA much more attractive and reliable options than they are now.”
In today’s Atlanta, he explains, 71 percent of people ride in single-occupancy vehicles, while only 10 percent of 2.5 million commuters car pool. The top reason that people continue using their private vehicles is flexibility. If they need to work late, or leave early to pick up a sick child, they don’t want to be tied to a car pooling schedule.
RideCell’s service, based on technology developed by Stephen L. Dickerson, an emeritus professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering, can make car pooling almost as convenient as that personal car, says company chief technology officer Aarjav Trivedi. A user can input travel time, destination and other preferences into a RideCell-enabled mobile phone, then watch as the system shoots back a range of ride options that offers smoking and even gender-preference choices.
The first concern people raise for a system like this involves security, Trivedi acknowledges.
“It’s not as simple as just matching people up – developing trust is key,” he says. “Everyone wants to be sure the ride they’re getting is a safe one.”
RideCell’s solution, he says, is “limited networks of trust” based on existing social networks. A corporate or university directory would represent one such existing network. Georgia Tech faculty and staff, for example, could agree to ride with other Georgia Tech employees.
A multi-layered registration process would ensure that only bona fide staff would find their way into the RideCell system. Various kinds of vehicle and/or driver identification, from license-plate numbers and online photos to on-vehicle decals, might heighten security.
RideCell even uses the mobile phone’s Bluetooth capability to automate authentication between driver and rider. And GPS-tracking technology could detect when a vehicle went off course, which might signal trouble.
Once established, individual networks of trust could combine forces. For example, Georgia Tech employees could agree to share ride information with employees from nearby Coca-Cola.
RideCell is still working on its software, and not every mobile phone can host the company’s system – although text messaging enables coverage of most of the mobile market. In addition, RideCell has made its product available to in-car GPS platforms including Dash Express.
RideCell’s software even includes an integrated-billing function. The system adjusts subscriber accounts for transportation in either private vehicles or van pools – riders get billed, drivers get a credit.
“And that’s just the beginning,” says company founder Dickerson. “This technology can be extended to high-occupancy toll lanes and even traffic metering, which could save billions in infrastructure build-out.”
RideCell is already moving into the real world of convenient car pooling. The company is setting up a system trial involving some 150 Georgia Tech faculty, students and staff. It’s hoped that the trial, performed in cooperation with Georgia Tech Parking and Transportation, will help iron out software glitches and provide a major step toward wider deployment.
Why would people give up their beloved private vehicles to car pool or take MARTA?
Trivedi says there are several motivations. One is that gasoline prices can be expected to go back up – maybe not tomorrow but soon. A second is that “many people really do want to be green.” A third is that some want to limit wear and tear on their cars – or avoid having to own a car at all.
“And some people simply like riding with other people,” he adds.
Many ventures aim to conserve oil, but few specifically target engine oil.
Qoil uses a patent-pending electrochemical sensor to continually evaluate the condition of lubricating oil. Its technology can provide data on not only the motor oil but also on the engine it’s protecting.
“Historically, it’s been cheaper just to change your oil every 3,000 miles than to take a chance on damaging your engine,” says Frank Mess, CEO of Qoil (pronounced “coil”). “The net result is that hundreds of millions of barrels of oil or more are wasted every year as perfectly good motor oil is thrown out.”
Currently, he explains, vehicle-fleet owners who want to evaluate engine oil must have samples extracted and sent to a lab. It’s a bit like what diabetics had to go through before portable blood testing equipment, he says. It’s laborious, and periodic lab results are generally a poor substitute for on-the-spot information.
Qoil’s technology provides real-time electrochemical analysis of engine oil by placing sensors in the oil flow. The result is that owners can extract maximum life from their increasingly expensive motor oil. And, by monitoring for early signs of engine damage, the Qoil approach can help head off expensive repairs.
Based on the research of Steven Danyluk, the Morris M. Bryan Jr. Chair in Mechanical Engineering for Advanced Manufacturing Systems at Georgia Tech, Qoil’s sensors initially make the most sense for fleet vehicles, Mess says. But private vehicles could also benefit as the technology becomes more widespread and affordable. The company is also working with potential customers in other industrial segments who need to protect high-value engines and gearboxes.
Qoil now has 24 prototype oil-monitoring systems operational on commercial vehicles in the field. These installations use a bypass flow loop, in which oil flows past the sensor and back into the engine. Ultimately, Mess says, the sensor will likely be threaded straight into an engine port.
Signals from the sensor are processed and transmitted to Qoil’s analysis system in Atlanta, where the company uses internally developed algorithms to analyze the data and produce detailed reports on oil and engine health.
“We’ve had significant success in monitoring the chemical degradation of the oil as a function of time, as well as successes in detecting early failure symptoms that prevented expensive equipment failures,” Mess says.
In addition to VentureLab seed funding, Qoil has received a first round of venture capital. Qoil sensors are currently being manufactured in-house, but the company has engaged external partners as it prepares to ramp up production.
The company is a member of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC).
Other companies growing at Georgia Tech include:
Vehicle Monitoring Technology (VMT) monitors vehicle activity and vehicle emissions in conjunction with driver behavior to promote safety, better air quality and energy efficiency. Its technologies are based on the research of Randall Guensler, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Jennifer Ogle, now at Clemson University. Guensler and Ogle are also principals in the company.
VMT is currently providing monitoring services for vehicle activity and emissions in various U.S. localities. The company specializes in several areas including technology development for instrumented vehicle-data collection and analyzing the impact of pricing schemes, such as HOV toll lanes, on traffic and emissions.
C2 Biofuels is an outgrowth of a Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) project that seeks to develop fuel-ethanol production from biomass material available in large quantities in the Southeast, including Southern yellow pine.
C2 Biofuels is supported by Sam Shelton of SEI and the Georgia Tech School of Mechanical Engineering and Bill Bulpitt of SEI. In addition, a team at the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the University of Georgia is helping to evaluate and develop processes and technologies.
The startup is led by Roger Reisert, a Georgia Tech alumnus who has designed, built and operated refineries. Reisert says the company plans to build and begin operation of a pilot plant in 2009. The schedule also calls for a larger demonstration plant, to be built in 2010, and a commercial plant by 2012.
The goal: to deliver fuel-grade cellulosic ethanol to service stations at $1.70 a gallon.
Applied Nanomaterials is working on nanoscale generators that could power very small devices and bio-sensors. The company is based on the work of Zhong Lin Wang, a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering.
Innovolt uses patented technology to enhance energy management and energy efficiency, especially in the area of power protection and the prevention of equipment damage from energy surges. The technology is based on the work of Deepak Divan, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The company graduated from ATDC in May 2009.
LumoFlex is developing organic photovoltaic materials that could result in substantial power savings and flexible form factors in a number of products. The company derives from research by Seth Marder and Joe Perry of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Bernard Kippelen and Greg Durgin of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Virtual Aerosurface Technologies develops tiny devices that, installed in aircraft wings or wind turbines, emit “microjets” of air that adjust lift and drag to improve control and save fuel. These microjet devices are based on the work of Ari Glezer of the School of Mechanical Engineering.
Bach Energy seeks to extract biofuels from municipal solid waste via a gasification process. The technology is based on the research of Art Ragauskas, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
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]]>Cancer is the most-feared of human diseases, often striking without warning and seemingly without identifiable cause. Decades into the nation’s war on cancer, we have learned that the disease is far more complex than we originally believed.
Kirill Lobachev, associate professor in the School of Biology, uses this gel documentation system to capture images of DNA on a gel. (Click image for high-resolution version. Credit: Gary Meek)
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers are pursuing many different directions in their quest to understand how cancer arises. They are adding their findings to a deepening understanding of the complex molecular pathways that turn a normal cell into a malignant one. Ultimately, that knowledge may lead to new strategies for preventing cancer, new diagnostic techniques for finding it early – and to drugs and other agents that may provide cures.
This article describes Georgia Tech research into the origins of cancer including:
This is the first in a series of three reports that will focus on cancer research at Georgia Tech. The other two will highlight efforts to develop new diagnostics and new treatments.
Hormones fuel some types of cancer, including breast cancer, in which malignant cells feed on estrogen – the principal female sex hormone. That suggests strategies to stop the cancer’s spread might include blocking the site where estrogen binds to its receptor or inhibiting the gene that controls production of estrogen.
Marion Sewer, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biology, focuses her research on a protein called liver receptor homolog 1 (LRH1). Inhibiting LRH1 could potentially slow the progression of hormone-sensitive breast cancer by stopping estrogen production.
“We are investigating LRH1 because it binds to sequences of DNA and activates the gene that produces estrogen,” says Sewer. “Although LRH1 is not typically present in normal breast tissue, it is present at high levels in breast cancer cells. We’re trying to figure out what activates it and causes it to be overproduced in cancerous tissue.”
Biologists know that activation of LRH1 cannot occur until a particular small molecule binds to it, but they are unclear about the identity of that molecule. Sewer and Eric Ortlund, an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Emory University, are trying to identify the molecule – called a ligand – that binds to LRH1 and activates it.
In collaboration with Alfred Merrill, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biology and the Smithgall Chair in Molecular Cell Biology, Sewer is also isolating LRH1 from breast cancer cells and using mass spectrometry techniques to identify any ligands that are bound to the receptor.
“If we can figure out what the ligand is and design some analog of the ligand that would inhibit its ability to bind to DNA and produce estrogen, we may discover a better anti-cancer therapy method,” explains Sewer.
In a related project, Sewer is investigating the genes that control production of vitamin D. These are members of the same family of genes – called cytochromes P450 – that control production of estrogen.
“Since vitamin D levels have been shown to be much lower in breast cancer patients and studies have linked insufficient vitamin D to an increased risk for breast cancer, we are investigating sphingolipid molecules that increase the presence of the genes that produce the active form of vitamin D,” notes Sewer.
The molecules – called 1-deoxysphinganines – were originally isolated from mollusks and have been shown to have anti-cancer properties. Graduate student Tenzing Phanthok and undergraduate student Viniya Patidar are investigating the role of 1-deoxysphinganine in increasing vitamin D production and in turn preventing cancer cells from multiplying.
Since these 1-deoxysphinganines are naturally produced in the body, it is possible that cancer progression is a result of altered production of 1-deoxysphinganine. Perhaps the level of these molecules could be used as a cancer biomarker or indicator, Sewer says.
Sewer’s work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scientist Award.
This project was supported by Award No. R01GM073241 from the National Institute of General Medicine Sciences (NIGMS) and Award No. MCB-0347682 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the researcher and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NIGMS, the National Institutes of Health or the NSF.
While many biologists investigate cancer genetics – mutations in DNA sequences that cause the disease – a growing group of biologists is examining the role of cancer epigenetics, which are changes that contribute to malignancy without causing changes in DNA sequences.
Yuhong Fan, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biology, believes that the scientific field of epigenetics may help shape the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment.
“Cancer cells have drastically different epigenetic patterns compared to normal cells,” explains Fan, who is also a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar. “Many epigenetic changes may appear prior to the development of invasive cancer, so I think that doctors might one day be able to detect epigenetic markers for cancer before a tumor appears.”
Epigenetic studies concentrate on the way the genome is marked and packaged inside a cell’s nucleus. Much of Fan’s research focuses on the role of H1 linker histones, a family of 10 proteins that helps to package the DNA within chromosomes.
Fan and Arthur Skoultchi, chair of the Department of Cell Biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at New York’s Yeshiva University, previously observed the effects of partially reducing H1 levels in mice. The work showed that H1 histones are important to an organism’s normal development. Expanding on these findings, Fan recently teamed with John McDonald, chief scientist of the Ovarian Cancer Institute and associate dean for biology development in the School of Biology, to determine if the multiple H1 subtypes are regulated differently in benign and malignant ovarian cancer tissues.
“We found that some of the H1 subtypes were expressed at significantly higher levels in the cancerous tissue compared to the benign tissue and some were expressed at significantly lower levels,” notes Fan. “The most remarkable finding was that these differences, whether increases or decreases, were consistent among multiple samples.”
With this knowledge, Fan’s next step is to find out what genes and functions are affected by changes in expression of each subtype. To do this, her group plans to change the level of each H1 subtype in cancer cell culture and monitor what happens to cell growth and cell fate.
“We hope that measuring the expression level of one or more of these H1 subtypes can be used as an epigenetic biomarker for the cancer diagnosis of the future,” adds Fan. “Since the expression patterns are consistent, you could easily measure a few epigenetic characteristics, rather than looking at thousands of genes.”
Funding for Fan’s research is provided by the National Institutes of Health and the Georgia Cancer Coalition.
Unlike many cancer biology researchers who investigate general processes underlying many cancers, John McDonald focuses his investigations broadly on one type of cancer – ovarian.
Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological cancer, with the American Cancer Society predicting that in the United States alone each year, more than 20,000 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 16,000 will die from it.
“Ovarian cancer is called the silent killer because by the time symptoms arise and it’s detected, it has typically spread throughout the body,” says McDonald, chief scientist of the Ovarian Cancer Institute and associate dean for biology development in the School of Biology. “Our laboratory takes an integrated approach to studying ovarian cancer by investigating its causes, establishing accurate and reliable diagnostic tests, and developing novel and effective therapies.”
One focus of McDonald’s research is to determine how cancer cells develop in the ovaries. While it is estimated that up to 90 percent of ovarian carcinomas are derived from ovarian surface epithelial cells – cells that create the thin layer of tissue that covers the ovaries – the behavior of these cells differs from other epithelial-derived carcinomas because they become more specialized as malignancy progresses.
To investigate this behavior in more detail, McDonald and Nathan Bowen, a research scientist and Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar, compared the gene expression profiles of ovarian surface epithelial cells isolated from the surface of healthy ovaries with those of malignant ovarian tumors collected by the Ovarian Cancer Institute.
The results showed that more than 2,000 genes were expressed at significantly different levels in the two sample types. Genes associated with adult stem cell maintenance were expressed at a much higher level in the cells isolated from healthy ovaries.
“We found that changes in the expression of genes involved in maintaining the inertness and stem cell nature of epithelial surface ovarian cells may be instrumental in the initiation and development of ovarian cancer,” explains McDonald.
The results also showed that the surface of the ovary exhibits the characteristics of an adult stem cell niche, which is a protected environment where stem cells remain inactive until a signal triggers their cell cycle and they differentiate.
Expanding on these results, McDonald, Bowen and postdoctoral fellows Roman Mezencev and Lijuan Wang are currently examining the sensitivity of ovarian cancer stem cells and differentiated cancer cells to existing chemotherapy agents.
“The preliminary results indicate that existing chemotherapy agents may effectively kill cancer cells but not touch these cancer stem cells, which could be why ovarian tumors and other cancers frequently recur,” adds McDonald.
This work was supported by the Ovarian Cancer Institute, Georgia Cancer Coalition, Golfers Against Cancer Foundation, Ovarian Cycle Foundation, Robinson Family Foundation and Deborah Nash Harris Foundation.
Exposure to environmental carcinogens such as tobacco smoke and ultraviolet radiation can result in various types of DNA damage and subsequently lead to the development of cancer if the damage is not repaired.
Double-strand breaks, in which both strands in the DNA double helix are severed, are particularly hazardous to cells because they can lead to genome rearrangements. And their repair is intrinsically more difficult.
Biologists typically believed that double-strand breaks could only be repaired by homologous intact DNA – until recently, when Francesca Storici, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biology, showed that RNA could be used as a template to directly repair DNA in yeast cells. This contradicted the dogma that genetic information had to flow from DNA to RNA.
“Using RNA that naturally resides inside a cell to repair damaged DNA could represent an additional line of defense against DNA damage,” says Storici, who is also a Georgia Cancer Coalition Scholar. “The capacity of RNA to record itself into DNA could be the basis of a wholly unexplored process of RNA-driven DNA evolution.”
These unique RNA functions may have important implications in gene targeting and gene therapy because RNA molecules mimicking RNA oligonucleotides could be generated directly in the nucleus of targeted cells via transcription from vectors.
Since her initial discovery in yeast, Storici has used RNA to repair broken chromosomal DNA in human cells in culture and to correct a base defect in the genome of bacterial cells, suggesting that RNA-templated DNA repair is a more general mechanism. She is currently examining exactly how this direct transfer of RNA information to DNA occurs.
“While we can gain a lot of insight from understanding how a cell can repair its DNA, we can also use that information to create a better method for correcting genetic defects,” notes Storici.
Her goal is to develop a tool to correct a particular mutation on a specific chromosome while causing minimal damage to the DNA. One way to do that, Storici says, might be to search for factors that facilitate delivery of the targeting molecule to the nucleus and promote the exchange of DNA strands.
To test the tool she develops, Storici is working with and constructing different human cell lines, and monitoring the repair of specific genetic defects with a simple flow cytometry assay.
Given the ability of RNA to transfer genetic information to chromosomal DNA and the possibility of amplifying RNA within cells at will, Storici plans to continue investigating new directions in gene targeting and treatment of cancer and other genetic diseases.
For almost 30 years, Georgia Tech professor Alfred Merrill has been studying lipids – the fats, oils, cholesterols and certain vitamins that our bodies need to grow and survive. Today, his expertise lies in a subgroup of lipids called sphingolipids, which influence cell structure, signaling and interaction.
“The lipid backbones of sphingolipids are important cell-signaling molecules that turn on and turn off intracellular proteins that are involved in cell growth, death, and an interesting process called autophagy that has recently gained much attention in the cancer research field,” says Merrill, who is also the School of Biology’s Smithgall Chair in Molecular Cell Biology.
Autophagy – meaning “self-eating” – involves the degradation of cellular compartments, called organelles, and cellular proteins. During this process, a cell forms a vesicle that encapsulates its cytoplasm and some of the organelles and then fuses with digestive enzymes that degrade the contents of the vesicle and make them available for cell nutrition.
Interestingly, autophagy has been implicated in both cancer cell death and survival. Since Merrill’s research has shown that sphingolipid signaling is essential for creating autophagy vesicles, these metabolites may be involved in both promoting and limiting tumor growth.
Autophagy promotes cancer cell survival by allowing cells to respond to changing environmental conditions, such as nutrient deprivation. During starvation, autophagy allows cells to degrade proteins and organelles and thus obtain a source of nutrients that would not be available otherwise.
“Cancer cells use autophagy because as they are developing they have a period in which they go into a nutrient crisis because they haven’t established their own blood and nutrient flow, so they use autophagy as a way to survive in the meantime,” explains Merrill.
However, this same process of gaining nutrients can lead to tumor cell death as well. Merrill’s laboratory found that a number of anti-cancer agents promote the formation of these vesicles through sphingolipid signaling.
“Preliminary data supports the theory that the autophagic vesicles in cancer cells are unstable, so if one of their components— the sphingolipids—is out of balance, this can cause them to break apart and spill out their toxic contents, killing the cancer cell,” adds Merrill.
While the mechanism through which autophagy inhibits tumor development is still unclear, graduate student Kacee Sims is examining the role of sphingolipid pathways in the conversion of autophagy from a cancer cell survival pathway to a cell death pathway.
The project described was supported by Award No. U54GM069338 from the National Institute of General Medicine Sciences (NIGMS). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the researcher and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NIGMS or the National Institutes of Health. Significant funding to support this research was also provided by the Smithgall Endowment to Georgia Tech.
Everyone has fragile sites on their chromosomes that are particularly prone to breaking, making them hot spots for rearrangements that can lead to hereditary diseases and cancer. Georgia Tech School of Biology associate professor Kirill Lobachev is trying to understand what’s special about these regions, the consequences of the breaks, and the pathways that are involved in promoting and repairing these breaks.
“It is becoming clear that the fragile sites often contain unstable repetitive sequences that can adopt unusual DNA structures,” says Lobachev. “We think that everyone is probably a carrier of these unstable motifs that can cause chromosomes to break anytime, so we ultimately want to be able to predict where a chromosome is going to break and how frequently this break will occur, and determine if we can prevent it.”
Determining whether a particular chromosomal region is predisposed to breakage requires knowledge about the structural parameters of the unstable sequences that make chromosomes fragile, such as their size or composition of the genetic sequences they contain. Using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism, Lobachev’s laboratory has been able to mimic some of the structural instability that cancer cell chromosomes exhibit.
In a recent study, Lobachev and colleagues demonstrated that DNA replication machinery sometimes stalls when it reaches a long sequence of palindromes – sequences that read the same way backward and forward. Further analysis has shown that chromosomes break when DNA replication is slowed or altered.
“Long palindromes were known to change the shape of DNA from a double helix into a hairpin or cruciform structure, but this was one of the first studies to show that these changes could affect DNA integrity,” explains Lobachev.
In addition, Lobachev and postdoctoral fellow Vidhya Narayanan determined that palindromic sequences induce a particular type of DNA break that is a precursor to a process involved in cancer called gene amplification. Amplification of genes involved in metabolism or inactivation of drugs can lead to chemotherapy resistance, and amplification of genes that turn normal cells into cancer cells are known to occur in several late-stage cancers.
They showed that gene amplification depends on the location of an oncogene relative to the break – called a hairpin-capped double strand break – and the end of the chromosome. The study indicated that restricting breakage of the unstable sequences may be a promising strategy for pharmaceutical cancer prevention and treatment.
In the future, knowing what genetic sequences are more likely to lead to chromosomal fragility and being able to explore genetic pathways involved in this process may help researchers identify persons who might be prone to developing cancer, adds Lobachev.
The Georgia Cancer Coalition’s (GCC) mission is to reduce the number of cancer deaths in Georgia. One key initiative toward accomplishing that goal is naming Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Clinicians and Scientists. In concert with Georgia’s academic universities, the GCC supports the recruitment of national leaders in cancer research to Georgia.
At Georgia Tech, 11 researchers have been named Distinguished Cancer Scholars, including:
The Georgia Cancer Coalition has also awarded seven Cancer Research Awards to Georgia Tech faculty members investigating how to prevent, treat and cure breast, ovarian and prostate cancers. Michelle Dawson, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, recently received one of these grants for her research into the development of specialized cells designed as gene delivery vehicles to target and treat breast cancer.
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More than a third of all Americans – some 120 million people – will be diagnosed with cancer sometime during their lives. Because the odds of survival approach 90 percent if the disease is found early, scientists worldwide are on a quest to develop ways to detect and diagnose cancer early.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers are pursuing many different directions in cancer detection and diagnostic techniques including:
This is the second in a series of three reports focusing on cancer research at Georgia Tech. The first, published in the Winter/Spring 2009 issue of Research Horizons, highlighted efforts to understand how cancer arises. The third report will highlight new cancer treatments.
A precious metal long used for jewelry, gold may soon be considered precious for cancer detection and treatment.
“Once you cut the size of gold down to a few nanometers, its properties change and it reacts with other elements, catalyzes reactions and interacts with light, which makes it valuable for medical applications,” says Mostafa El-Sayed, the Julius Brown Chair and Regents’ Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
While his wife was fighting breast cancer – a battle she ultimately lost – El-Sayed began reading journal articles about cancer research and realized that the properties of gold might make it useful for detecting and killing cancer cells. To investigate the possibility, he began collaborating with his son, Ivan El-Sayed, a head and neck cancer surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco.
Mostafa El-Sayed designed nanometer-sized spheres of gold and attached them to antibodies targeting specific receptors on cancer cells, which were provided by his son. Using dark-field imaging, they were able to detect the cancer cells to which the antibodies had attached. They could see the cancer cell surfaces and distinguish them from healthy cells due to the strong scattering of light from the gold nanoparticles.
Then the father-son team observed that these metal nanoparticles could also act as light-activated heaters for killing cancer cells. By shining visible laser light on cells, they were able to selectively destroy cancer cells with much lower power than was required to kill healthy cells.
“During these experiments, we realized that gold nanoparticles have advantages over other nanostructures because they can achieve both diagnostics and therapy simultaneously,” notes Mostafa El-Sayed.
After seeing the clinical potential of gold nanospheres on cells, the researchers conducted mouse experiments in collaboration with John McDonald, associate dean for biology program development at Georgia Tech, and Erin Dickerson, formerly a research scientist in McDonald’s laboratory. Xiaohua Huang, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and graduate student Erik Dreaden also contributed to this research.
By changing the shape of the nanospheres to cylindrical gold nanorods, the researchers were able to use near-infrared laser light to detect malignant tumors hidden more deeply under the skin and selectively destroy them without harming the healthy cells. Currently, research is being conducted to investigate the effects of gold nanoparticles on animals to clear the way for human clinical trials.
“The unique ability to tune the gold nanoparticle properties by varying their size, shape, composition and medium has allowed us to design nanostructures geared for specific bio-applications,” explains Mostafa El-Sayed.
“Since light converted into heat selectively kills cancer cells, this treatment can be used for different kinds of cancers, avoids normal drug resistance and does not require invasive surgery, thus avoiding post surgery infections.”
This work was funded by grant number DE-FG02-97ER14799 from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of the DOE or the United States Government. Significant funding to support this research was also provided by the Julius Brown endowment to Georgia Tech.
The explosive growth of genomic and proteomic data has ushered in a new era of molecular medicine in which cancer detection, diagnosis and treatment are tailored to each individual’s molecular profile. But this personalized medicine approach requires that researchers discover and link biomarkers – such as genes or proteins – to specific disease behaviors, such as the rate of tumor progression and different responses to treatments.
Two new software programs that help address that challenge have recently earned silver-level compatibility certification from the National Cancer Institute’s cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid®, also known as caBIG®.
Developed by May Dongmei Wang and her team in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, the programs – caCORRECT and omniBio-Marker – remove noise and artifacts, and identify and validate biomarkers from microarray data. Funding to develop the programs was provided by the National Institutes of Health – primarily the Emory-Georgia Tech National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE), the Georgia Cancer Coalition, Microsoft Research and Hewlett-Packard.
“Certification by caBIG means the tools can be easily used by everyone in the cancer community to improve approaches to cancer detection, diagnosis, treatment and prevention,” says Wang, an associate professor in the Coulter Department, a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar and director of the CCNE biocomputing and bioinformatics core.
caCORRECT – chip artifact CORRECTion – is a software program that improves the quality of collected microarray data, ultimately leading to improved biomarker selection. Because each microarray chip contains thousands of spots, it is easy for a few spots to become marred due to experimental variations by different laboratory technicians or errors that create scratches, edge effects and bubble effects on the data.
caCORRECT removes the noise and artifacts from the data, while retaining high-quality genes on the array. The software can also effectively recover lost information that has been obscured by artifacts. In collaboration with Andrew N. Young, an associate professor in pathology and laboratory medicine at Emory University’s School of Medicine and clinical laboratory director at Grady Health System, Wang and graduate students Todd Stokes, Martin Ahrens and Richard Moffitt validated the caCORRECT software.
The caBIG-certified omniBioMarker software identifies and validates biomarkers from high-throughput gene expression data. Candidate cancer biomarkers are typically genes expressed at different levels in cancer patients compared to healthy subjects.
omniBioMarker searches these groups of patient data for genes with the highest potential for accurately determining whether a patient has cancer. However, because individual genes are not expressed independently, the software also identifies groups of genes that act in concert. Wang, Young and graduate student John Phan tested the ability of the software to identify biomarkers in clinical renal cancer microarray data.
Since receiving caBIG silver-level compatibility certification for caCORRECT and omniBioMarker, Wang and her team have been working on getting two more software programs certified: Q-IHC and omniVisGrid.
This work was funded by grant numbers R01CA108468, P20GM072069 and U54CA119338 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NIH.
Microfluidic devices developed at Georgia Tech are enabling cancer researchers to collect and characterize tumor cells in a person’s bloodstream. Analyzing the quantity and diversity of the cancerous cells allows for early detection of tumors and cancer metastasis, as well as the monitoring of treatment. The analysis can also indicate the type of cancer, its aggressiveness and its receptiveness to particular treatments.
“Microfluidic devices have advantages over many typical laboratory analysis systems like flow cytometry because they cost less, require only a small population of cells, demand less time and can be combined for multiple sequential analyses,” says Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Bruno Frazier.
Frazier and graduate student Youngdo Jung designed a microfluidic device that attracts and collects magnetically labeled cells into a center channel while allowing untagged cells to travel along outer channels. To test the device with cancer cells, they teamed with Emory University researchers Lily Yang, an associate professor of surgical oncology research; Georgia Chen, an associate professor of hematology and oncology; and Dong Shin, a professor of hematology and oncology.
Because the proteins located on the surfaces of cancer and normal cells are different, the researchers selectively targeted the proteins on the cancer cell surfaces and tagged them with magnetic nanoparticles. In experiments, the researchers were able to collect 86 percent of the tagged cancer cells in the center outlet and 95 percent of the non-tagged red blood and white blood cells in the side outlet, with a flow rate of 100 microliters per hour.
Excited with the experimental results, Frazier’s team combined the microseparator with a downstream impedance spectroscopy microsystem, which traps a single cell in an analysis cavity and measures its electrical impedance.
“This impedance spectroscopy system allows us to determine the heterogeneity of a tumor, including the percentages of normal cells and different stage cancer cells, which is information that can be used to create a personalized treatment regimen,” explains Frazier.
In experiments with normal and cancerous breast cells, the researchers observed significant differences in the magnitude and phase of the impedance signal, enabling them to easily classify the cells. The technique can distinguish normal human breast tissue cells, early-stage breast cancer cells, invasive breast cancer cells and metastasized breast cancer cells.
Since completing the cellular experiments, the Georgia Tech and Emory researchers have begun testing the microsystems with blood and tissue samples from breast and head/neck cancer animal models.
“We believe that the microfluidic devices we’ve built will eventually play a key role in numerous aspects of cancer diagnosis and treatment, including detecting and evaluating metastatic disease, selecting and individualizing initial surgical and medical therapies, monitoring disease progression and understanding the fundamental biology of metastasis,” notes Frazier.
This work was funded by grant number ES10846 from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NIEHS or the NIH.
Early breast cancer detection can significantly improve survival rates. However, current diagnostic tests expose women to the potentially harmful effects of radiation – and often fail to detect cancer in the earliest stages.
A team of researchers from Georgia Tech, Emory University and the University of Ulm in Germany are using a portable, non-invasive device to determine which biomarker gases exhaled in a person’s breath indicate the presence of breast cancer.
“Scientists know that it’s possible to detect different chemical compounds from a person’s breath and relate them to illness,” explains Charlene Bayer, principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “Yet they haven’t been able to quantify results – such as determining a patient has a tumor because he or she has X amount of Y compounds in his or her breath.”
Breath biomarkers are volatile organic compounds originating in the lower lungs. Certain compounds are related to oxidative stress, the body’s response to inflammation, and are often an indication of disease.
As a patient breathes into the device, these compounds are trapped and examined by a sensor. The researchers’ sensing methodology combines gas chromatography – a technique for separating complex compounds – with mass spectrometry, which identifies the chemical makeup of a substance. Specific patterns in the compounds are then found and used to confirm the presence or absence of the disease.
The team recently conducted a clinical study analyzing more than 300 volatile organic compounds in breath samples of 20 healthy women over the age of 40 and 20 women recently diagnosed with stage II-IV breast cancer and who had not received treatment. The results showed that the breath analysis was able to determine whether the sample came from a cancer patient or healthy subject 78 percent of the time.
The researchers are currently adding to their clinical database of breath data and trying to determine which compounds are most important for detecting breast cancer. That could help reduce the number of compounds tested.
Because it can offer immediate results right in a physician’s office, Bayer expects the device will help increase early detection among those who do not have the resources for a mammogram, more easily conduct interval testing for those with a genetically high risk for breast cancer, and facilitate recurrence testing after breast cancer treatment.
Other researchers involved in this project include Brani Vidakovic, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; Sheryl G.A. Gabram, a professor of surgery in the Division of Surgical Oncology at Emory University; and University of Ulm professor Boris Mizaikoff.
Scientists at Georgia Tech are using patterns of metabolites found in a drop of blood to detect ovarian cancer. Using an analytical technique called mass spectrometry, the researchers have been able to differentiate between serum samples taken from patients with ovarian cancer and those from unaffected individuals.
“Ovarian cancer is the fourth leading cause of death in women, but it is a relatively rare cancer, so a functionally useful diagnostic test has to be 99 percent accurate or you are going to get too many false positives,” says John McDonald, chief scientist of the Ovarian Cancer Institute and associate dean for biology development in the School of Biology.
McDonald teamed with mass spectrometry expert Facundo Fernandez, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, to sort molecules in the serum based on their weight and electrical charge.
“We focused on metabolites as opposed to proteins or peptides because we get better quantification and higher resolution for the smaller molecules that comprise the human metabolome,” explains Fernandez.
With the help of Alexander Gray, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech College of Computing’s Computational Science and Engineering Division, the research team was able to detect patterns of key metabolites in the blood. Using a sophisticated artificial intelligence computer program, they were able to “train” the computer to distinguish patterns of small metabolites found in the blood of cancer patients from those of control subjects.
The scientists first used serum samples from known cancer patients and unaffected individuals to establish metabolomic patterns that were present at different levels in the two groups. The machine learning program identified a pattern consisting of only a few dozen metabolites, among thousands of candidates, which could be used to distinguish between women with ovarian cancer and women with non-cancerous conditions.
Once these patterns were identified, the researchers tested the patterns of the same metabolites in a different set of serum samples from other patients with and without cancer. The researchers identified the samples with 99 percent accuracy.
The identity of the key metabolites and the role they may play in ovarian cancer is still under investigation, but the development of an accurate and reliable diagnostic test will save lives when combined with existing therapies, according to McDonald.
“Another great thing about this approach is that it may be possible to extend it for the early detection of any type of cancer or any disease from a droplet of blood,” adds McDonald.
This work is supported by the Ovarian Cancer Institute, Deborah Nash Harris Endowment Fund, the Ovarian Cycle Foundation and the Georgia Research Alliance VentureLab program.
Robots are being used more frequently today in hospitals around the country. Many of these robots, like the one developed by Queen’s University associate professor Gabor Fichtinger to perform needle-based prostate biopsy and therapy procedures, require medical images to accurately guide the surgical tool to the desired target.
“Magnetic resonance imaging enables real-time scanning of the needle from its insertion through the skin to contact with the target, but the difficulty lies in being able to develop algorithms that immediately display and analyze the images while the patient is in the imaging scanner,” says Allen Tannenbaum, who holds a joint appointment as the Julian Hightower Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
To visualize the prostate in real-time during biopsy and radioactive seed-placement procedures, Tannenbaum and graduate student Yi Gao developed fast image segmentation and registration algorithms to locate the prostate in magnetic resonance images and correct for movement during the procedure. The algorithms have been integrated into the transrectal prostate magnetic resonance imaging module of Slicer3, an open-source surgical navigation software.
Tannenbaum employed two methods to “extract” the prostate from the magnetic resonance images: a shape-based algorithm and a semi-automatic method. The shape-based algorithm required inputting manually segmented three-dimensional prostate images into an artificial intelligence program. Then, given a new image, the program was able to isolate the prostate from nearby structures. For the semiautomatic method, users selected points inside and outside of the prostate and the program used that information to decide whether a pixel belonged to the organ or the background.
In addition to segmentation, images of the same patient taken at different points in time require registration to cope with deformation of the organ.
“Imagine you have a balloon – that’s the prostate – and you take a needle and push on the balloon. Pushing on it deforms the prostate and these changes have to be accounted for,” explains Tannenbaum.
The prostate presents a number of difficulties for traditional image registration approaches because there are no easily discernable landmarks. However, because the surface of the prostate is almost half convex and half concave, Tannenbaum was able to capture the concave region in each image and use it to register the whole prostate. “Our segmentation and registration algorithms provide much greater accuracy for the robot to stick a needle in the prostate, while also requiring less than a second for computation and no special supercomputers,” adds Tannenbaum.
This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap Initiative called The National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing (NA-MIC). 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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]]>Reptiles use unique forms of locomotion to get around in the world. Legless reptiles use their entire bodies for movement, while some reptiles with legs choose between using legs or their bodies – depending on the environment.
Georgia Tech researchers recently published studies detailing how lizards and snakes move across and through different environments. Insights from this research could give the developers of future generations of robots more options for locomotion, especially in confined areas.
A study published in the July 17, 2009, issue of the journal Science details how sandfish – small lizards with smooth scales – move rapidly within desert sand. In this first thorough examination of subsurface sandfish locomotion, Georgia Tech researchers found that the animals place their limbs against their sides and create a wave motion with their bodies to propel themselves through granular media.
“When started above the surface, the animals dive into the sand within a half second. Once below the surface, they no longer use their limbs for propulsion – instead, they move forward by propagating a traveling wave down their bodies like a snake,” says study leader Daniel Goldman, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.
With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the research team used high-speed X-ray imaging to visualize sandfish – formally known as Scincus scincus – burrowing into and through sand. The team used that information to develop a physics model of the lizard’s locomotion.
The sandfish used in this study inhabits the Sahara desert in Africa and is approximately four inches long. It uses its long, wedge-shaped snout and countersunk lower jaw to rapidly bury into and swim within sand. The sandfish’s body has flattened sides and is covered with smooth shiny scales, its legs are short and sturdy with long and flattened fringed toes and its tail tapers to a fine point.
To conduct controlled experiments with the sandfish, Goldman and graduate students Ryan Maladen, Yang Ding and Chen Li built a seven-inch by eight-inch by four-inch-deep glass bead-filled container with tiny holes in the bottom through which air could be blown. The air pulses elevated the beads and caused them to settle into a loosely packed solid state. Repeated pulses of air compacted the material, allowing the researchers to closely control the density of the material.
“Because loosely packed media is easier to push through and closely packed is harder to push through, we thought there should be some difference in the sandfish’s locomotion,” says Goldman. “But the results surprised us because the density of the granular media did not affect how the sandfish traveled through the sand; it was always the same undulatory wavelike pattern.”
By tracking the sandfish in the X-ray images as it swam through the glass beads, Goldman was able to characterize the sandfish’s motion – called its kinematics – using a single-period sinusoidal wave that traveled from the head to the tail.
“The large amplitude waves over the entire body are unlike the kinematics of other undulatory swimming organisms that are the same size as the sandfish, like eels, which propagate waves that start with a small amplitude that gets larger toward the tail,” explains Goldman.
After collecting the experimental data, Goldman’s team developed a physics model to predict the speed at which sandfish swim. The model allowed the researchers to partition the body of the sandfish into segments, each of which generated thrust and experienced drag when moving through the granular environment.
To establish the equations for drag through sand, the researchers measured the granular thrust and drag forces on a small stainless steel cylindrical rod, thus allowing them to predict the wave efficiency and optimal kinematics. They found that the faster the sandfish propagate the wave, the faster they move forward through granular media – up to speeds of six inches per second. This speed allows the animal to escape predators and the heat of the desert surface, and to quickly swim to ambush surface prey they detect from vibrations.
“The results demonstrate that burrowing and swimming in complex media like sand can have intricacy similar to that of movement in air or water, and that organisms can exploit the solid and fluid-like properties of these media to move effectively within them,” notes Goldman.
Understanding the mechanics of subsurface movement could reveal how small organisms like worms, scorpions, snakes and lizards can transform landscapes by their burrowing actions. This research may also help engineers build sandfish-like robots that can travel through complex environments.
“If something nasty was buried in unconsolidated material, such as rubble, debris or sand, and you wanted to find it, you would need a device that could scamper on the surface, but also swim underneath the surface,” Goldman says. “Since our work aims to fundamentally understand how the best animals in nature move in these complex unstructured environments, it could be very valuable information for this type of research.”
Snakes use both friction generated by their scales and redistribution of their weight to slither along flat surfaces, researchers at Georgia Tech and New York University have learned. Their findings, which appeared June 8, 2009, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run counter to previous studies that have suggested snakes move by pushing laterally against rocks and branches.
Insights from the research could give developers of future generations of robots more options for locomotion, especially in confined areas.
“We found that snakes’ belly scales are oriented so that snakes resist sliding toward their tails and flanks,” says the paper’s lead author, David Hu, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “These scales give the snakes a preferred direction of motion, which makes snake movement a lot like that of wheels, cross-country skis, or ice skates. In all these examples, sliding forward takes less work than does sliding sideways.”
The study, conducted while Hu was a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, centered on the frictional anisotropy – or resistance to sliding in certain directions – of a snake’s belly scales. While previous investigators had suggested that the frictional anisotropy of these scales might play a role in locomotion over flat surfaces, the details of this process had not been understood.
To explore this issue, the researchers first developed a theoretical model of a snake’s movement. The model determined the expected speed of a snake’s center of mass as a function of the speed and size of its body waves, taking into account the laws of friction and the scales’ frictional anisotropy. The model suggested that a snake’s motion arises through the interaction of surface friction and its internal body forces.
“The animals propel themselves using their muscles to move their bodies in a wave. As the wave travels backwards through its body, the snake’s scales catch the ground, generating a frictional force that propels it forward,” explains Hu.
To study the model’s accuracy in describing the movement of real snakes, the researchers measured the sliding resistance of snake scales and monitored the movement of snakes through a series of experiments on flat, inclined, smooth and rough surfaces. They employed video and time-lapse photography to gauge movements of the snakes.
First, the research team measured the ability of milk snakes to slither on rough cloth and a smooth plank. The snakes had trouble moving on the smooth surface, but could move more easily on the cloth-covered one. However, the snakes ran into movement difficulties again when researchers fitted them with a cloth jacket, which eliminated the scale frictional anistropy.
Hu also anesthetized snakes and placed them head-first, backwards and sideways over inclined smooth and rough surfaces. On the smooth surface, friction was fairly evenly matched in all directions, whereas on the rough surface, snakes slid easily in the forward direction, but their scale friction resisted sliding backwards or sideways. The researchers found that it was twice as hard to move the snakes sideways as it was to slide the animals forward.
“The friction was caused by the orientation of the snakes’ scales, which are arranged like shingles on a roof to resist such movements,” notes Hu.
That test provided a friction coefficient that could be studied with the computer model. With that value included, the theoretical snake followed roughly the same path as the real snakes. However, the speeds predicted by the model were lower than those the researchers observed in the snake experiments.
To find out why, Hu’s team placed moving snakes on a photoelastic gelatin that lit up when force was applied. They found that the snakes lift parts of their bodies slightly off the ground when moving. This helps reduce unwanted friction and applies greater pressure to the parts of the body wave that are pushing the snake forward. While friction accounts for about 65 percent of the forward movement, this weight redistribution by the snake accounts for the other 35 percent, according to Hu.
After factoring this into the model, the results showed a close relationship between what the model predicted and the snakes’ actual movements. The theoretical predictions of the model were generally consistent with the snakes’ actual body speeds on both flat and inclined surfaces.
“In the future, understanding snake locomotion might help engineers design better snake robots, which can be used to maneuver into tight spaces,” Hu adds.
The study’s other co-authors were Jasmine Nirody and Terri Scott, both undergraduate researchers at New York University, and Michael Shelley, a professor of mathematics and neural science and the Lilian and George Lyttle Professor of Applied Mathematics at Courant.
The information on the sandfish is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. PHY- 0749991 and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the researcher and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. James Devitt, deputy director for media relations at New York University, contributed to the portion of this article relating to snakes.
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The gift, made through the Harris Foundation, will help support a capital campaign for construction of a new ECE headquarters facility and the renovation of the school’s 47-year-old Van Leer Building, where some 7,000 students receive instruction each year.
Harris will donate $500,000 each year for four years beginning in 2010 – the anticipated completion date of the Georgia Tech Foundation’s private fund drive for the new facilities. Specifically, the Harris gift is intended for construction of an auditorium or other similar space.
Dr. G.P. "Bud" Peterson, president of Georgia Tech and Howard L. Lance, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Harris, today signed an agreement for the donation during a special ceremony at the Harris Customer Briefing Center in Melbourne, Florida. The event also included a reception attended by Harris employees who are Georgia Tech graduates and by other representatives from the university.
“Our faculty and students are currently scattered across 10 buildings around the campus, the Van Leer classrooms are outdated, and the building lacks adequate laboratory facilities,” said Dr. Gary S. May, professor and Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE, who also attended the check presentation.
“Clearly, this generous lead gift from Harris Corporation provides significant momentum for the school’s long-term capital needs and helps to create a new presence that will serve us well in the 21st Century.”
Harris has a decades-long partnership with Georgia Tech and its School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, which is the largest producer of electrical and computer engineers by degree in the nation. The company employs nearly 200 of the school’s graduates.
In addition to the $2 million gift announced today, Harris has donated some $280,000 to the university since 2006. This includes a five-year, $250,000 pledge for a research lab in the Nanotechnology Research Center, and another $30,000 to support various programs within the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
]]>Because it can capture more power from a given area, the 3-D design could be useful for powering satellites, cell phones, military equipment and other applications that have a limited surface area. Developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the "three dimensional multi-junction photovoltaic device" uses its 3-D surface structure to increase the likelihood that every photon striking it will produce energy.
"One problem with conventional flat solar cells is that the sunlight hits a flat surface and can bounce off, so the light only has one chance to be absorbed and turned into electricity," explained John Bacon, president of IP2Biz®, an Atlanta company that has licensed the technology from GTRI. "In the GTRI 3-D solar cell, we build a nanometer-scale version of Manhattan, with streets and avenues of tiny light-capturing structures similar to tall buildings. The sunlight bounces from building to building and produces more electricity."
The arrays of towers on the 3-D solar cell can increase the surface area by several thousand percent, depending on the size and density of the structures.
"Conventional cells have to be very large to make adequate amounts of electricity, and that limits their applications," Bacon explained. "The large surface area of our 3-D cell means that applications from satellites to cell phones will be more practical since we can pack so much light gathering power into a small footprint."
The three dimensional structure also means that the cells don't have to be aimed directly at the sun to capture sunlight efficiently, Bacon added. Conventional solar cells work best when the sunlight hits them at a narrow range of angles, but the new 3-D system remains efficient regardless of the angle at which the light hits.
The tower structures on the GTRI solar cells are about 100 microns tall, 40 microns by 40 microns square, 50 microns apart — and grown from arrays containing millions of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes primarily serve as the structure on which current-generating photovoltaic p/n coatings are applied.
"The carbon nanotubes are like the framing inside of buildings, and the photovoltaic materials are like the outer skin of the buildings," said Tom Smith, president of 3-D Solar LLC, a company formed to commercialize the cells. "Within the three-dimensional structures, multiple materials could be used to create the physical framing. Carbon nanotubes were used in the original solar cells, but they are not required for the technology to work."
The 3-D solar cells were developed in the laboratory of Jud Ready, a GTRI senior research engineer. Tests comparing the 3-D solar cells produced in Ready's lab with traditional planar cells produced from the same materials showed an increase in power generation, Smith said.
The researchers chose to make their prototype cells from cadmium materials because they were familiar with them from other research. However, a broad range of photovoltaic materials could also be used, and selecting the best material for specific applications will be the goal of future research.
Fabrication of the cells begins with a silicon wafer, which also serves as the solar cell's bottom junction. The researchers first coat the wafer with a thin layer of iron using a photolithography process that can create a wide variety of patterns. The patterned wafer is then placed into a furnace heated to approximately 700 degrees Celsius.
Hydrocarbon gases are then flowed into the furnace, where the carbon and hydrogen separate. In a process known as chemical vapor deposition, the carbon grows arrays of multi-walled carbon nanotubes atop the patterns created by the iron particles.
Once the carbon nanotube towers have been grown, the researchers use a process known as molecular beam epitaxy to coat the nanotube arrays with cadmium telluride (CdTe) and cadmium sulfide (CdS), which serve as the p-type and n-type photovoltaic layers. Atop that, a thin coating of indium tin oxide, a clear conducting material, is added to serve as the cell's top electrode.
In the finished solar cells, the carbon nanotube arrays serve both as support for the 3-D arrays and as a conductor connecting the photovoltaic materials to the silicon wafer.
The 3-D solar cells were described in the March 2007 issue of the journal JOM, published by the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, and in the Journal of Applied Physics in 2008. The research leading to their development was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Beyond the patents in China and Australia, IP2Biz has applied for protection in the United States, Canada, Europe, Korea and India, Smith noted. The patents granted so far apply to any photovoltaic application in which three dimensional structures are used to capture light bouncing off them, he added.
"The 3-D photovoltaic cell could be of great value in satellite, cell phone and defense applications given its order of magnitude reduction in footprint, coupled with the potential for increased power production compared to planar cells," Smith added. "We are very pleased with the level of interest in licensing or acquiring this innovation as means of addressing the world's growing need for energy."
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Sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DARPA Network Challenge attracted hundreds of teams to tackle the problem of how to locate the balloons, which were positioned Dec. 5 at locations ranging from San Francisco and Portland to Memphis and Miami.
A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the $40,000 prize for correctly locating all 10 balloons. A team led by researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) found nine of the 10 balloons during the nine-hour competition.
DARPA's interest in the competition was in assessing how social networks could be used to address massive information-gathering tasks. In addition to its research component, the challenge also marked the 40th anniversary of the ARPANET, the forerunner of today's Internet.
GTRI researchers Erica Briscoe and Ethan Trewhitt began discussing the challenge in early November, and quickly organized a core team of seven co-workers. They established a Web site and began using Facebook and word-of-mouth communications to build a network that eventually included more than a thousand people pledged to help.
One of their initial decisions was that if they should win, the prize would be donated to the American Red Cross -- rather than being split among the team members and balloon spotters. Team members believe that was important to attracting altruistic volunteers.
“One thing that surprised us was that many balloon reporters specifically chose our team because we had decided to donate the winnings,” said Betty Whitaker, a GTRI principal research scientist who helped coordinate the team. “We pledged any winnings to charity to encourage recruitment and avoid complicated issues with money after the contest.”
Another key was establishing the Web site “I Spy A Red Balloon,” which built a high ranking on Google thanks to references on established Web sites. That allowed the team to attract people who may have seen a red balloon on Dec. 5 and wondered what was going on.
“Though we focused on getting the word out to the public prior to launch day, our strong presence on that day made it possible for people who were unaware of the competition to find our team after running across a balloon,” explained Trewhitt, a GTRI research engineer.
The team also connected established networks and used the news media to get information out to potential balloon-spotters. Beyond those who pledged to help, thousands more people knew about the effort and would have made contact had they seen a balloon.
But as with popular social networking services, not everybody could be trusted.
“Because teams were commonly infiltrated by members of competing teams, one of the toughest parts of this competition was not being able to trust any particular members of the group,” Trewhitt added. “This led us to realize that trust in large groups is a tricky issue -- and a topic for future research.”
On competition day, which began at 10 a.m. with balloons being raised in the 10 previously-undisclosed locations, team members searched Twitter and Facebook for news of balloon sightings. They called friends, family and local businesses to validate alleged sightings, and analyzed incoming photographs to spot fakes and confirm the location of authentic red balloons.
They also used a variety of tools, some of which they built, to help track sightings. Their Web site, for instance, used Google Maps to summarize reports.
Though the GTRI team didn't win the top prize, its leaders believe the effort established credibility and planted seeds for future research projects.
“We would like to study issues of trust in large social networks, as well as how to extract and validate useful and correct information from un-moderated online media such as Twitter,” said Erica Briscoe, a GTRI research scientist. “Twitter is often the fastest medium for notification of real-time events because it is unfiltered and raw. It would be useful to research methods for determining the accuracy and authenticity of rumors in this type of environment.”
The competition also showed how much could be done on a budget of just $200, which was what the “I Spy A Red Balloon” team spent in total.
For its part, the agency also seemed pleased with what the teams had done.
“[The DARPA Network] Challenge explores basic research issues such as mobilization, collaboration and trust in diverse social networking constructs, and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications,” the agency said in a news release. “DARPA plans to meet with teams to review the approaches and strategies used to build networks, collect information and participate in the Challenge.”
Beyond those already mentioned, the team also included Stephen Cuzzort, Jessica Pater, Rick Presley and Miles Thompson, all from the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Kirk Englehardt (404-407-7280); E-mail: (kirk.englehardt@gtri.gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
]]>"This study shows that bio-artificial materials are suitable for promoting vasculature growth and remodeling," said lead author on the study Andrés García, professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. "Because hydrogels are very compatible with biological tissues, they are a promising therapeutic delivery vehicle to improve treatment of peripheral artery disease, ischemic heart disease, and survival of cell and tissue transplants."
Details of the research were published in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on December 21, 2009. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute (ACTSI) through the Georgia Tech/Emory Center (GTEC) for the Engineering of Living Tissues, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and the American Heart Association.
As part of the research, García and Georgia Tech graduate student Edward Phelps tailored the biochemical and mechanical properties of polyethylene glycol-based hydrogel matrices to enable vasculature to form in and around them. First, the researchers incorporated specific chemical cross-links into the gels so that they would maintain their structural integrity and only degrade in the presence of enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases that are typically expressed by invading cells. They also incorporated into the matrices a protein, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which stimulates the growth of blood vessels.
"Incorporating these cross-links controlled the release of VEGF from the matrix so that VEGF was only released as the matrix was digested by invading cells," explained García. "This was very important because if you have something solid such as a matrix that cannot degrade, you will not have any vasculature growth into that area."
Adhesive amino acid sequences were also added to the gel so that cells could spread within the gel and interact with nearby endothelial cells undergoing the blood vessel growth process called angiogenesis.
When the researchers implanted the pre-formed hydrogel constructs into small animals, the matrix exhibited constant levels of VEGF for two days followed by a gradual decrease during the following 12 days. When animals were injected with soluble VEGF, a steady decline of VEGF was recorded until 90 percent of the compound was lost within two weeks.
"With the degradable implant that included growth factors, after two weeks we saw that new vessels were growing into and around the implant," noted Phelps.
Additional studies with micro-CT imaging showed a six-fold increase in vascular density at two weeks and a 12-fold increase in vascular density at four weeks with the degradable matrix compared to an injection of soluble VEGF. In addition, the hydrogel degraded in a controlled fashion and was replaced by normal tissue.
"We found that the vasculature was functional and connected to the host circulatory system, which we saw when a contrast agent injected through the aorta reached the vessels in the implant," added García.
To place the hydrogel deeper inside the body than the pre-formed matrix construct would allow and to be able to fill in an injured area of any shape, the researchers developed a liquid material that forms a gel inside the body when exposed to ultraviolet light.
"In reality, most injuries are not well-defined defects so you can't take a pre-formed construct and fill the irregular-sized site," added García. "Instead, you want to be able to access the area in a minimally invasive way and injecting this solution through the skin allows us to do that without surgery."
The researchers injected the VEGF-containing matrix solution into mice suffering from restricted blood flow, known as ischemia, in one leg. After seven days, the animals exhibited a 50 percent increase in blood perfusion to the affected leg and a 100 percent increase in perfusion to the affected foot. The blood flow to the affected leg was greatly enhanced compared to treatment with a non-degradable hydrogel and injection of soluble growth factors alone.
"The engineered matrix containing VEGF performed much better than injecting soluble VEGF, indicating that the delivery vehicle acted synergistically to amplify the effect of the growth factor," noted Phelps.
According to the researchers, the increased perfusion was due to growth factor sequestration in the matrix, resulting in prolonged exposure that persisted as the matrix was degraded and remodeled.
Additional studies are currently being conducted to determine the clinical viability of these hydrogels as therapeutic vascularization therapies to treat peripheral artery disease and ischemic heart disease, and cell transplantation to treat diabetes. Future studies may incorporate more or different growth factors to achieve even more robust healing effects.
Other researchers involved in the study include W. Robert Taylor, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, Emory's Division of Cardiology, and the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center; Peter Thulé, an associate professor in Emory University's Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Lipids, and the Atlanta Veteran's Affairs Medical Center; and Natalia Landázuri, a postdoctoral fellow in the Emory University Division of Cardiology.
This work was partly funded by grant number R01-EB004496 from the National Institutes of Health and by PHS Grant UL1 RR025008 from the Clinical and Translational Science Award program, National Institutes of Health (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.
Research News & Publications Office
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Media Relations Contacts: Abby Vogel (404-385-3364; avogel@gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986; jtoon@gatech.edu).
Technical Contact: Andrés García (404-894-9384); E-mail: (andres.garcia@me.gatech.edu)
Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>The next farmer's market will take place during Georgia Tech's Earth Day celebration on April 23.
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Bring new or softly used gifts to the Student Involvement Center (in the Student Center above Einstein's), the Student Success Center, North Avenue Housing Office, East Campus Housing Office, or the Office of Success Programs (located on the third floor of the Instructional Center) by December 4.
Gifts should be appropriate for males and females between the ages of 15 and 19. Gift recommendations include used MP3 players, headphones, DVDs, blank CDs, art supplies, clothing, or shoes.
AIESEC "is a global, non-political, independent, not-for-profit organization run by studentsand recent graduates of institutions of higher education. Its members are interested in world issues,leadership, and management. AIESEC does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, sexualorientation,creed, religion, national, ethnic, or social origin," according to the organization's Web site. They seek to "enable young people to explore and develop their leadership potential for them to have a positive impact in society." In addition to hosting numerous event on the Georgia Tech campus, AIESEC members volunteer throughout communities in Atlanta and the organization sponsors international internship experiences.
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The $10.5 million Center, known as the Bio-nano-enabled Inorganic/Organic Nanostructures and Improved Cognition (BIONIC) center, is being led by Vladimir Tsukruk and Kenneth Sandhage, professors in Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering.
"Advanced materials is an area of importance for the Air Force since the landscape of materials science is rapidly changing and bio-nano-materials are classes of pervasive materials that exhibit unique capabilities and have the potential to address Air Force needs," explained Rajesh Naik, a scientist in the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Materials and Manufacturing Directorate. "In addition, improved cognition tools are required for assessing the cognitive ability of the warfighter as we ask for more from our human operators in the most demanding environments."
The BIONIC center includes a group of core members from six departments within the Georgia Tech Colleges of Sciences and Engineering, a researcher at The Ohio State University, and scientists and engineers at AFRL. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company is also an industrial collaborator.
Funding for the Center of Excellence is provided by the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate and Human Effectiveness Directorate of AFRL, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Georgia Tech. The initial award is for three years, with the possibility of an additional two-year extension.
"Georgia Tech was chosen to lead this Center of Excellence because of its investment in infrastructure development, including new facilities and instrumentation; its recruitment of high-caliber faculty members and students; and its emphasis in bio-nanotechnology and cognitive sciences," said Morley Stone, chief scientist of the Human Performance Wing of AFRL's Human Effectiveness Directorate.
There are three major research thrusts, called interdisciplinary research groups, within the BIONIC center. Each group contains several collaborators from AFRL's Materials and Manufacturing Directorate or Human Effectiveness Directorate.
For the first thrust, which is led by Sandhage, researchers are designing, fabricating, characterizing and modeling the performance of inorganic/organic nanocomposites for efficient, remote energy-harvesting devices, such as photovoltaics and batteries.
"The U.S. Air Force utilizes autonomous drones that they would like to operate for longer periods of time," explained co-director Sandhage, who holds the B. Mifflin Hood Professorship in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and an adjunct position in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "To do that, they need a cost-effective energy source that can perform efficiently for extended periods of time, while also providing high pulses of power when needed."
Tsukruk is leading the second interdisciplinary research group, which is focused on designing, fabricating, characterizing and simulating the performance of inorganic/organic nanocomposites for tunable, adaptive materials.
"When these adaptive materials are exposed to heat or light or both, they will change their properties in ways that will be useful for sensing or morphing surfaces," said co-director Tsukruk, who also holds a joint appointment in Georgia Tech's School of Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering.
The third thrust is being led by Michelle LaPlaca, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. LaPlaca and her team plan to develop tools and assessment methods to optimize critical cognitive processes of the modern warfighter.
"U.S. Air Force analysts must remain attentive to computers and controls for hours at a time, so we aim to find a molecular signature of cognition that is sensitive to changes in stress levels and correlate these molecules with functional brain maps using magnetic resonance imaging techniques," said LaPlaca. "We want to learn about a warfighter's physiological response to different situations and use this information to optimize training and work effectiveness."
In addition to its research objectives, another goal for the Center of Excellence is to conduct stimulating collaborative research that will motivate students to consider working at AFRL.
"At Georgia Tech, we've had a history of sending outstanding alumni to work at AFRL, including three of our recent Ph.D. graduates. As students, they were able to collaborate with researchers at AFRL and spend extended periods of time at the AFRL facilities, which opened their eyes to AFRL's exciting opportunities and dynamic research atmosphere," said Sandhage.
Other core members of the Center include Regents' Professor Mostafa El-Sayed, professor Seth Marder and assistant professor Nils Kroger from the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; professor Bernard Kippelen from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Shella Keilholz, an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; Eric Schumacher, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Psychology; and Hamish Fraser, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University.
Researchers will be added to this core group as early as next year, when the Center begins awarding seed grants to Georgia Tech faculty members.
"The goal of this seed grant program is to establish new connections to talented Georgia Tech faculty members that can result in long-term relationships and fruitful collaborations with the U.S. Air Force," added Sandhage.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Air Force under Award No. FA9550-09-1-0162. 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 U.S. Air Force.
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Media Relations Contacts: Abby Vogel (404-385-3364); E-mail: (avogel@gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>"The great news is that Georgia Tech had the third highest 'impact score,' which measures the extent to which our patents are being built upon," said Jilda Garton, Georgia Tech's associate vice provost for research. "We are also proud of the fact that Georgia Tech which reports as a single entity compares favorably with university systems such as the California University System."
According to the Patent Board, the 2009 Universities Patent Scorecard represents the universities and university-based laboratories from around the world involved in patenting their research in all disciplines within the United States. The report ranks 124 of the top universities according to the relative strengths of their patent portfolios.
]]>The Woman of Distinction Award is presented each year to students, faculty, stuff, and alums who exhibit exemplary leadership, heart, and innovative problem solving. This year's honorees lead inspiring lives that uplift theentire Georgia Tech Community.
2009 Women of Distinction
Staff Award, Dr. Lynn Fountain
Faculty Award, Dr. Julia Kubanek
Alumna Award, Clemmie Whatley
Graduate Student Award, Kathryn Smith
Undergraduate Student Award, Melissa Minneci
]]>Assistant Dean of Students/Director of the Women's Resource Center
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Assistant Dean of Students/Director of the Women's Resource Center
]]>The team, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, collected data Oct. 4 through Oct. 11 to document the impacts of the category 8.1 earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that occurred on Sept. 29. They examined flow depths, run-up heights, inundation distances, sediment depositions and damage patterns at various scales.
"In addition to timing -- the fact that the tsunami struck in the daylight morning hours when most people were on their way to work or school -- tsunami education, awareness and evacuation exercises really contained the death toll," noted Hermann Fritz, one of the principal investigators and an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "The technical solution doesn't always work for coastlines near the epicenter with less than 30 minutes between earthquake and onslaught of the tsunami. Earthquakes with durations of more than 30 seconds serve as a natural warning, resulting in a spontaneous self-evacuation."
Nearly 190 people were killed in the tsunami, with the majority of deaths reported in Samoa, a country governing the western part of the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The two main islands of Samoa are Upolu and Savai'i. American Samoa, a territory of the United States southeast of Samoa, is comprised of main island Tutuila, the Manu'a Islands, Rose Atoll and Swains Island. The Samoan government estimates the total damage from the tsunami at $147 million.
The team's survey circled all of the main Samoan islands and spanned 350 kilometers from Ofu in the east to Savai'i in the west. The researchers learned that the tsunami impact peaked at Poloa near Tutuila's western tip and Lepa at Upola's southeast coast. Maximum run-up heights reached 17 meters at Poloa, and inundation distances and damage were recorded at Pago Pago, more than 500 meters inland. The harbor at Pago Pago, well-protected from ordinary storm waves, is vulnerable to long-period tsunami waves.
In addition, researchers noticed a marked difference between the evacuation process in Samoa and American Samoa. While most villagers in Samoa knew to rapidly evacuate after experiencing an earthquake, only a month earlier they had been told that cars help with evacuations, a deadly directive since most roads run parallel to the beach.
"Many perished trapped inside cars waiting in congested small roads or in long lines behind vehicles stopped by landslides or debris on the road," said Costas Synolakis, principal investigator and professor of civil engineering at University of Southern California. "I have been on more than 20 tsunami field surveys, and in many ways this was one of the most surprising in terms of how carnage varied over fairly short distances. This was also the first time we noted what we suspected: misinformation kills."
Emile Okal, a seismologist and professor of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University, conducted approximately 120 interviews with tsunami survivors in 70 different locations around Tutuila and Upolu. He found that most people were educated about tsunamis and knew how to react because of community-based educational programs, not ancestral stories.
"The last significant tsunami in Samoa occurred in 1917 and was very similar in seismology to the Sept. 29 tsunami. Surprisingly, no one I interviewed said they knew of family members being in a similar situation," Okal observed. "Since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2007 Solomon Islands tsunami, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the local government in American Samoa to post signs and conduct evacuation drills in some Samoan communities. Many villages were completely destroyed, so I am impressed that the death toll was not larger. The bottom line is education worked."
While Synolakis agreed that the death toll was probably minimized due to educational efforts, he said there is still a lot of progress that can be made. While working in the field on Oct. 7, the team experienced a real tsunami warning and witnessed first-hand the tremendous confusion and disorganization that followed.
"Although there are warning signs along the beaches in American Samoa, there is no information about where the evacuation routes are," he said. "It's also just as important to let people know when it's safe to come back as it is to warn them. We definitely have our work cut out for us."
The collected field data serves as benchmarking and validation of numerical tsunami models with wide-ranging applications including forecasting, warning and sediment transport. The researchers will present their findings at special sessions at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco this December. Brief publications summarizing the immediate results will follow in research journals.
This survey was partially supported by the Pacific Earthquake Research Center (PEER).
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Media Relations Contacts: Nancy Fullbright (912-963-2522); E-mail: (nancy.fullbright@innovate.gatech.edu); Eric Mankin (213-821-1887); E-mail: (mankin@usc.edu); Megan Fellman (847-491-3115); E-mail: (fellman@northwestern.edu).
Writer: Nancy Fullbright
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Created as a senior design project by biomedical engineering undergraduates David Sotto, Nisha Bhatia, Stephanie Drewicz and Scott Seaman, the prototype has now been successfully tested on one of Zoo Atlanta's 22 western lowland gorillas. The students also had guidance from Hanjoong Jo, the Ada Lee and Pete Correll Professor in Biomedical Engineering and the Division of Cardiology; and Professor Franklin Bost, the Coulter Department director of design instruction.
"Zoo Atlanta is home to the nation's largest collection of gorillas, so there is an ongoing responsibility to contribute to the zoological community's understanding of their care," said Dennis Kelly, President and CEO. "We are proud to have spearheaded an effort that will ultimately benefit gorillas living in captive settings around the world."
The Gorilla Tough Cuff operates in the same manner as the mechanism familiar to humans, with the patient slipping an arm into a cuff. As the cuff inflates, the blood pressure reading is measured and displayed on a monitor. The student design team's biggest set of challenges, however, was constructing a durable, comfortable cuff large enough to fit an adult male gorilla weighing upwards of 300 pounds.
The prototype system was comprised of a blood pressure cuff bolted to a casing made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic. The casing was zip-tied to a rectangular mesh trap and the trap was temporarily attached to the gorilla cage. The pressure cuff tubing was connected to an off-the-shelf veterinary blood pressure monitor located outside of the gorilla cage.
"We also built a safety mechanism into the device so that the gorillas would not be injured if they became alarmed or frightened and tried to remove their arm from the cuff," said Sotto, who is currently a graduate student at Georgia Tech.
Once the prototype was complete, the Tough Cuff had its first tester: Ozzie, a 48-year-old male western lowland gorilla. Gorillas aren't typically keen on the idea of inserting their arms into inflatable cuffs: Ozzie's accomplishment is the result of months of patience and diligent voluntary positive reinforcement training on the part of Zoo Atlanta's Primate Team.
One of four geriatric gorillas living at the Zoo (the others are Shamba, 50; Choomba, 48; and Ivan, 47), Ozzie is at an age where he may be subject to health concerns similar to those experienced by mature humans. Cardiac disease is the leading cause of mortality in adult male gorillas living in captive settings, and the new system will enable veterinarians to more effectively monitor precursory signs such as high blood pressure.
"This is a great step forward in the medical management and care of captive gorillas," said Dr. Sam Rivera, Associate Veterinarian at Zoo Atlanta. "Our Veterinary and Primate Teams are extremely fortunate to have the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Tech and Emory University as a resource."
The Gorilla Tough Cuff has already been demonstrated for veterinarians and animal care professionals from numerous other accredited zoos. The device could ultimately prove invaluable to the more than 100 institutions around the world currently housing the species.
About Zoo Atlanta
An accredited member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), Zoo Atlanta inspires value and preservation of wildlife through a unique mix of education and outdoor family fun. From well-known native wildlife to critically endangered species on the brink of extinction, the Zoo offers memorable close encounters with more than 1,000 animals from around the world. The Zoo's newest attraction, Boundless Budgies: A Parakeet Adventure, opened in April 2009. The interactive new experience is the largest of its kind in the Southeast. Zoo Atlanta is also the proud home of Xi Lan, the only giant panda cub born in the U.S. in 2008. Other highlights include the nation's largest collection of great apes and a global center of excellence for the care and reproduction of vanishing amphibians and reptiles. Zoo Atlanta is open daily with the exceptions of Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Keeper talks, interactive wildlife shows, education programs and special events run year-round. For more information, call 404.624.WILD or go to zooatlanta.org.
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities, Georgia Tech's more than 19,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Georgia Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and African American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
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Media Relations Contacts: Georgia Tech -- Abby Vogel (404-385-3364); E-mail: (avogel@gatech.edu); Zoo Atlanta -- Keisha Hines (404-624-5980 office; 404-309-2238 cell); E-mail: (khines-davis@zooatlanta.org)
]]>In August 2008, Mayor Otis Johnson held a town hall meeting to pledge that the city of Savannah will be a more environmentally sustainable community and to launch a new sustainability initiative, dubbed Thrive. However, Johnson wanted to focus on leading by example rather than making policies that force citizens to get on board with the program.
"There's a lot of talk about being green and sustainable," Johnson said. "If we're going to lift up being environmentally healthy, we have to walk that walk."
Rachel Smithson, Thrive coordinator for the city of Savannah, began collecting data to establish the city's carbon footprint. The city conducted employee commuter surveys and analyzed electricity consumption, fuel usage and gas emissions. By plugging all of this data into a formula created by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Smithson realized that Savannah city government produces roughly 75,320 tons of equivalent carbon emissions per year.
"Now we had a baseline and we just needed to set an emissions reduction target," Smithson recalled. "Just about that time, the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority came up with the Governor's Energy Challenge that invited statewide business, county and city governments to reduce their energy consumption 15 percent by the year 2020."
After studying the carbon footprint data, Smithson noticed that city government buildings were the number one source of energy consumption, a trend that coincides with national data. The Thrive Committee decided to focus its initial efforts on buildings, and through its connection with the Georgia Environmental Partnership, called on Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute for assistance. One of the most comprehensive university-based programs of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization and economic development in the nation, the Enterprise Innovation Institute has a local office on Georgia Tech's Savannah campus.
"We wanted to have an energy audit because we didn't want to randomly start replacing lights and windows; we wanted to make sure that we were going to have the greatest impact on our electricity and energy consumption," Smithson said. "The city was really excited about using Georgia Tech because it isn't trying to sell us a particular product; the staff there gives us a good, third-party, neutral analysis of what we need."
Mike Brown, an energy specialist with the Enterprise Innovation Institute, and two Georgia Tech co-op students conducted energy audits at three government buildings: City Hall, the Thomas Gamble Building and the Broughton Municipal Building. All three are designated historic buildings, and house the mayor's office and council chambers, human resources, information technology, auditing, utility services and revenue, among others.
Brown and the students placed data loggers in each of the buildings, measuring temperature, lighting and energy consumption, even over nights and weekends. They studied each building's energy consumption history and measured the major energy-consuming equipment.
Among the recommendations that the Georgia Tech specialists made were: replace incandescent lamps with compact fluorescent lamps, improve fluorescent lighting efficiency by replacing T-12 lights with T-8 lights, and manage the building plug-load. They also recommended installing occupancy sensors in restrooms, vending machine controllers to reduce lighting and cooling, a building automation system to automatically control HVAC systems, and variable-air volume fans to reduce air flow when cooling is not needed.
According to Smithson, the biggest challenge now is implementing Georgia Tech's recommendations. As part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the City was able to establish a revolving loan with its stimulus funding. Although the City cannot implement all of the recommendations immediately, Smithson says that as soon as one investment is paid back, another project can begin with the energy savings from the previous project.
"Other challenges we face include changing the mindset of our employees, but behavior modification and organizational and culture shifts take time," she said. "We also don't want to harm the historic integrity of our facilities, but at the same time we don't want to be so concerned that we're throwing energy out the window because we're using single-pane glass."
Already, the benefits are outweighing the challenges. Georgia Tech's assistance allowed the city to have an energy conservation strategy in place, a requirement of the stimulus funding application that some cities have spent more than $250,000 to obtain. And although a lot of investments have yet to be made, electricity expenditures were $350,000 below what the city had targeted through May 2009, something Smithson attributes to changing employee behavior alone.
"Having Georgia Tech on board doing the energy audit has helped us transform our messaging from 'this is good for the environment' to 'this is good for the bottom line,' and that has helped us sell this larger Thrive initiative to our elected officials and the community," said Bret Bell, director of Savannah's Public Information Office. "We're taking it seriously enough that we want to document where we started and where we are going. It has given us credibility."
About Enterprise Innovation Institute:
The Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute helps companies, entrepreneurs, economic developers and communities improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology and innovation. It is one of the most comprehensive university-based programs of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization and economic development in the nation.
Research News & Publications Office
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Media Relations Contacts: Nancy Fullbright (404-894-2214); E-mail: (nancy.fullbright@innovate.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail (john.toon@innovate.gatech.edu).
Writer: Nancy Fullbright
]]>The two projects -- GTRI's Container Security Device (CSD) and the Composite Container Security System -- were developed under contract to the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate. They were among projects featured and demonstrated in simulated and realistic supply chain scenarios at the Department's Cargo Conveyance Security Technology Demonstrations held August 17-28 at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.
Representatives from a broad range of organizations with interest in cargo security -- including federal agencies, congressional and committee staffers, shipping industry representatives, and government officials from Japan, Canada, Singapore, and the European Union -- attended the event. Among the federal agencies with cargo security responsibilities are the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, Transportation Security Administration and Department of Energy.
"GTRI was awarded a contract to develop a container security device based on a unique solution to this complex problem," said Gisele Bennett, director of GTRI's Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory. "The GTRI Container Security Device (CSD) is a small, inexpensive system that will detect unauthorized door opening or removals on ISO marine containers."
ISO containers by design can flex because of forces applied to them as they travel through the supply chain. The GTRI design can account for the normal flexing of the containers without indicating a door opening when one has not occurred.
"The GTRI CSD design has been assessed by the government test team to be highly promising for its resistance to tamper or compromise," Bennett added. "The GTRI CSD is integrated with another DHS-funded system, the Marine Asset Tag Tracking System (MATTS) developed by iControl Inc. MATTS will communicate GTRI CSD alarm data to customs organizations and industry."
In collaboration with the University of Maine, Georgia Tech has also developed a system to secure lightweight composite containers. Teaming with the University's AEWC: Advanced Structures and Composites Center and Maine Secure Composites, LLC, Georgia Tech has developed a novel, lightweight sensor grid to incorporate within the walls, doors and floors of the composite container developed at the University of Maine.
"When combined with GTRI's CSD, the resulting container will be approximately 10-15 percent lighter and more durable than current generation steel containers, but with an embedded security and communication system that will detect breaches to any of the container's six sides and communicate security information, via MATTS, to customs organizations or carriers," Bennett noted.
Shipping containers are potential means for smuggling weapons, drugs and other contraband items across national borders. Security systems are part of the solution because they can sound an alarm if the containers are tampered with in-transit.
The two-week demonstration was held in Albuquerque for those in government, research and industry to highlight technologies being developed to ensure that the contents of cargo containers are not tampered with or removed.
The Department of Homeland Security is sponsoring research in key topical areas to discovery the necessary requirements for robust shipping container security standards. This research is structured to develop representative container security technologies that can be integrated into an effective system.
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Media Relations Contacts: Kirk Englehardt (404-407-7280); E-mail: (kirk.englehardt@gtri.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu).
]]>Research reported in the September issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology found that nanoscience and nanotechnology indeed are highly multidisciplinary -- but not much more so than other modern disciplines such as medicine or electrical engineering that also draw on multiple areas of science and technology.
With $1.6 billion scheduled to be invested in nano-related research during 2010, assessing the multidisciplinary nature of the field could be important to policy-makers, research managers, technology-transfer officers and others responsible for managing the investment and creating a supportive environment for it.
"Research in nanoscience and nanotechnology is not just a collection of isolated 'stove pipes' drawing knowledge from one narrow discipline, but rather is quite interdisciplinary," said Alan Porter, co-author of the paper and a professor emeritus in the Schools of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We found that research in any one category of nanoscience and nanotechnology tends to cite research in many other categories."
The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation through the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University.
Porter and collaborator Jan Youtie, manager of policy services in Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, analyzed abstracts from more than 30,000 papers with "nano" themes that were published between January and July of 2008. They found that although materials science and chemistry dominated the papers, fields as diverse as clinical medicine, biomedical sciences and physics also contributed.
These "nanopapers" studied by the researchers appeared in more than 6,000 journals that were part of a database known as the Science Citation Index (SCI). The researchers found nanopapers in 151 of SCI's 175 subject categories, with 52 of the categories containing more than 100 such papers.
To explore how well knowledge was integrated across the disciplines, the researchers also studied the journal articles that were cited in the nanopapers. They found more than one million cited references, a mean of 33 per paper.
Using text mining techniques to extract sources from the cited references, they further found that 45 subject categories were cited by five percent or more of the nanopapers -- and 98 categories that were cited by at least one percent of the papers. The text mining was done using VantagePoint software developed by Georgia Tech and Search Technology Inc.
Six subject categories dominated both the original nanopapers and the cited references. Each of the six contained 10 percent or more of the original nanopapers and was cited by 39 percent or more of the references. They are:
• Materials science, multidisciplinary
• Physics, applied
• Chemistry, physical
• Physics, condensed matter
• Nanoscience and nanotechnology
• Chemistry, multidisciplinary
The researchers found considerable interdisciplinary representation within those six categories. Though 86 percent of the 3,863 nanopapers in the "nanoscience and nanotechnology" category cited papers in materials science, another 80 subject categories had 40 or more cited papers each.
This representation continued even outside the top six categories. The 808 nanopapers in electrical engineering cited papers in journals from 138 different subject categories, while the 435 nanopapers in organic chemistry cited papers in journals from 140 different subject categories.
The researchers also used a metric they called an "integration score" to gauge how interdisciplinary nature of a particular paper or set of papers. The integration score ranged from zero for stand-alone disciplines that don't cite work from other disciplines to one for highly-integrated disciplines that heavily cite work from other areas.
Integration scores ranged from 0.65 for nanoscience and nanotechnology to 0.60 for electrical engineering and 0.64 for organic chemistry.
"Our results show the multidisciplinary nature of research in nanoscience and nanotechnology, although the integration scores make it clear that much non-nano research is also comparably interdisciplinary," Porter said. "Much of the nanoresearch is also concentrated in 'macrodisciplines' such as materials science and chemistry, and researchers tend to cite work from neighboring fields more often than work in more distant fields."
Understanding the interdisciplinary nature of nanoscience and nanotechnology could be important to creating the right environment for the field to produce results.
"There is a broad perspective that most scientific breakthroughs occur at the interstices among more established fields," said Youtie. "Nanotechnology R&D is believed to be an area where disciplines converge. If nanotechnology does have a strong multidisciplinary character, attention to communication across disciplines will be an important feature in its emergence."
In the future, Porter and Youtie hope to explore other policy-focused nano topics, including:
• How research and development patterns can forecast likely commercial innovations;
• The societal implications of nanoscience and nanotechnology innovations so that potential negative efforts can be mitigated before they occur;
• How corporations develop their strategies for nanoscience and nanotechnology, and
• Where nanoscience and hotspots for research and development -- called "nanodistricts" -- exist around the world.
"A nanodistrict is a regional concentration of research institutions and firms where nanotechnologies are developed," Youtie explained. "Although nanotechnology applications are deployed widely across the world, a smaller number of nanodistrict locations are appearing where nanotechnology research, development and initial commercialization are clustered."
The Center for Nanotechnology in Society is part of a broad U.S. effort to anticipate the societal implications of nanotechnology. Georgia Tech's role in the multi-university effort is to characterize the type of nanotechnology research being done and to identify early indicators of emerging technologies in that field.
Youtie and Porter are also part of Georgia Tech's Program in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP), a collaboration of the School of Public Policy and the Enterprise Innovation Institute that advances research and practice in science, technology, innovation and spatial development policy.
The findings and opinions contained in this news release are those of the researchers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
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]]>The problem was a pressing one. The A-10 attack aircraft, an Air Force workhorse, needed important additions to its electronic warfare (EW) countermeasures systems.
"This was a rush program -- they needed it right away," said research engineer Melanie Hill, who was GTRI's lead engineer on the program. "We made it a priority across many different GTRI groups because of the broad requirements, which included electrical engineering, software development, systems engineering and mechanical engineering."
At issue was the ability of the A-10 to detect infrared signals from certain classes of enemy weapons. The A-10, an attack aircraft that often flies at lower altitudes to use its heavy guns and missiles against ground targets, could be vulnerable to those weapons.
The A-10 already carried extensive electronic warfare equipment, including the ALQ-213, a central controller that is the core of the airplane's electronic warfare systems. Essentially, it is the pilot's control center for threat protection.
The ALQ-213 takes information from the aircraft's individual EW systems -- which include a radar warning receiver and signal-jamming pods -- and processes that data in a coordinated manner. The controller also handles the dispensing of chaff and flares, which are countermeasures used to decoy hostile missiles.
The GTRI team's first task was to take an existing infrared-detection tool, the AAR-47 missile warning system, and determine whether it could do the job on the A-10. Then the team had to decide exactly how to add the AAR-47 to the A-10, and how to integrate the new missile-warning functions into the ALQ-213 controller.
The effort, called the A-10 Infrared Countermeasures (IRCM) Program, was on a tight schedule from the start, with 200 days to move from concept to flight test. The project was sponsored by the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center at Robins Air Force Base.
Engineers from across GTRI pulled together to meet the deadline. GTRI principal research scientist Charlie Carstensen used a pedestal-mounted A-10 located at an Air Force facility in Rome, N.Y., to establish that the AAR-47 was a viable option for the A-10.
With principal research engineer Mike Willis as program manager, principal research engineer Jeff Hallman led the AAR-47 research effort, and principal research engineer Byron Coker led the team developing the software that allowed the AAR-47 to communicate with the ALQ-213. A successful flight test kept the program on schedule.
GTRI's next task was to take the prototype equipment that had passed the flight test and use it to develop a standardized installation kit that included a complete package of technical drawings. The kit would then be used to perform hundreds of upgrades on U.S. A-10s worldwide.
Research associate Kim Wood was a leader in electrical/mechanical design and aircraft installation, and principal research engineer Rod Beard and electrical engineer Wallace Gustad were among the GTRI personnel who worked on the original prototype used for flight testing, as well as on development of the upgrade installation kits. Numerous other engineers, technologists and scientists worked on the program's mechanical engineering and drafting needs.
To help get the actual A-10 upgrade process under way, GTRI supported the manufacture of the initial production kits, and then turned the engineering over to the Air Force for continued production.
The upgrade is now active on the U.S. A-10 fleet worldwide.
In a separate but related project, a GTRI team that included Byron Coker, Mike Willis and Lee Montaña was successful in automating the functions of the ALQ-213 on the A-10 and the F-16 combat aircraft. Now pilots of those aircraft can put their entire EW suite on fully automatic operation, giving them greater freedom to concentrate on missions.
"I think the success of the IRCM program says something about GTRI's ability and readiness to focus a broad spectrum of expertise on a given need, even in a short timeframe," Hill said. "A lot of different disciplines in GTRI worked on this program, and they worked together in ways that were both timely and highly effective."
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]]>Publishing in the journal Nature Materials this week, researchers from four different institutions report measuring different friction forces when a carbon nanotube slides along its axis compared to when it slides perpendicular to its axis. This friction difference has its origins in soft lateral distortion of the tubes when they slide in the transverse direction.
The findings not only could provide a better understanding of fundamental friction issues, but from a more practical standpoint, offer a new tool for assembling nanotubes into devices and clarify the forces acting on them. Asymmetries in the friction could potentially also be used in sorting nanotubes according to their chirality, a property that is now difficult to measure with other means.
When an atomic force microscope (AFM) tip is scanned transversely across a multi-walled carbon nanotube, the amount of friction measured is twice as much as when the same tube is scanned longitudinally, along the length of the tube. The researchers attribute this difference to what they call "hindered rolling" -- additional effort required to overcome the nanotube's tendency to roll as the AFM tip strokes across it rather than along it.
"Because the energy required to move in one direction is twice as much as required to move in the other direction, this could be an easy way to control the assembly of carbon nanotubes for nanoelectronics, sensors and other applications," said Elisa Riedo, co-author of the study and an associate professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "To assemble nanotubes on a surface, you need to know how they interact and what force is needed to move them."
The combined theoretical and experimental study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Other institutions contributing to the project include the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, International School for Advanced Studies and CNR Democritos Laboratory -- all in Trieste, Italy -- and the University of Hamburg in Germany. The paper was published in advance online on September 13 by the journal Nature Materials.
Carbon nanotubes have exceptional thermal, mechanical and electrical properties that have generated considerable interest since they were first reported in 1991. Though friction has been studied before in nanotubes, this research is the first to provide detailed information about the frictional forces at work in both the longitudinal and transverse directions when the tubes interact with an AFM tip.
Friction is one of the oldest problems in physics and one of the most important to everyday life. It is estimated that the losses in the U.S. economy due to friction total about 6 percent of the gross national product. Friction is even more important to micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and nanoscale devices because these smaller systems are more affected by surface forces than large systems.
"As systems become smaller and smaller, it becomes more important to understand how to address friction," said Riedo. "Surface forces can prevent micro and nano systems from operating at all."
Experimentally, the researchers scanned an atomic force microscope tip longitudinally along a series of multiwalled carbon nanotubes held stationary on a substrate. They also conducted a series of similar scans in the transverse direction. The researchers applied a consistent force on the AFM tip in both scanning directions, and relied on powerful Van der Waals forces to hold tubes in place on the substrate.
"When you scan a nanotube transversely, you are probing something very different," said Riedo. "You are also probing additional dissipation modes due to a kind of swaying motion in which energy is also dissipated through movement of the nanotube as it alters its cross section."
The experiment showed that greater forces were required to move the tip in the transverse direction. Using molecular dynamics simulations, collaborators Erio Tosatti and Xiaohua Zhang at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, International School for Advanced Studies and CNR Democritos Laboratory analyzed the phenomenon to understand what was happening.
"In principle, there seems to be no reason why the frictional forces required to move the AFM tip would be different in one direction," Riedo noted. "But the theory confirmed that this 'hindered rolling' and soft mode movement of the nanotubes are the sources of the higher friction when the tip moves transversely."
Because the nanotube-tip system is so simple, it offers an ideal platform for studying basic friction principles, which are important to all moving systems.
"This kind of system gives you the opportunity to explore friction using an ideal experiment so you can really probe the energy dissipation mechanism," Riedo explained. "The system is so simple that you can distinguish between the dissipation mechanisms, which you can't usually do well in macro-scale systems."
Based on the molecular dynamics simulations, Riedo and Tosatti believe that the friction anisotropy will be very different in chiral nanotubes versus non-chiral -- left-to-right symmetric -- nanotubes.
"Because of the chirality, the tip moves in a screw-like fashion, creating hindered rolling even for longitudinal sliding," Tosatti said. "Thus, the new measuring technique may suggest a simple way to sort the nanotubes; among the next steps in the research will be to show experimentally that this can be done."
In addition to the researchers already mentioned, co-authors for this paper include Christian Klinke at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Hamburg, and Marcel Lucas and Ismael Palaci at Georgia Tech.
"Understanding the basic mechanism of friction in carbon nanotubes will help us in designing devices with them in the future," Riedo added. "We have shown an anisotropy in the friction coefficient of carbon nanotubes in the transverse and longitudinal directions, which has its origin in the soft lateral distortion of tubes when the tip-tube contact is moving in the transverse direction. Our findings could help in developing better strategies for chirality sorting, large-scale self-assembling of nanotubes on surfaces, and designing nanotube adhesives and nanotube-polymer composite materials."
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]]>As head of Georgia Tech's FutureMedia Initiative, Renu Kulkarni's charter is to help bring all these elements together in an open-innovation environment that will make the state of Georgia both a leader in developing new media and a model for how to bring new ideas to market.
"Mine is a collaborative role, one that will help all the players span the innovation cycle from research to discovery to creation, commercialization and scale-up," she said. "My job will be to connect universities, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry to create a rich and robust open innovation ecosystem that builds on and leverages our world-class resources."
Most recently vice president for technology partnerships at communications giant Motorola, Kulkarni has more than 20 years of experience in turning research and development into new products, building strategic alliances for industry, and developing new business.
Before becoming vice president, she also directed Motorola's research and development portfolio, managing a $150 million-per-year fund, a technology and market trend analysis program, and research and development partnerships with customers. She also served as Motorola's senior director for corporate strategy and held a variety of business consulting, marketing and technical management positions for companies including Deloitte Consulting, BellSouth International, Sprint and GTE Corp.
Kulkarni holds an M.B.A. from Emory University's Goizueta Business School and a B.S. degree from Georgia Tech's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She is also a graduate of the Stuyvesant High School, the famed mathematics and science magnet school in New York City.
At Georgia Tech, she reports to the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Georgia Tech's applied research organization, and to the Enterprise Innovation Institute, which helps enterprises of all kinds become more competitive through the application of science, technology and innovation. Together, the two institutions span the innovation cycle from research and discovery to commercialization and scale-up.
"With its more than seven decades of experience in integrating research results to solve real-world problems, the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) can play a key role in bringing resources together to ensure that Georgia takes advantage of the opportunities in future media," said Stephen E. Cross, GTRI's director and a Georgia Tech vice president. "With her background in technology collaborations, Renu Kulkarni is the ideal person to lead this initiative."
One of Kulkarni's first assignments has been to lead development of the FutureMedia conference (www.futuremediaga.org) to be held on October 15, an event she expects will "start the conversation" about what Georgia needs to do to capitalize on its strengths.
The broad-based event features Chris Klaus, founder and CEO of Kaneva, Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News and Ron Clark, founder of The Ron Clark Academy. It will also include speakers from the University of Georgia, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emory University and Georgia Tech -- and demonstrations from more than 60 startup companies and dozens of university researchers.
Speakers from Georgia Tech will include G.P. "Bud" Peterson, Georgia Tech's president; Elizabeth Mynatt, director of the GVU Center, and Janet Murray, Dean's Recognition Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture (LCC) and director of LCC's Graduate Program in Digital Media. Stephen Fleming, vice provost of Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, will moderate a panel discussion on the state of digital media.
Hosted by Georgia Tech, the event is sponsored by Turner Broadcasting. Partners include the Creative Coast Alliance, Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Research Alliance, the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta, the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia, the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Technology Association of Georgia, the Technology Executives Roundtable, and Venture Atlanta 09.
Beyond the event, Kulkarni has been meeting with more than a dozen campus leaders in digital media and with business organizations across the state that have a strategic interest in future media.
What's the ultimate goal of FutureMedia?
"We envision a physical and virtual place where all are invited to experiment, discover, create, commercialize and shape the future of digital media," Kulkarni said. "We want to create an open innovation ecosystem that will make Georgia a global pioneer in this field and provide a model not only for what we do in future digital media, but also in how we do it."
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]]>Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are developing ways to harden the microchips themselves against damage from various types of cosmic radiation. With funding from NASA and other sponsors, a Georgia Tech team is investigating the use of silicon-germanium (SiGe) to create microelectronic devices that are intrinsically resistant to space-particle bombardment.
Key to the investigation is determining exactly what happens inside a device at the instant a particle hits, says principal investigator John D. Cressler, who is a Ken Byers Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
"Cosmic radiation can go right through the spacecraft, and right through electronics on the way, generating charge inside the device that can cause electronic systems to produce errors or even die," Cressler said. "There's a lot of interest in improved hardening capabilities from NASA, the Department of Defense and communications companies, because anything that flies into space has to withstand the effects of this radiation."
Silicon-germanium holds major promise for this application, he adds. SiGe alloys combine silicon, the most common microchip material, with germanium, at nanoscale dimensions. The result is a material that offers important gains in toughness, speed and flexibility.
Any space vehicle, from NASA spacecraft and military vehicles to communications and global positioning system (GPS) satellites, must contend with two principal types of cosmic radiation.
-- Ionizing radiation includes ubiquitous particles such as electrons and protons that are relatively high in energy but not deeply penetrating. A moderate amount of metal shielding can reduce their destructive effect, but such protection increases a space vehicle's launch weight.
-- Galactic cosmic rays include heavy ions and other extremely high-energy particles. It is virtually impossible to protect against these dangers.
Faced with damaging radiation, engineers have for decades augmented shielding with a circuit-design technique called "triple modular redundancy." This approach utilizes three copies of each circuit, all tied into logic circuitry at one end. If one copy of the circuit is corrupted by cosmic radiation and begins producing bad data, the logic circuit opts for the matching data produced by the other two circuits.
"The problem with this approach is that it requires three times the overhead in power, real-estate and cost," Cressler said.
Other traditional circuit-protecting techniques have included the hardening-by-process method. In this approach, integrated circuits are produced using special processes that harden the chips against radiation damage. The problem is this processing generally increases chip costs by 10 to 50 times.
As a result, the space community is eager to find ways to produce space-hardened microelectronic devices using only everyday commercial chip-making technologies, Cressler says. The savings in cost, size and weight could be very significant.
Silicon-germanium is a top candidate for this application because it has intrinsic immunity to many types of radiation. The catch is that, like other materials, SiGe cannot stand up to the extremely destructive heavy ions present in galactic cosmic rays.
At least, not yet.
Cressler's team is analyzing exactly what happens inside a SiGe device when it's subjected to the type of energy found in heavy ions. Using sophisticated new equipment, including an extremely high-speed oscilloscope, researchers can capture details of particle-strike events that last only trillionths of a second (picoseconds).
Working with NASA and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Cressler is using an ultrafast laser to inject current into a silicon-germanium transistor. The aim is to emulate the effect of a heavy-ion strike in space.
"When I shine a laser on the device, it generates a pulse of current that may only last for a few picoseconds," Cressler said. "Capturing the dynamics of that process -- what it looks like in time and in its magnitudes -- is important and challenging."
Cressler's investigation also involves firing actual ions at SiGe circuits. Using a focused ion microbeam at the Sandia National Laboratories, the Georgia Tech team can aim a single heavy ion at a given point on a device and capture those results as well.
The ultimate aim is to alter silicon-germanium devices and circuits in ways that will make them highly resistant to nearly all cosmic radiation, including heavy ions, without adding overhead.
Observing actual particle impacts in real time is key, Cressler says. Detailed computer 3-D models of particle strikes on SiGe devices and circuits -- created with sophisticated numerical simulation techniques -- have already been developed. But until researchers can compare these models to actual observed data, they can't be sure the models are correct.
"If we get good fidelity between the two," he added, "then we've know we have a good understanding of the physics."
Step two, he adds, will involve using that information to design devices and circuits that are highly immune to radiation.
"One of the holy grails in this field is getting sufficient radiation hardness without resorting to any of the high overhead schemes such as shielding, process hardening, or triple modular redundancy," he said. "And, in fact, we are closing in on that goal, using SiGe electronics."
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Writer: Rick Robinson
]]>"This clinical trial has validated that the Tongue Drive system is intuitive and quite simple for individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries to use," said Maysam Ghovanloo, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Trial participants were able to easily remember and correctly issue tongue commands to play computer games and drive a powered wheelchair around an obstacle course with very little prior training."
At the annual conference of the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA) on June 26, the researchers reported the results of the first five clinical trial subjects to use the Tongue Drive system. The trial was conducted at the Shepherd Center, an Atlanta-based catastrophic care hospital, and funded by the National Science Foundation and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.
The clinical trial tested the ability of these individuals with tetraplegia, as a result of high-level spinal cord injuries (cervical vertebrae C3-C5), to perform tasks related to computer access and wheelchair navigation -- using only their tongue movements.
At the beginning of each trial, Ghovanloo and graduate students Xueliang Huo and Chih-wen Cheng attached a small magnet -- the size of a grain of rice -- to the participant's tongue with tissue adhesive. Movement of this magnetic tracer was detected by an array of magnetic field sensors mounted on wireless headphones worn by the subject. The sensor output signals were wirelessly transmitted to a portable computer, which was carried on the wheelchair.
The signals were processed to determine the relative motion of the magnet with respect to the array of sensors in real-time. This information was then used to control the movements of the cursor on a computer screen or to substitute for the joystick function in a powered wheelchair. Details on use of the Tongue Drive for wheeled mobility were published in the June 2009 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.
Ghovanloo chose the tongue to operate the system because unlike hands and feet, which are controlled by the brain through the spinal cord, the tongue is directly connected to the brain by a cranial nerve that generally escapes damage in severe spinal cord injuries or neuromuscular diseases.
Before using the Tongue Drive system, the subjects trained the computer to understand how they would like to move their tongues to indicate different commands. A unique set of specific tongue movements was tailored for each individual based on the user's abilities, oral anatomy and personal preferences. For the first computer test, the user issued commands to move the computer mouse left and right. Using these commands, each subject played a computer game that required moving a paddle horizontally to prevent a ball from hitting the bottom of the screen.
After adding two more commands to their repertoire -- up and down -- the subjects were asked to move the mouse cursor through an on-screen maze as quickly and accurately as possible.
Then the researchers added two more commands -- single and double mouse clicks -- to provide the subject with complete mouse functionality. When a randomly selected symbol representing one of the six commands appeared on the computer screen, the subject was instructed to issue that command within a specified time period. Each subject completed 40 trials for each time period.
After the computer sessions, the subjects were ready for the wheelchair driving exercise. Using forward, backward, right, left and stop/neutral tongue commands, the subjects maneuvered a powered wheelchair through an obstacle course.
The obstacle course contained 10 turns and was longer than a professional basketball court. Throughout the course, the users had to perform navigation tasks such as making a U-turn, backing up and fine-tuning the direction of the wheelchair in a limited space. Subjects were asked to navigate through the course as fast as they could, while avoiding collisions.
Each subject operated the powered wheelchair using two different control strategies: discrete mode, which was designed for novice users, and continuous mode for more experienced users. In discrete mode, if the user issued the command to move forward and then wanted to turn right, the user would have to stop the wheelchair before issuing the command to turn right. The stop command was selected automatically when the tongue returned to its resting position, bringing the wheelchair to a standstill.
"Discrete mode is a safety feature particularly for novice users, but it reduces the agility of the wheelchair movement," explained Ghovanloo. "In continuous mode, however, the user is allowed to steer the powered wheelchair to the left or right as it is moving forward and backward, thus making it possible to follow a curve."
Each subject completed the course at least twice using each strategy while the researchers recorded the navigation time and number of collisions. Using discrete control, the average speed for the five subjects was 5.2 meters per minute and the average number of collisions was 1.8. Using continuous control, the average speed was 7.7 meters per minute and the average number of collisions was 2.5.
While this initial performance trial only required six tongue commands, the Tongue Drive system can potentially capture a large number of tongue movements, each of which can represent a different user command. The ability to train the system with as many commands as an individual can comfortably remember and having all of the commands available to the user at the same time are significant advantages over the common sip-n-puff device that acts as a simple switch controlled by sucking or blowing through a straw.
Some sip-n-puff users also consider the straw to be a symbol of their disability. Since Tongue Drive users simply wear headphones that are commonly worn to listen to music, the system is more acceptable to potential users.
John Anschutz, manager of the assistive technology program at the Shepherd Center, identified advantages the Tongue Drive system has over the tongue-touch keypad.
"The Tongue Drive system seems to be much more supportable if there were a failure of some component within the system. With the old tongue-touch keypad, if the system went down then the user lost all of the functions of the wheelchair, phone, computer and environmental control," explained Anschutz. "Ghovanloo's approach should be much more repairable should a fault arise, which is critical for systems for which so much function is depended upon."
A future system upgrade will be to move the sensors inside the user's mouth, according to Ghovanloo. This will be an important step for users who are very impaired and cannot reposition the system for best results, according to Anschutz.
"All of the subjects successfully completed the computer and powered wheelchair navigation tasks with their tongues without difficulty, which demonstrates that the Tongue Drive system can potentially provide individuals unable to move their arms and hands with effective control over a wide variety of devices they use in their daily lives," said Ghovanloo.
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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>What do these trends suggest for the future of media companies around the world?
Renu Kulkarni doesn't know for sure, but she wants to "start the conversation" about the question -- and the role that Georgia will play in shaping the future of digital, social and multimedia. As head of the new FutureMedia Initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she believes the Peach State is uniquely positioned to be both a global pioneer and innovator in helping define the future of media.
"With world-class university research, proven engineering and commercialization expertise, a successful community of entrepreneurs -- and leading digital media, communications and entertainment industries -- Georgia really does have what it will take to help chart the future of media," said Kulkarni, who joined Georgia Tech after a 20-year career in the high-tech industry, most recently serving as vice president for technology partnerships at communications giant Motorola.
The FutureMedia Initiative will kick off October 15 with a day-long conference aimed at encouraging dialogue about what Georgia needs to do to create an open innovation ecosystem for developing media of the future.
To be held at the Palomar Hotel adjacent to the Georgia Tech campus, the FutureMedia Conference (www.futuremediaga.com) will feature media visionaries, thought leaders from Georgia universities and industry -- and demonstrations of technologies already in the innovation pipeline from the startup and university research communities.
Among the speakers will be Chris Klaus, founder and CEO of Kaneva; Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News, and Ron Clark, founder of The Ron Clark Academy. The event will also include speakers from the University of Georgia's New Media Institute, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emory University's Goizueta Business School, Georgia Tech's GVU Center and its School of Literature, Communication and Culture. Industry represented will include Cisco, Motorola, Turner Broadcasting, Music Intelligence Solutions, Noro-Moseley Partners and Chrysalis Ventures.
An afternoon session will provide demonstrations of university research, including innovative music technology, gesture navigation, augmented reality -- and advanced high-speed network and mobile technologies. As many as 60 startup companies are expected to demonstrate their new products and services.
Hosted by Georgia Tech, the event is sponsored by Turner Broadcasting. Partners include the Creative Coast Alliance, Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Research Alliance, the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta, the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia, the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Technology Association of Georgia, the Technology Executives Roundtable and Venture Atlanta 09.
Georgia has created an integrated innovation pipeline for developing new commercially-important technologies and moving them into the marketplace, noted Susan Shows, senior vice president at the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). The GRA's VentureLab program has already spun off dozens of startups based on university research.
"Investments in Georgia's research universities are paying off in the formation of new companies that are creating the industries and jobs of the future," Shows said. "By bringing university-industry resources together, FutureMedia will accelerate our success in the media industries that will be important 5, 10 or 20 years from now."
Georgia Tech intends to play a strong role in expanding Georgia's media industry and startup infrastructure, said Georgia Tech Vice President Stephen Cross, who also serves as director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) -- where the FutureMedia Initiative is headquartered.
"What's unique about Georgia Tech is that we already have a number of fabulous thought leaders, researchers and scientists, companies and startups," he said. "Many of the pieces of the story are already well known, but we haven't integrated them yet into a common and mutually supportive story line. The plot is evolving quickly, but the ending is not yet clear. We intend to be the authors of a great ending and FutureMedia will help us do that."
More than a dozen Georgia Tech units are already developing digital media. The goal of FutureMedia, said Kulkarni, will be to expand the Institute's overall role.
"We want to make the pie larger for all without getting in the way of what is already going on," she explained. "The conference is meant to bring the community together to begin a dialogue. FutureMedia is something that has lots of opportunities for all of us if we work together."
What's the ultimate goal of FutureMedia?
"We envision physical and virtual places where all are invited to experiment, discover, create, commercialize and shape the future of media," Kulkarni explained. "We want to create a rich, open innovation ecosystem that will make Georgia a global pioneer in this field and provide a model not only for what we do in enabling the future, but also in how we do it."
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Writer: John Toon
]]>A venture capitalist and former telecom engineer with a degree in theoretical physics, Fleming will succeed Wayne Hodges, who retired recently after a 40-year career at Georgia Tech.
"In these challenging times, I am very pleased that someone with Stephen's experience, leadership, enthusiasm and drive has elected to take on this very important position," said Mark Allen, senior vice provost for research and innovation at Georgia Tech. "The size, scope and success of the Enterprise Innovation Institute are among the key differentiators for Georgia Tech among leading institutions around the world, and are essential to Georgia Tech's core mission of disseminating technological discoveries and enhancing technology's impact."
State budget cuts have significantly reduced support for the Enterprise Innovation Institute, and Fleming has said that broadening the organization's financial base will be among his top priorities.
"Though we've done our best to align our costs with our projected state, federal and private-sector dollars, we must continue to seek other sources of funding to fuel the job-creating engine that Georgia needs," Fleming said. "I am excited about the challenges ahead as we more fully apply the resources of Georgia Tech to help build Georgia's economy. Our strength is based on the people in the Enterprise Innovation Institute."
With approximately 200 staff members and students, the Enterprise Innovation Institute includes five major divisions:
* Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP), a division of the Enterprise Innovation Institute's Industry Services, which provides direct technical assistance and professional education to help companies become more competitive in world markets;
* Entrepreneur Services, which includes the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), Georgia Tech's science and technology incubator, which helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies;
* Strategic Partners, which serves as an industry-centric doorway into Georgia Tech for companies seeking multi-faceted interdisciplinary research;
* Community Policy and Research Services, which helps government at all levels address the challenges of technology-based economic development, and
* Commercialization Services, which evaluates Georgia Tech inventions and helps form startup companies around commercially-promising technologies.
Fleming praised Hodges, who led the development of the Enterprise Innovation Institute and served as director of the ATDC for more than 20 years.
"The Enterprise Innovation Institute is widely seen as the model for 21st century technology-based economic development organizations at research universities," said Fleming. "What Georgia Tech has today in the Enterprise Innovation Institute is due to Wayne Hodges' vision, creativity and tenacity. Through his hard work and support from Georgia Tech and partner organizations such as the Georgia Research Alliance, we have an organization that universities around the world would like to emulate."
Fleming has more than 13 years of private equity experience at the general partner level. Prior to his venture capital career, he spent 15 years in operations roles at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Nortel Networks, and LICOM -- a venture-funded startup.
An Atlanta native and summa cum laude graduate of Georgia Tech, Fleming is active in the "alternative space" industry -- an investor in three private aerospace companies and is a founding member of the Space Angels Network. He also serves on the boards of trustees for the Spiritual Living Center of Atlanta and for Tech High School, a charter high school emphasizing science, math and technology in urban Atlanta.
Fleming is a member of the IEEE, the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America and a number of regional technology organizations.
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]]>Though the long-term durability of the new mixed ion conductor material must still be proven, its development could address two of the most vexing problems facing the solid oxide fuel cells: tolerance of sulfur in fuels and resistance to carbon build-up known as coking. The new material could also allow solid oxide fuel cells -- which convert fuel to electricity more efficiently than other fuel cells -- to operate at lower temperatures, potentially reducing material and fabrication costs.
"The development of this material suggests that we could have a much less expensive solid oxide fuel cell, and that it could be more compact, which would increase the range of potential applications," said Meilin Liu, a Regent's professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This new material would potentially allow the fuel cells to run with dirty hydrocarbon fuels without the need to clean them and supply water."
The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Basic Energy Science Catalysis Science Program.
Like all fuel cells, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) use an electrochemical process to produce electricity by oxidizing a fuel. As the name implies, SOFCs use a ceramic electrolyte, a material known as yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ).
The fuel cell's anode uses a composite consisting of YSZ and the metal nickel. This anode provides excellent catalytic activity for fuel oxidation, good conductivity for collecting current generated, and compatibility with the cell's electrolyte -- which is also YSZ.
But the material has three significant drawbacks: even small amounts of sulfur in fuel "poison" the anode to dramatically reduce efficiency, the use of hydrocarbon fuels creates carbon build-up which clogs the anode -- and because YSZ has limited conductivity at low temperatures -- SOFCs must operate at high temperatures.
As a result, fuels used in SOFCs, such as natural gas or propane, must be purified to remove sulfur, which increases their cost. Water in the form of steam must also be supplied to a reformer that converts hydrocarbons to hydrogen and carbon monoxide before being fed to the fuel cells, adding complexity to the overall system and reducing energy efficiency. And the high-temperature operation means the cells must be fabricated from costly exotic materials, which keeps SOFCs too expensive for many applications.
The new material developed at Georgia Tech addresses all three of those anode issues. Referred to as BZCYYb as shorthand for its complex composition, the material tolerates hydrogen sulfide in concentrations as high as 50 parts-per-million, does not accumulate carbon -- and can operate efficiently at temperatures as low as 500 degrees Celsius.
The BZCYYb (Barium-Zirconium-Cerium-Yttrium-Ytterbium Oxide) material could be used in a variety of ways: as a coating on the traditional Ni-YSZ anode, as a replacement for the YSZ in the anode and as a replacement for the entire YSZ electrolyte system. Liu believes the first two options are more viable.
So far, the new material has provided steady performance for up to 1,000 hours of operation in a small laboratory-scale SOFC. To be commercially viable, however, the material will have to be proven in operation for up to five years -- the expected lifespan of a commercial SOFC.
"We don't see any problems ahead for fabrication or other issues that might prevent scale-up," said Liu. "The material is produced using standard solid-state reactions and is straightforward."
The researchers don't yet understand how their new material resists deactivation by sulfur and carbon, but theorize that it may provide enhanced catalytic activity for oxidizing sulfur and both cracking and reforming hydrocarbons.
In addition to its tolerance of sulfur and resistance to coking, the BZCYYb material's conductivity at lower temperature could also provide a significant advantage for SOFCs.
"If we could reduce operating temperatures to 500 or 600 degrees Celsius, that would allow us to use less expensive metals as interconnects," Liu noted. "Getting the temperature down to 300 to 400 degrees could allow use of much less expensive materials in the packaging, which would dramatically reduce the cost of these systems."
Beyond its use in fuel cells, the material developed by Liu and his team -- which also included Lei Yang, Shizhong Wang, Kevin Blinn, Mingfei Liu, Ze Liu and Zhe Cheng -- could also be used for fuel reforming to feed other types of fuel cells.
Though the technology for solid oxide fuel cells is currently less mature than that for other types of fuel cells, Liu believes SOFCs will ultimately win out because they don't require precious metals such as platinum and their efficiency can be higher -- as much as 80 percent with co-generation use of waste heat.
"Solid oxide fuel cells offer high energy efficiency, the potential for direct utilization of all types of fuels including renewable biofuels, and the possibility of lower costs since they do not use any precious metals," said Liu. "We are working to reduce the cost of solid oxide fuel cells to make them viable in many new applications, and this new material brings us much closer to doing that."
This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Basic Energy Science Catalysis Science Program under grant DE-FG02-06ER15837. The comments and conclusions in this document are those of the researchers and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Energy.
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Writer: John Toon
]]>However, there is currently no published standardized, repeatable methodology by which manufacturers of RFID equipment or medical devices can assess potential issues with electromagnetic interference and evaluate means to mitigate them.
To resolve these concerns, the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) recently began developing testing protocols for RFID technology in the health care setting. The test protocol development is being overseen by AIM Global, the international trade association representing automatic identification and mobility technology solution providers, and also includes MET Laboratories, a company that provides testing and certification services for medical devices.
"A comprehensive set of test protocols, which are sufficiently precise to permit repeatable results, is required to understand if there is an interaction between various types of RFID systems and active implantable medical devices, electronic medical equipment, in vitro diagnostic equipment and biologics. Only after the protocols are developed will we be able to investigate the cause of any interactions, the result of any interactions, and ways manufacturers might eliminate or mitigate interactions," said Craig K. Harmon, president and CEO of Q.E.D. Systems and chairman of AIM Global's RFID Experts Group. This group is overseeing the Health Care Initiative and includes representatives from 40 organizations in the United States, Europe and Asia.
GTRI researchers will test how RFID systems affect the function of implantable and wearable medical devices, such as pacemakers, implantable cardioverter defibrillators, neurostimulators, implantable infusion pumps and cardiac monitors.
"The internal components, firmware and hardware of every company's devices are different, meaning that each device can respond differently to the same electromagnetic environment. Since there have been various preliminary tests and publications from different organizations indicating that there may or may not be issues with RFID system environments and these devices, it is important to standardize the way to test such devices," said Ralph Herkert, director of GTRI's Medical Device Test Center.
Herkert and Gisele Bennett, director of GTRI's Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory, will evaluate and determine the best method for measuring whether interference takes place as a result of RFID emission in both active and passive RFID technologies covering the spectrum from low-frequency to ultra high-frequency.
The researchers will test whether radio frequency-emitting devices cause any negative effects on the medical devices, and under what conditions these effects might occur. Testing will also determine whether specific medical devices are particularly susceptible to certain radio frequency identification characteristics and if any corrective actions can be taken to mitigate such susceptibility.
Medical device testing is not new for GTRI, which established its Medical Device Test Center more than 14 years ago. The facility was created to enable manufacturers of implantable cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators to work with providers of electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems, used by retailers, libraries and other establishments to prevent theft and track inventory. The center's original mission was to help manufacturers improve compatibility between implantable medical devices and EAS systems that radiate electromagnetic energy. In 2006, GTRI expanded its operations and facilities to test new types of security and logistical systems (SLS), including RFID.
To test the effects of RFID systems on medical devices, the researchers simulate real-world conditions by placing a medical device in a tank of saline solution that simulates the electrical characteristics of body tissue and fluid. The medical device is then exposed to different RFID technologies. Several tests are performed with the device placed in different orientations to represent how people typically interact with the emissions.
"We think the testing procedure for RFID systems will be similar to the EAS system procedure, but there are a few more challenges with the RFID systems because a person doesn't always pass through a portal," noted Bennett, who is also a member of AIM Global's RFID Experts Group. "Medical devices can be affected by active tags with stronger signals or RFID systems reading passive tag signals."
The test protocols developed by GTRI will be submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for concurrence, after which a worldwide certification program will be launched and other testing facilities will be invited to participate.
Funding to develop these test guidelines is currently being provided by GTRI, but the researchers are actively looking for external funding.
"We have more than 35 years of experience at GTRI testing medical device interference and we think that testing the effects of RFID on medical devices is an important area to pursue," added Bennett.
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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are developing a novel material for transferring heat away from ultra-high-power defense electronics. The exotic material, a composite of diamond and copper, is one of the materials under development as part of a new concept called a "Thermal Ground Plane" that aims to remove heat up to 100 times more effectively than present thermal-conducting schemes.
Such a performance leap could be vital to cooling next-generation radars, said Jason Nadler, a GTRI research engineer. Nadler is investigating ways to bring new materials and techniques to bear on the problem.
"Many areas of electronics are running up against the same issue: you just can't move the heat away fast enough to let the devices be reliable," Nadler said. "As we rely increasingly on very high-power devices, the methods of getting heat away from them have to become more efficient."
Georgia Tech is working with the Raytheon Co. on a project that seeks to raise thermal conductivity capabilities to 20,000 watts per meter Kelvin (a measure of thermal-conductivity efficiency). That's a tall order, considering that the current conductivity champion, for radar applications, is a copper material with performance of approximately 200 to 300 watts per meter Kelvin.
The three-phase, four-year project is sponsored by the Microsystems Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
This improved cooling capability could benefit future high-power transmit-receive (T/R) module packages. Because of their higher power, those transmit-receive modules will also have higher cooling needs that may require a Thermal Ground Plane -- a sort of heat-dissipating sandwich about one millimeter thick that would be part of the T/R module's packaging.
"A Thermal Ground Plane is basically a materials system," Nadler explained. "The most thermally conductive natural material, pure diamond, has a conductivity of about 2,000 watts per meter Kelvin. We're aiming for 20,000, and to do that we have to look at the problem from a materials systems standpoint."
Nadler's material is one of those under development to serve as the heart of the Thermal Ground Plane. The conductivity of that material would be improved with the addition of a liquid coolant able to carry heat away from the T/R module devices in the same way that sweat cools a body. A metal heat sink would help the liquid coolant dissipate the heat by condensing the vapor back to a fluid.
Using a liquid coolant takes advantage of phase changes -- the conversion of matter between liquid and vapor states. The diamond-copper material would conduct heat to the liquid coolant and optimize cooling through wicking and evaporation. Then, the heat would be rejected as the vapor is re-condensed to a liquid on the side attached to the metal heat sink.
"The trick is to use evaporation, condensation and intrinsic thermal conductivity together, in series, in a continuous system," Nadler said. "The whole device is a closed loop."
Challenges remain, however, including some specific materials issues. To form the desired materials, diamond and copper must be integrated into a porous structure that can best transfer heat and facilitate efficient evaporation.
But diamond and copper don't bond well, due in part to their different coefficients of thermal expansion and chemical incompatibility. Diamond doesn't expand much when heated, while copper expands moderately. That difference leads to a thermal-expansion mismatch, which can fracture the interface between the two materials when they're heated.
In addition, the porous internal structure of the diamond-copper material must have exactly the right size and shape to maximize its own intrinsic heat conductivity. Yet its internal structure must also be designed in ways that can help draw the liquid coolant toward the heat source to facilitate evaporation.
Nadler explained that liquid coolant flow can be maximized by fine tuning such mechanisms as the capillarity of the diamond-copper material. Capillarity refers to a given structure's ability to draw in a substance, especially a liquid, the way a sponge absorbs water or a medical technician pulls a drop of blood up into a narrow glass tube.
To be effective, the size of a capillary structure must be precisely controlled; if it's too large or too small, the wicking phenomenon won't occur. The GTRI team must size the diamond-copper material's internal structure to maximize capillarity.
"We're finding ways to change the cellular structure of the diamond-copper material at the nanoscale and the microscale," Nadler said. "We're doing this by making complex open-celled structures -- basically tiny foams with exactly the right properties."
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Writer: Rick Robinson
]]>Awarded a $9 million contract through the 2008 KORUS Tech Program, an initiative of the Korean Industrial Technology Foundation, Georgia Tech was chosen out of 109 universities to lead the development and design of the next generation of digital convergence devices that will let users establish and participate in digitally connected communities. This award marks the first time that the Korean government has chosen a U.S. university to lead one of its research and development programs.
Project investigators will develop immersive technologies on a hybrid graphics processing unit (GPU) - central processing unit (CPU) platform, which will be created at the newly established KORUS Research Center for Informersive Systems (CIS). The center will be headed by Jongman Kim, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the lead investigator for this project and consortium.
An enabling technology for personalized, interactive media convergence, the platform will consist of a custom-designed massively parallel architecture with a hybrid GPU accelerated many-core and heterogeneous multicore fusion system for new machine learning and multimedia algorithms and techniques. To balance resources and computationally demanding applications for high performance, Kim and his team are developing new mechanisms -- dynamically decomposed computing and hardware-based load balancing techniques. He will introduce a new holistic design analysis model -- the Performance, Energy, and Fault-Tolerance Metric.
"The interdependence among speed/throughput, energy, and fault-tolerance shows the importance of having this new metric that can identify the best tradeoffs among these three competing traits and desired design goals," said Kim, who leads the computer architecture part of this project.
Plans call for the system to be a smart, updated engine that understands user behavior; it will feature a tailored software interface that is based on intelligence and immersion with advanced three-dimensional graphics support. Ghassan AlRegib, a Georgia Tech ECE associate professor and editor-in-chief of the ICST Journal on Immersive Telecommunications, leads the multimedia processing and immersive communications portion of project, where data about home environments, modes of entertainment, and viewing and listening preferences are captured, processed, and interpreted by using motion, temperature, and light sensors; microphones; and multiple cameras that are placed in a user's home.
"Our challenge is to intelligently process this data and digitally understand the user," said AlRegib, who serves as area editor for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. "We are trying to create smart agents within media centers that understand users and adapt media accordingly."
As the hub for home-networked entertainment, this platform will have wireless connectivity to other devices and will be operated with hand gestures, body movements, and facial expressions. AlRegib also noted that the platform would further advance the use of social networks by the broadcast industry to broaden its viewer base.
"This system will allow users to have a personalized media experience; content providers and Internet-based or TV broadcasters will be able to adjust their delivered media according to individuals' needs and interests rather than regional needs," AlRegib said. "We have witnessed the impact of social networking media on our daily lives, so merging them with TV seems to be a natural next step toward complete digital convergence."
Helping Kim and AlRegib -- both faculty members at the Georgia Tech Savannah campus -- tackle these technical challenges are ECE faculty members specializing in digital signal processing, telecommunications, computer architecture, and human-computer interaction: Monson H. Hayes, III, professor and associate director at Georgia Tech Savannah; Biing-Hwang "Fred" Juang, Motorola Foundation Chair Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar; and Associate Professor Sung Kyu Lim. Kim and AlRegib will create undergraduate and graduate courses related to this project, while students at the Atlanta and Savannah campuses will assist with developing technologies and testing prototypes.
Four Korea-based partners will work with Georgia Tech to make this platform into a reality. Celrun, an Internet protocol television company, will handle graphic engine, media processing, and display layout issues. C&S Microwave, a wireless communications company, has conducted a feasibility study on Femtocell (a small cellular base station for residential or small business environments) and mobility between handheld devices and the proposed system. Sungkyunkwan University will work on embedded software, semiconductor technology, operating system, virtual ware, migration, and load balancing. The Korean Electronics Technology Institute will focus on personalized service solutions for various multimedia, data fusion, and digital communities, especially in social network modeling.
Kim said that interested parties from Georgia Tech and other organizations are welcome to join CIS in creating technologies for this platform. The center will also continue working with Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, which has provided crucial marketing research and commercialization plan assistance. "Growth in this area and industry interest is only expected to increase," said Kim, who has held R&D positions at both LG Electronics and Neopoint. "We believe that digital convergence will happen and that our work will be pivotal in its realization."
Institute officials enthusiastically support this new international partnership. "Georgia Tech and ECE have long been world leaders in digital media and its supporting technologies," said Gary S. May, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair for ECE. "The Korean government's decision to ask Georgia Tech to lead this effort further solidifies our international reputation in this arena."
The establishment of CIS and its future success could also lead to collaborations in areas like the automotive industry, according to Georgia Tech Vice Provost for International Initiatives Steven W. McLaughlin. "Georgia Tech has many longstanding collaborations in Korea and a very healthy representation here in Atlanta. The KORUS Tech program is emblematic of the partnerships we have, the kind of impact we continue to develop in the region, and the benefits those relationships have in Georgia," McLaughlin said. "Korea is a gateway to Asia for Georgia Tech, and we expect to have increasing interactions with Korean companies, institutes, universities, and ministries in the coming years."
According to the Georgia Tech study conducted for this project, Korea ranks among the world's top seven countries with the most households subscribing to broadband and is projected to move into the top five in the near future. Per capita, Korea ranks among the top four broadband subscribers, according to a June 2007 study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and had more total subscribers than the other top eight countries combined. The United States ranked 15th per capita, but had the largest number of total subscribers.
Korean officials cited Georgia Tech's stellar reputation in research, education, and translation of technology into useful products and successful companies as the primary reasons for choosing the institute for this project. "The Georgia Tech team's innovative ideas were backed by technological rigor and complemented by detailed analysis of state-of-the-art technologies and competing initiatives," said Sungjin (Bryan) Baik, senior researcher and project manager of the KORUS Tech Program from the Korea Institute of Advancement of Technology. "Atlanta's stature in the telecommunications and information media industries was also key in deciding that Georgia Tech was the proper home for this center." The majority of CIS operations will be based at the Atlanta campus of Georgia Tech and will receive additional support from facilities and personnel at Georgia Tech Savannah.
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Technical Contacts: Jongman Kim (912-965-2385); E-mail: (jkim@ece.gatech.edu); Ghassan AlRegib (912-966-7937); E-mail: (gregib@ece.gatech.edu); Biing Hwang (Fred) Juang (404-894-6618); E-mail: (juang@ece.gatech.edu).
Writer: Jackie Nemeth
]]>"When started above the surface, the animals dive into the sand within a half second. Once below the surface, they no longer use their limbs for propulsion -- instead, they move forward by propagating a traveling wave down their bodies like a snake," said study leader Daniel Goldman, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics.
With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the research team used high-speed X-ray imaging to visualize sandfish -- formally called Scincus scincus -- burrowing into and through sand. The team used that information to develop a physics model of the lizard's locomotion.
The sandfish used in this study inhabits the Sahara desert in Africa and is approximately four inches long. It uses its long, wedge-shaped snout and countersunk lower jaw to rapidly bury into and swim within sand. The sandfish's body has flattened sides and is covered with smooth shiny scales, its legs are short and sturdy with long and flattened fringed toes and its tail tapers to a fine point.
To conduct controlled experiments with the sandfish, Goldman and graduate students Ryan Maladen, Yang Ding and Chen Li built a seven-inch by eight-inch by four-inch-deep glass bead-filled container with tiny holes in the bottom through which air could be blown. The air pulses elevated the beads and caused them to settle into a loosely packed solid state. Repeated pulses of air compacted the material, allowing the researchers to closely control the density of the material.
Since a sandfish might encounter and need to move through different densities of sand in the desert, the researchers tested whether sandfish locomotion changed when burrowing through media with volume fractions of 58 and 62 percent -- typical values for desert sand.
"Since loosely packed media is easier to push through and closely packed is harder to push through, we thought there should be some difference in the sandfish's locomotion," said Goldman. "But the results surprised us because the density of the granular media did not affect how the sandfish traveled through the sand; it was always the same undulatory wavelike pattern."
For a given wave frequency, the swimming speed depended only on the frequency of the wave and not on the density. Unexpectedly though, the animals could swim a bit faster in closely packed material by using a higher frequency range. The team also varied the diameter of the glass beads, but still observed similar wavelike motion.
By tracking the sandfish in the X-ray images as it swam through the glass beads, Goldman was able to characterize the sandfish's motion -- called its kinematics -- as the form of a single-period sinusoidal wave that traveled from the head to the tail.
"The large amplitude waves over the entire body are unlike the kinematics of other undulatory swimming organisms that are the same size as the sandfish, like eels, which propagate waves that start with a small amplitude that gets larger toward the tail," explained Goldman.
After collecting the experimental data, Goldman's team developed a physics model to predict the speed at which sandfish swim through sand. The model was inspired by the resistive force theory, which allowed the researchers to partition the body of the sandfish into segments, each of which generated thrust and experienced drag when moving through the granular environment.
"When you balance the thrust and drag, you get motion at some velocity, but we needed to determine the forces on the animal segments because we don't have the appropriate equations for drag force during movement through granular media," explained Goldman.
To establish these equations, the researchers measured the granular thrust and drag forces on a small stainless steel cylindrical rod, thus allowing them to predict the wave efficiency and optimal kinematics. They found that the faster the sandfish propagate the wave, the faster they move forward through granular media -- up to speeds of six inches per second. This speed allows the animal to escape predators, the heat of the desert surface and quickly swim to ambush surface prey they detect from vibrations.
"The results demonstrate that burrowing and swimming in complex media like sand can have intricacy similar to that of movement in air or water, and that organisms can exploit the solid and fluid-like properties of these media to move effectively within them," noted Goldman.
In addition to having a biological impact, this study's results also have ecological significance, according to Goldman. Understanding the mechanics of subsurface movement could reveal how the actions of small burrowing organisms like worms, scorpions, snakes and lizards can transform landscapes by their burrowing actions. This research may also help engineers build sandfish-like robots that can travel through complex environments.
"If something nasty was buried in unconsolidated material, such as rubble, debris or sand, and you wanted to find it, you would need a device that could scamper on the surface, but also swim underneath the surface," Goldman said. "Since our work aims to fundamentally understand how the best animals in nature move in these complex unstructured environments, it could be very valuable information for this type of research."
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. PHY-0749991 and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the researcher and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
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Technical Contact: Daniel Goldman (404-894-0993); E-mail: (daniel.goldman@physics.gatech.edu)
Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>The information -- which may be the first reliable measurements of cyclone damage in the area -- could lead to development of computer models for predicting how future storms may impact the geologically complex Ayeyarwady River delta. Those models could be the basis for planning, construction and education that would dramatically reduce future loss of life.
Among the findings of the study: the cyclone created a storm surge as much as five meters high -- topped by two-meter storm waves -- that together inundated areas as much as 50 kilometers inland. Fatality rates reached 80 percent in the hardest-hit villages, and an estimated 2.5 million people in the area lived in flood-prone homes less than 10 feet above sea level.
"The recorded high water marks serve as benchmarking for numerical models for the complex hydraulic response of the giant Ayeyarwady delta," noted Hermann M. Fritz, an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Ongoing numerical simulations will allow us to determine flood zones and vulnerabilities for future cyclone scenarios. Based on those, evacuation scenarios and evaluation plans will be derived in collaboration with international partners and the Myanmar government."
Already, a local non-governmental organization in the nation has developed a cyclone education program to raise awareness among residents, said Fritz, who was the only international scientist leading a team that surveyed 150 kilometers of the country's coastline during a two-week period August 9-23, 2008.
"The aim of our project was to document the extent of the flooding and associated damage in the delta," Fritz explained. "Field surveys in the immediate aftermath of major disasters focus on perishable data, which would otherwise be lost forever -- such as infrastructure damage prior to repair and reconstruction."
In the flood zone, for instance, the researchers searched for evidence of water marks on buildings, scars on trees and rafted debris as indicators of the maximum water height.
"Nargis washed away entire settlements, often without leaving a single structure standing, which forced us to focus on evidence left on large trees," added Fritz, who has studied other natural disasters in Asia, Africa and the United States. "High water marks were photographed and located using global positioning system instruments. Transects from the nearest beach or waterway to the high water marks were recorded with a laser range finder."
The survey team documented soil erosion of as much as one meter vertically and more than 100 meters horizontally. Highlighting the loss of land was a golden Buddhist stupa -- originally constructed on dry land -- that was left 150 meters offshore following the storm. Cyclone Nargis also scoured several drinking water wells, leaving them in the beach surf zone -- and depriving survivors of safe water supplies.
While the storm surge and waves weren't unusually high, the impact may have been worsened by the lack of nearby high ground for evacuation and loss of coastal mangrove forests that could have slowed the storm waves, Fritz said. Structures in the area were not built to survive cyclones, and there was no evacuation plan for the area -- where people had no previous experience with such storms.
Those finding point to recommendations, including implementation of a cyclone education program, development of flood and vulnerability maps, construction of cyclone-safe buildings to serve as shelters, implementation of an improved warning system, and planning for evacuation, Fritz said. Partial reconstruction of the mangroves that had been removed for agriculture and fuel could also help protect the coastline.
The expedition's itinerary was planned based on unofficial damage reports, physical storm and cyclone track data, satellite imagery, numerical model benchmark requirements and experience gained in surveying other disasters. The group traveled to the country by cargo boat and did most surveying from the vessel.
The research was in part supported by the Pyoe Pin Programme of the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom. The program is also sponsoring detailed modeling and a follow up study being done at Georgia Tech by Fritz and Christopher Blount, one of his doctoral students.
A Category 4 storm, Nargis was the eighth deadliest cyclone recorded worldwide. It is one of seven tropical cyclones generated in the Bay of Bengal that had death tolls in excess of 100,000. With damage estimated at more than $10 billion, the storm is the most destructive ever recorded in the Indian Ocean.
Fritz hopes the work done by the survey team -- which also included Swe Thwin of the Myanmar Coastal Conservation Society and Moe Kyaw and Nyein Chan of the Mingalar Myanmar NGO -- will ultimately help reduce the human cost of major cyclones.
"In the 21st century with modern communication and all that has been learned about cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, there is no need for 138,000 people to be killed by a storm like this," Fritz said. "With adequate planning, education and shelters, it should be possible to reduce fatality rates from future cyclones by at least one order of magnitude."
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]]>In an article published in the July 24 issue of the journal Science, researchers provide a detailed analysis of how the jeweled beetle Chrysina gloriosa creates the striking colors using a unique helical structure that reflects light of two specific colors -- and of only one polarization: left circular polarization. The reflecting structures used by the beetle consist predominately of three different polygonal shapes whose percentages vary with the curvature of the insect's shell.
"Iridescent beetles, butterflies, certain sea organisms and many birds derive their unique colors from the interaction of light with physical structures on their external surfaces," said Mohan Srinivasarao, a professor in the School of Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Understanding how these structures give rise to the stunning colors we see in nature could benefit the quest for miniature optical devices and photonics."
With support from the National Science Foundation, Srinivasarao and colleagues Vivek Sharma, Matija Crne and Jung Ok Park used two different microscopy techniques to study the surface structures on the shell of the beetle. What they found confirmed earlier suggestions that the colors are produced from liquid crystalline material, which self-assembles into a complex arrangement of polygonal shapes each less than 10 microns in size.
"When we looked at the beetle's surface, we found tiles in the shapes mostly of hexagons, pentagons and heptagons," Srinivasarao said. "These patterns arise, we think, because of the nature of the cholesteric liquid crystal and how the liquid crystal phase structures itself at the interface between air and fluid. We think these patterns result because the liquid crystal must have defects on the surface when exposed to air, and those defects create the patterns in the beetle's shell or exoskeleton."
Because of simple geometric restrictions, the percentage of each shape depends on the curvature of that particular section of the shell. "This is really a pattern formation issue," said Srinivasarao. "It is difficult to pack only hexagons onto a curved surface. On flat surfaces, there are fewer defects in the form of five- and seven-sided cells."
In addition, the five- and seven-sided cells normally appear in pairs, an issue also dictated by the geometric difficulties of packing the shapes onto curved surfaces. The researchers found very similar structures in the ten different beetles purchased from an insect supply house.
Liquid crystalline materials are valuable industrially, used in displays for laptop computers, portable music players and other devices. They are also used in children's thermometers, where temperature affects the color of light reflected from the material, indicating whether or not a child has a fever.
While the structures are determined genetically, their final form depends on the living conditions the beetle experiences during its growth and development, Srinivasarao noted.
The fact that these jeweled beetles reflect circular polarization was identified in the early 1900s by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, A.A. Michelson, who hypothesized that the circular polarization might result from a "screw structure" within the insect's cuticle, but he did not elaborate on it further. The solidified structures produced from a cholesteric liquid crystal and its defects on the beetle's shell reflect bright green light with a wavelength of 530 nanometers mixed with yellow light in a wavelength of 580 nanometers.
"The most dramatic way to get saturated color is through what this beetle does with the circularly-polarized light," Srinivasarao said. "The reflection is very metallic and angle-dependent, and this is due to the helical pitch of the cholesteric liquid crystal."
Sunlight normally contains light in equal quantities with a left circular polarization and a right circular polarization. The jewel beetle's exoskeleton, however, reflects only light with a left circular polarization. Only a few members of the scarab family of beetles reflect both polarizations.
How the beetles benefit from the specific color and polarization isn't known for sure, but scientists speculate that the optical properties may confuse predators, causing them to misjudge the location of the insects -- or suggest that they may not be good to eat. The colors may also help the insects find mates.
In future research, Srinivasarao hopes to study other insects that use complex structures to create unique colors. He believes that scientists still have a lot to learn by studying the optical structures of beetles and other insects.
"We are just now starting to catch up with what these beetles have been doing for many, many years," he said. "There are hundreds of thousand of species, and the way they generate color is just stunning -- especially since it is all done with water-based systems, mostly based on the biopolymer chitin. This is self-assembly at several levels, and we need to learn a lot more to duplicate what these insects do."
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]]>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. However, according to Stephen Fleming, vice provost at Georgia Tech, "the startup market has changed dramatically over the past few years. Many startup companies do not want or need to pursue venture funding. Some are not even seeking traditional office space. ATDC's new initiatives directly address the demands of today's startup environment."
ATDC will open its membership to all technology entrepreneurs in Georgia, from those at the earliest conception stage to the well-established, venture-fundable companies. "We're interested in any technology business opportunity," said David Sung, one of ATDC's startup catalysts and a former partner with H.I.G. Ventures. "There are many ways ATDC can help startups, from business coaching and providing networking opportunities to financing through angel investment, government grants and contracts, corporate partnerships, and classic bootstrapping. We will support all entrepreneurs, whatever path they may take, through their entire growth process."
ATDC will continue to offer traditional "bricks-and-mortar" incubation space on entrepreneur-friendly terms, both in midtown Atlanta and Savannah. The center will be expanding its recent "SeedSpace" offering of small single-office leases in Technology Square for the earliest entrepreneurs and will provide a variety of co-working spaces to promote casual interaction among entrepreneurs. Recognizing the sprawl of the Atlanta metro area, ATDC will offer programs outside the Perimeter where dense clusters of entrepreneurs can benefit from its services. ATDC will also take full advantage of social media to build connections with entrepreneurs across the entire state of Georgia.
Since 1999, the state-funded ATDC Seed Capital Fund has made equity investments in Georgia startup companies alongside angel investors and traditional venture firms. With this new merger, ATDC will also manage the Georgia Tech Edison Fund, an innovative investment fund established in 2007 which draws its resources from charitable donors who are interested in helping expand the entrepreneurial ecosystem surrounding Georgia Tech.
"ATDC has always been a focal point for entrepreneurship in Georgia," said Sig Mosley, president of Imlay Investments and member of ATDC's board of advisors. "With these moves, ATDC now is aligned to support the specific needs of the new startup environment. The open door policy is a strong, positive shift and reinforces ATDC's leadership role in the startup community not just within the Atlanta metro area, but throughout the entire state."
The merger of the three units will bring together a broader knowledge base to provide comprehensive services to Georgia's technology entrepreneurs.
"By working at the very earliest stage with university spinouts -- not just pre-revenue but pre-incorporation -- we have learned a great deal about the coaching required by brand-new entrepreneurial teams that are still establishing their business model," said Roberto Casas, previously assistant director of Georgia Tech's VentureLab. "To date, we've focused on startups based on Georgia Tech intellectual property. By merging with ATDC, we'll be able to offer similar services to any Georgia startup, whether connected to Georgia Tech or not."
ATDC, the former Georgia Tech VentureLab, and the SBIR Assistance program are 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. Stephen Fleming, the former head of Georgia Tech VentureLab, was recently promoted to vice provost of Georgia Tech overseeing all of EI2. He will serve as the initial director of the new ATDC.
"Despite the economic downturn, it's still a great time to build a startup company in Georgia," said Fleming. "The last four years have seen an explosion of groups and organizations supporting the early-stage entrepreneur. With this expansion, we're rebooting the franchise of ATDC as the hub of technology entrepreneurship in Georgia. We hope to work with everyone, at any stage, along any path, to accelerate more technology startups and weave them into the economic fabric of Georgia."
All employees of ATDC, Georgia Tech VentureLab, and the SBIR Assistance Program will be retained in the consolidation. The new ATDC organization will continue to assist Georgia Tech faculty members and other research staff in forming new companies, and will continue to provide assistance to any Georgia small business seeking SBIR funding.
About ATDC:
ATDC helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful technology companies. Founded in 1980, the Advanced Technology Development Center has provided business incubation and acceleration services to hundreds of Georgia startups -- most of which are not based on Georgia Tech research, but which benefit from the close proximity to the university. ATDC currently has three facilities: two at Georgia Tech's main campus in Atlanta, and one at Georgia Tech's satellite campus in Savannah.
About SBIR Assistance Program of Georgia:
The state of Georgia has one of the nation's leading SBIR/STTR assistance programs which, since being established in 2005, has educated and helped hundreds of Georgia entrepreneurs access these sources of federal funds. With the program's direct assistance, 150 companies have submitted one or more proposals resulting in more than $30 million in federal awards. By merging into ATDC, the program will be able to interact with more entrepreneurs across the state, including those who may have never considered applying for federal grants, and bring more of these awards into Georgia's startup ecosystem.
About VentureLab:
In 2001, Georgia Tech became a founding member of VentureLab, a program of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). VentureLab helps build spinout companies around cutting-edge university research. With its emphasis on technologically-grounded business analysis, access to early-stage funds, and recruitment of experienced management, Georgia Tech's VentureLab has launched more than two dozen successful companies and serves as a model for other universities seeking to commercialize their discoveries. GRA's VentureLab Program now extends to four other research universities in Georgia; with an investment of some $13 million from GRA, more than 150 Georgia-based startups have been created around university intellectual property in the state. GRA also recently launched a new venture fund to make equity investments into these spinout companies.
The current-carrying and heat-transfer measurements were reported by a team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The same team had previously reported measurements of resistivity in graphene that suggest the material's conductance would outperform that of copper in future generations of nanometer-scale interconnects.
"Graphene nanoribbons exhibit an impressive breakdown current density that is related to the resistivity," said Raghunath Murali, a senior research engineer in Georgia Tech's Nanotechnology Research Center. "Our measurements show that these graphene nanoribbons have a current carrying capacity at least two orders of magnitude higher than copper at these size scales."
Measurements of thermal conductivity and breakdown current density in narrow graphene nanoribbons were reported June 19 in the journal Applied Physics Letters. The research was supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation/DARPA through the Interconnect Focus Center and by the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative through the Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery and Exploration (INDEX).
The unique properties of graphene -- which is composed of thin layers of graphite -- make it attractive for a wide range of potential electronic devices. Murali and his colleagues have been studying graphene as a potential replacement for copper in on-chip interconnects, the tiny wires that are used to connect transistors and other devices on integrated circuits. Use of graphene for these interconnects, they believe, would help extend the long run of performance improvements in integrated circuit technology.
"Our measurements show that graphene nanoribbons have a current carrying capacity of more than 10^8 amps per square centimeter, while a handful of them exceed 10^9 amps per square centimeter," Murali said. "This makes them very robust in resisting electromigration and should greatly improve chip reliability."
Electromigration is a phenomenon that causes transport of material, especially at high current density. In on-chip interconnects, this eventually leads to a break in the wire, which results in chip failure.
"We are learning a lot of new things about this material, which will lead researchers to consider other potential applications," said Murali. "In addition to the high current carrying capacity, graphene nanoribbons also have excellent thermal conductivity."
Because heat generation is a significant cause of device failure, the researchers also measured the ability of the graphene nanostructures to conduct heat away from devices. They found that graphene nanoribbons have a thermal conductivity of more than 1,000 watts per meter Kelvin for structures less than 20 nanometers wide.
"This high thermal conductivity could allow graphene interconnects to also serve as heat spreaders in future generations of integrated circuits," said Murali.
To study the properties of graphene interconnects, Murali and collaborators Yinxiao Yang, Kevin Brenner, Thomas Beck and James Meindl began with flakes of multi-layered graphene removed from a graphite block and placed onto an oxidized silicon substrate. They used electron beam lithography to construct four electrode contacts, then used lithography to fabricate devices consisting of parallel nanoribbons of widths ranging between 16 and 52 nanometers and lengths of between 0.2 and 1 micron.
The breakdown current density of the nanoribbons was then studied by slowly applying an increasing amount of current to the electrodes on either side of the parallel nanoribbons. A drop in current flow indicated the breakdown of one or more of the nanoribbons.
In their study of 21 test devices, the researchers found that the breakdown current density of graphene nanoribbons has a reciprocal relationship to the resistivity.
Because graphene can be patterned using conventional chip-making processes, manufacturers could make the transition from copper to graphene without a drastic change in chip fabrication.
"Graphene has very good electrical properties," Murali said. "The data we have developed so far looks very promising for using this material as the basis for future on-chip interconnects."
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]]>For the past ten years, Sawczuk has served as CEO of Zygogen LLC, an Atlanta-based biotechnology company that advanced the use of zebra fish for drug screening. Prior to 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.
Sawczuk also served ATDC as a consultant in 1999, assisting bioscience companies and participating in the formation of EmTech Bio, an incubator at Emory University.
At ATDC, she will help companies tap a comprehensive set of services designed to help commercialize innovations, support the launch and growth of technology companies, obtain early-stage commercialization grants and secure Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding from federal agencies.
Among the key resources is the ATDC Biosciences Center, an incubator located in Georgia Tech's Biosciences Complex. Life sciences research now accounts for approximately 20 percent of Georgia Tech's $500 million-per-year research program.
"Through ATDC and the Georgia Research Alliance's VentureLab commercialization program, we can provide an integrated set of services designed to support the startup and growth of bioscience companies statewide," said Sawczuk. "This combination of resources gives Georgia entrepreneurs a strong advantage as they launch and build new companies in the biosciences."
Sawczuk's education and entrepreneurial experience give her an ideal background for leading ATDC's biosciences program, said Stephen Fleming, vice provost at Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, ATDC's parent organization.
"We are pleased to have Nina return to ATDC and Georgia Tech to lead our initiatives aimed at expanding the state's community of bioscience companies," he said. "With its research universities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and established companies, Georgia's life sciences community has a strong economic impact on the state."
Sawczuk holds a master's degree in molecular and cellular biology from Harvard Medical School, an M.B.A. from Duke University's 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.
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.
Recently ATDC expanded its mission by merging with Georgia Tech's VentureLab and with the Georgia SBIR Assistance Program. The change will enable 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.
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.
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]]>"This tool helps us to get the best result for each patient," said co-author Mark A. Fogel, M.D., an associate professor of cardiology and radiology, and director of Cardiac MRI at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "The team can assess the different surgical options to achieve the best blood flow and the optimum mixture of blood, so we can maximize the heart's energy efficiency."
In the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging, the researchers describe the surgical planning methodology, detailing how the tool helped them to plan the surgery of a four-year-old girl who was born with just one functional ventricle, or pumping chamber, instead of two.
Two in every 1,000 babies in the United States are born with this type of single ventricle heart defect. These children typically suffer from low levels of oxygen in their tissues because their oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood mix in their one functional ventricle before being redistributed to their lungs and body.
To correct this, the children undergo a series of three open-heart surgeries -- called the staged Fontan reconstruction -- to reshape the circulation in a way that allows oxygen-poor blood to flow from the limbs directly to the lungs without going through the heart. While these vascular modifications can eliminate blood mixing and restore normal oxygenation levels, surgeons and cardiologists must ensure that the lungs will receive proper amounts of blood and nutrients after the surgery so that normal development occurs.
"Preoperatively determining the Fontan configuration that will achieve balanced blood flow to the lungs is very difficult and the wide variety and complexity of patients' anatomies requires an approach that is very specific and personalized," said Ajit Yoganathan, Ph.D., Regents' Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "With our surgical planning framework, the physicians gain a better understanding of each child's unique heart defect, thus improving the surgery outcome and recovery time."
The patient described in this paper, Amanda Mayer, age four, of Staten Island, N.Y., had previously undergone all three stages of the Fontan procedure at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, but developed severe complications. Her oxygen saturation was very low -- only 72 percent, compared to normal levels of at least 95 percent -- which indicated the possibility of abnormal connections between the veins and arteries in one of her lungs. Normally, the liver releases hormonal factors that prevent these abnormal connections, so the presence of the malformations indicated a low supply of hepatic blood to the lung.
To improve the distribution of these hormonal factors to both lungs, the surgeons needed to re-operate and reconfigure the patient's cardiovascular anatomy. Georgia Tech's surgical planning framework helped Thomas L. Spray, M.D., chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Children's Hospital, to determine the optimal surgical option.
"MRI acquires images of the child's heart without using radiation," said Spray. "Then we use the computerized technology to model different connections to simulate optimum blood flow characteristics, before we perform the surgery."
The image-based surgical planning consisted of five major steps: acquiring magnetic resonance images of the child's heart at different times in the cardiac cycle, modeling the preoperative heart anatomy and blood flow, performing virtual surgeries, using computational fluid dynamics to model the proposed postoperative flow, and measuring the distribution of liver-derived hormonal factors and other clinically relevant parameters as feedback to the surgeon.
Fogel collected three different types of magnetic resonance images, and Yoganathan, along with graduate students Kartik Sundareswaran and Diane de Zélicourt, generated a three-dimensional model of the child's cardiovascular anatomy. From the model they reconstructed the three-dimensional pre-operative flow fields to understand the underlying causes of the malformations.
For this particular patient, the team saw a highly uneven flow distribution -- the left lung was receiving about 70 percent of the blood pumped out by the heart, but only five percent of the hepatic blood. Both observations suggested left lung malformations, but closer examination of the flow structures in that particular patient revealed that the competition between different vessels at the center of the original Fontan connection effectively forced all hepatic factors into the right lung even though a vast majority of total cardiac output went to the left lung.
To facilitate the design of the surgical options that would correct this problem, Jarek Rossignac, Ph.D., a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, developed Surgem, an interactive geometric modeling environment that allowed the surgeon to use both hands and natural gestures in three-dimensions to grab, pull, twist and bend a three-dimensional computer representation of the patient's anatomy. After analyzing the three-dimensional reconstruction of the failing cardiovascular geometry, the team considered three surgical options.
Watch a video showing the interactive surgical planning environment.
The research team then performed computational fluid dynamics simulations on all three options to investigate for each how well blood would flow to the lungs and the amount of energy required to drive blood through each connection design. These measures of clinical performance allowed the cardiologists and surgeons to conduct a risk/benefit analysis, which also included factors such as difficulty of completion and potential complications.
Of the three choices, Spray favored the option that showed a slightly higher energy cost but exhibited the best performance with regards to hepatic factor distribution to the left and right lungs. Five months after the surgery, Mayer showed a dramatic improvement in her overall clinical condition and oxygen saturation levels, which increased from 72 to 94 percent. Mayer is breathing easier and is now able to play actively like other children, according to her cardiologist, Donald Putman, M.D., of Staten Island, N.Y.
"The ability to perform this work is a team effort," Fogel added. "State-of-the-art three-dimensional cardiac MRI married to modern biomedical engineering and applied anatomy and physiology enabled this approach. With the advanced pediatric cardiothoracic surgery we have here at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, patients can benefit from this new method."
Additional authors on the paper include Shiva Sharma from Pediatric Cardiology Services, Kirk Kanter from the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Emory University, and Fotis Sotiropoulos from the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
This work was funded by grant number HL67622 from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NHLBI or the NIH.
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Technical Contact: Ajit Yoganathan (404-894-2849); E-mail: (ajit.yoganathan@bme.gatech.edu).
Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>The U.S. Department of Defense has used the FalconView software program since the 1990s to analyze and display geographical and other data crucial to mission planners. The program's ease of use, open architecture and interoperability all contribute to its popularity. There were an estimated 45,000 users before the open-source version was released.
"We are excited to broaden our user base outside of the Department of Defense," said Chris Bailey, GTRI principal research engineer and FalconView project director. "We expect that individual municipalities, including state, city and town governments; police forces; architects, environmental researchers and utility companies will be among those who will benefit from this new FalconView open-source software."
Police forces can plot information on burglaries, robberies, sex crimes and other major incidents on maps in FalconView, according to Bailey. School districts can reformat school zones easily using a number of different data analyses and visualization techniques. FalconView can also be valuable for companies trying to determine the best location for their business to meet customer needs.
In the past, the U.S. Department of Defense typically funded companies to develop software and these companies rarely shared the source code, which led to "knowledge monopolies" because there were usually not mechanisms for secondary vendors to make improvements to the software, Bailey said. Open-source practices allow third parties to freely use source code and provide formal mechanisms to submit improvements or patches back to the main source code repository. With open source software, bugs are typically caught and repaired faster.
Since FalconView already had hundreds of registered developers creating "plug-in" tools for the software, and because third parties within the Department of Defense had developed programs that were integrated with FalconView, the software was a perfect candidate for becoming open source.
In July 2008, the U.S. Air Force Office of Advanced Systems and Concepts funded GTRI to create the open-source version of FalconView, which involved removing components that were not applicable to non-defense users and code that depended on classified data. Since its release on June 22, 2009, more than 1,000 copies of open-source FalconView have been downloaded from the FalconView Web site [http://www.falconview.org].
The Windows-based FalconView software package allows users to view many different imagery formats, including popular geographic information systems formats and KML, which is the code used by Google Earth and Google Maps. Municipalities can upload archived maps of their localities into FalconView and users can also download topographical, nautical, aeronautical and satellite maps from the Internet for use in FalconView.
"FalconView has advantages over most of the free mapping software products because FalconView can be used without an active Internet connection," said GTRI research scientist Joel Odom, a member of the 11-person FalconView development team. "Someone can take a file they're viewing in another program and look at it in FalconView to get a top-down two-dimensional view that they can thoroughly analyze even if they're in a boat in the middle of the ocean without a satellite uplink and downlink."
The open-source version of FalconView also contains several analysis tools. The drawing utility allows users to create custom shapes in an overlay that can be saved and shared. Calculating distances between points on a map is easy with the analysis tool. The tool also allows users to calculate the visibility between areas on the map if elevation data is available.
In addition, a global positioning system and camera can be hooked up to the FalconView software to allow users to track their movements on a "moving" map and record the exact locations where they snapped photographs.
Bailey and his team plan to continue creating new features for FalconView and accepting components developed by non-GTRI programmers. GTRI will also continue to serve as the systems integrator for the software.
"This new open-source version of FalconView allows us to share all of the interesting mapping capabilities of this once defense-only software with users around the world," added Bailey.
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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>Two new software programs that help address that challenge have recently earned silver-level compatibility certification from the National Cancer Institute's cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid®, also known as caBIG®. The programs improve the process of identifying cancer biomarkers from gene expression data.
Developed by May Dongmei Wang and her team in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, the programs -- caCORRECT and omniBioMarker -- remove noise and artifacts, and identify and validate biomarkers from microarray data. Funding to develop the programs was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the Georgia Cancer Coalition, Microsoft Research and Hewlett-Packard.
"Certification by caBIG means the tools can be easily used by everyone in the cancer community to improve approaches to cancer detection, diagnosis, treatment and prevention," said Wang, an associate professor in the Coulter Department and a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar.
caBIG is a collaborative information network that enables researchers, physicians, and patients to share data, tools and knowledge to accelerate the discovery of new approaches that they hope will ultimately improve cancer patient outcomes. To become caBIG-certified, caCORRECT and omniBioMarker passed a rigorous set of requirements, ensuring the cancer research community that the software tools are high quality and interoperable with all other caBIG-certified systems for nationwide deployment.
caCORRECT -- chip artifact CORRECTion -- is a software program that improves the quality of collected microarray data, ultimately leading to improved biomarker selection. Widely used Affymetrix microarrays contain thousands of probes, each including a 25-oligo sequence, which are used to detect mRNA expression levels.
"Once someone has collected microarray data, it is important to run quality control on it and remove any problematic points of data that could highlight incorrect biomarkers when analyzed," explained Wang, who is also director of the biocomputing and bioinformatics core in the Emory-Georgia Tech National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE).
Since each microarray chip contains thousands of spots, it is easy for a few spots to become marred by artifacts and noise. These unusable portions are typically the result of experimental variations by different laboratory technicians or errors that create scratches, edge effects and bubble effects on the data.
caCORRECT removes the noise and artifacts from the data, while retaining high-quality genes on the array. The software can also effectively recover lost information that has been obscured by artifacts.
In collaboration with Andrew N. Young, an associate professor in pathology and laboratory medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and clinical laboratory director at Grady Health System, Wang and graduate students Todd Stokes, Martin Ahrens and Richard Moffitt validated the caCORRECT software. A large-scale survey of public data and data from Young's laboratory demonstrated the ability of caCORRECT to assess and improve the quality of a wide array of datasets.
"caCORRECT is a quality assurance tool that allows researchers to utilize and trust imperfect experimental microarray data that they spent a tremendous amount of time and money to generate," added Wang. "caCORRECT improves the downstream analysis of microarray data and should be used before conducting biomarker selection, therapeutic target studies, or pathway analysis studies in bioinformatics and systems biology."
Once the quality of the data is assured with caCORRECT, researchers can use the caBIG-certified omniBioMarker software to identify and validate biomarkers from the high-throughput gene expression data.
Candidate cancer biomarkers are typically genes expressed at different levels in cancer patients compared to healthy subjects. omniBioMarker searches these groups of patient data for genes with the highest potential for accurately determining whether a patient has cancer. However, because individual genes are not expressed independently, the software also identifies groups of genes that act in concert.
The advantage of the omniBioMarker software is that it fine-tunes biomarker selection to a particular dataset or clinical problem based on prior biological knowledge. It also applies unique analysis parameters for each specific clinical problem. The parameters are optimal when the software selects genes that are known to be relevant biomarkers based on clinical observations and laboratory experiments available in literature and public databases. Then the software finds new potential biomarkers for experimental validation.
Wang, graduate student John Phan and Young tested the ability of the software to identify biomarkers in clinical renal cancer microarray data. The researchers selected renal cancer for study because it has several distinct subtypes, which can appear in the same person in varying degrees and must be treated according to the diagnosed subtype to maximize treatment success. The results indicate that integrating prior laboratory and clinical knowledge with the microarray data improves biomarker selection.
"Using omniBioMarker to create an optimal metric for ranking and identifying novel biomarkers reduces the number of false discoveries, increases the number of true discoveries, reduces the required time for validation and increases the overall efficiency of the process," noted Wang.
Since receiving caBIG silver-level compatibility certification for caCORRECT and omniBioMarker, Wang and her team have been working on getting two more software programs certified -- Q-IHC, a tool that analyzes and quantifies multi-spectral images such as quantum dot-stained histopathological images, and omniVisGrid, a grid-based tool that visualizes data and analysis processes of microarrays, biological pathways and clinical outcomes.
This work was funded by grant numbers R01CA108468, P20GM072069 and U54CA119338 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 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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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>Less than 100 nanometers thick, silk-silver nanoparticle composite films formed in this process can be used as flexible mirrors. The technique could also be used to create films that reflect light in specific wavelengths, anti-microbial coatings, thin film sensors, self-cleaning coatings, catalytic materials and potentially even flexible photovoltaic cells.
"We are taking advantage of biological molecules that have the ability to bind metallic ions of silver or gold from solution," said Vladimir Tsukruk, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. "These molecules can create mono-dispersed metallic nanoparticles of consistent sizes under ambient conditions -- at room temperature and in a water-based environment without high vacuum or high temperatures."
Sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory, the research was described August 19 at the Fall 2009 National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
The nanoparticles produced range in size from four to six nanometers in diameter, surrounded by a biological shell of between one and two nanometers. The silk template permits good control of the nanoparticle placement, creating a composite with equally dispersed particles that remain separate. The optical properties of the resulting film depend on the nanoparticle material and size.
"This system provides very precise control over nanoparticle sizes," said Eugenia Kharlampieva, a postdoctoral researcher in Tsukruk's laboratory. "We produce well-defined materials without the problem of precipitation, aggregation or formation of large crystals. Since the silk fibroin is mono-dispersed, we can create uniform domains within the template."
Fabrication of the nanocomposites begins by dissolving silk cocoons and making the resulting fibroin water soluble. The silk is then placed onto a silicon substrate using a spin-coating technique that produces multiple layers of thin film that is then patterned into a template using a nanolithography technique.
"Because silk is a protein, we can control the properties of the surface and design different kinds of surfaces," explained Kharlampieva. "This surface-mediated approach is flexible at producing different shapes. We can apply the method to coat any surface we want, including objects of complex shapes."
Next, the silk template is placed in a solution containing ions of gold, silver, or other metal. Over a period of time ranging from hours to days, nanoparticles form within the template. The relatively long growth process, which operates at room temperature and neutral pH in a water-based environment, allows precise control of the particle size and spacing, Tsukruk notes.
"We operate at conditions that are suitable for biological activities," he explained. "No reducing agents are required to produce the particles because the biomolecules serve as reducing agents. We don't add any chemicals that could be toxic to the protein."
Use of these mild processing conditions could reduce the cost of producing the composites and their potential environmental impact. When dried, the resulting silk-nanoparticle film has high tensile strength, high elasticity and toughness.
"Silk is almost as strong as Kevlar, but it can be deformed by 30 percent without breaking," said Tsukruk. "The silk film is very robust, with a complicated structure that you don't find in synthetic materials."
For the future, the researchers plan to use the bio-assisted, surface-mediated technique to produce nanoparticles from other metals. They also hope to combine different types of particles to create new optical and mechanical properties.
"If we combine gold-binding and silver-binding peptides, we can make composites that will include a mixture of gold and silver nanoparticles," said Kharlampieva. "Each particle will have its own properties, and combining them will create more interesting composite materials."
The researchers also hope to find additional applications for the films in such areas as photovoltaics, medical technology and anti-microbial films that utilize the properties of silver nanoparticles.
Beyond Tsukruk and Kharlampieva, the research team has included Dmitry Zimnistky, Maneesh Gupta and Kathryn Bergman of Georgia Tech; David Kaplan of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, and Rajesh Naik of the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
"Nanomaterials grown under environmentally friendly conditions can be as good as synthetic materials that are produced under harsh conditions," Tsukruk added. "This technique allows us to grow very useful materials under natural conditions."
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]]>The team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Michigan State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory analyzed the gene sequences, proteins expressed and physiology of 10 strains of Shewanella. They believe the study results will help researchers choose the best Shewanella strain for bioremediation projects based on each site's environmental conditions and contaminants.
The findings, which further advance the understanding of the enormous microbial biodiversity that exists on the planet, appear in the early online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through the Shewanella Federation consortium and the Proteomics Application project.
Similar to a human breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, many Shewanella microbes have the ability to "inhale" certain metals and compounds and convert them to an altered state, which is typically much less toxic. This ability makes Shewanella very important for the environment and bioremediation, but selecting the best strain for a particular project has been a challenge.
"If you look at different strains of Shewanella under a microscope or you look at their ribosomal genes, which are routinely used to identify newly isolated strains of bacteria, they look identical. Thus, traditional microbiological approaches would suggest that the physiology and phenotype of these Shewanella bacteria are very similar, if not identical, but that is not true," explained Kostas Konstantinidis, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Konstantinidis, who also holds a joint appointment in the Georgia Tech School of Biology, led the research team in analyzing the data.
Using the traditional method for determining interrelatedness between microbial strains -- sequencing of the 16S ribosomal gene -- the researchers determined that the 10 strains belonged to the same genus. However, the technique was unable to distinguish between most of the strains or define general properties that would allow the researchers to differentiate one strain from another. To do that, they turned to genomic and whole-cell proteomic data.
By comparing the 10 Shewanella genomes, which were sequenced at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, the research team found that while some of the strains shared 98 percent of the same genes, other strains only shared 70 percent. Out of the almost 10,000 protein-coding genes in the 10 strains, nearly half -- 48 percent -- of the genes were strain-specific, and the differences in expressed proteins were consistently larger than their differences at the gene content level.
"These findings suggest that similarity in gene regulation and expression constitutes an important factor for determining phenotypic similarity or dissimilarity among the very closely related Shewanella genomes," noted Konstantinidis. "They also indicate that it might be time to start replacing the traditional microbiology approaches for identifying and classifying new species with genomics- or proteomics-based methods."
Upon further analysis, the researchers found that the genetic differences between strains frequently reflected environmental or ecological adaptation and specialization, which had also substantially altered the global metabolic and regulatory networks in some of the strains. The Shewanella organisms in the study appeared to gain most of their new functions by acquiring groups of genes as mobile genetic islands, selecting islands carrying ecologically important genes and losing ecologically unimportant genes.
The most rapidly changing individual functions in the Shewanellae were related to "breathing" metals and sensing mechanisms, which represent the first line of adaptive response to different environmental conditions. Shewanella bacteria live in environments that range from deep subsurface sandstone to marine sediment and from freshwater to saltwater. All but one of the strains was able to reduce several metals and metalloids. That one exception had undertaken a unique evolution resulting in an inability to exploit strictly anaerobic habitats.
"Let's say you have a strain of Shewanella that is unable to convert uranium dissolved in contaminated groundwater to a form incapable of dissolving in water," explained Konstantinidis. "If you put that strain in an environment that contains high concentrations of uranium, that microbe is likely to acquire the genes that accept uranium from a nearby strain, in turn preventing uranium from spreading as the groundwater flows."
This adaptability of bacteria is remarkable, but requires further study in the bioremediation arena, since it frequently underlies the emergence of new bacterial strains. Konstantinidis' team at Georgia Tech is currently investigating communities of these Shewanella strains in their natural environments to advance understanding of the influence of the environment on the evolution of the bacterial genome and identify the key genes in the genome that respond to specific environmental stimuli or conditions, such as the presence of heavy metals.
Ongoing studies should broaden the researchers' understanding of the relationship between genotype, phenotype, environment and evolution, he said.
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]]>To view a copy of this report, visit
http://www.police.gatech.edu/documents/brochure.pdf
"Testing 1-2-3-4, this is a test. Test out."
The normal siren and recorded test message will not be played at this time. The e-mail and voice mail alerts will also not be transmitted during this test.
]]>
Dr. Dirk Schaefer, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, will join 48 of the nation's brightest young engineering researchers and educators who have been selected to take part in the inaugural symposium.
Schaefer, who works at Georgia Tech's Savannah campus, was selected along with other top engineering faculty members in the first half of their careers who are developing and implementing innovative educational approaches in a variety of disciplines. They will gather in Herndon, Va., November 15-18 to share ideas and best practices to bring back to their home institutions.
"I am proud that Dr. Schaefer is playing a strategic role in transforming engineering education," said David Frost, director of Georgia Tech-Savannah. "We are fortunate to have someone of his caliber as part of our Savannah campus."
The participants were nominated by fellow engineers or deans and chosen from a highly competitive pool of applicants. Schaefer, who joined Georgia Tech in 2006, has focused his research on the strategic design of engineering education including virtual learning environments and remotely/robotically controlled physical laboratory exercises for distance learning settings.
]]>Researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have designed and tested the concept, dubbed ULTRA II, for the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR). The crew-protection concept builds on an earlier GTRI development for the ONR that evaluated new concepts for light armored vehicles. A blast test conducted with the ULTRA II full-sized crew compartment test article at the Aberdeen Test Center showed that the new concept could protect the vehicle crew from improvised explosions.
"Instead of up-armoring a standard vehicle or modifying an existing drive train, we built a bubble of force protection first and then addressed vehicle mobility," explained Vince Camp, a GTRI senior research engineer and the project's principal investigator. "The idea was to emphasize warfighter protection first by starting with design of an improved crew compartment, as opposed to starting with an existing vehicle and trying to add armor."
The ULTRA II crew compartment was designed to house six persons: a driver and commander facing forward, and two pairs of crew members behind them, each pair facing opposite sides of the vehicle. By putting their backs toward the center of the crew compartment, the concept moves the crew away from the outside walls to reduce the likelihood of injury from side blasts, provides better visibility for the crew to monitor their surroundings, allows blast-resistant seats to be frame-mounted -- and facilitates faster egress from the vehicle.
The crew compartment envisioned by GTRI uses a "space frame" constructed of tubular steel -- similar to civilian off-road racing vehicles. An armored steel "skin" provides added structure and moderate ballistic and blast protection. Additional armor is bolted onto the frame in a modular way, allowing varying levels of protection that could be easily modified in the field and changed as new high-performance armor concepts are developed.
An integral part of the protection is provided by a sacrificial "blast wedge" bolted onto the bottom of the vehicle. Constructed of welded steel armor, the wedge both deflects energy away from the vehicle and absorbs energy from a blast, performing a function similar to "crumple zones" in modern civilian vehicles.
The design and fabrication of the test article was conducted by personnel in the Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory of GTRI. Tests using a heavily-instrumented test article with instrumented dummies simulating the crew showed that the wedge deflected or absorbed nearly 70 percent of the energy from an explosion beneath it. Damage from the blast was primarily confined to the sacrificial blast wedge and there was no structural damage and no blast penetration to the crew compartment.
"Energy used up in crushing and tearing the metal in the blast wedge is energy that wouldn't go into injuring the crew," said Kevin Massey, a GTRI senior research engineer who was part of the project team. "Data from the instrumented dummies shows that had this test been conducted with real warfighters in a real vehicle, we wouldn't have seen any spinal injuries, head trauma, neck trauma or leg injuries."
Because the wedge is removable, it could be replaced if damaged. Making the blast wedge removable also allows for an overall reduction of the vehicle's height for shipping, an important issue for rapid deployment.
The research team, which also included Burt Jennings, Cal Jameson, Jake Leverett and Mark Entrekin, combined non-linear dynamic blast simulations and neural networks to study how blast forces would affect the vehicle. Conventional finite element analysis also provided valuable design feedback in development of the ULTRA II test article.
There were many tradeoffs to consider in designing the new concept, including vehicle height and resistance to blast forces that may come from many different angles.
"To survive the blast, you want to get as high off the ground as possible," Massey noted. "But the higher you are off the ground, the more likely you are to roll over. This is an example of the tradeoffs that have to be balanced."
In addition to crew protection, the researchers also designed a translating door that would provide a large side opening similar to that of existing civilian minivans. Such a door system would provide improved ingress/egress for the crew and could remain open when the vehicle is moving.
GTRI has presented data from the test to the Office of Naval Research, and hopes to pursue additional refinements to the blast wedge and overall vehicle concept. Among the goals would be to improve energy absorption from the blast wedge, and to evaluate whether the crew compartment should separate from the drive train in certain types of blasts.
"We think that the concept of a space-frame design is a very viable one, and we want to take the lessons we've learned so far to improve on it," Massey added. "We'd also like to see if the concept of the energy-absorbing wedge can be applied to existing vehicles that are already out there. The bottom line is saving people's lives and protecting them from injury."
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]]>Students, faculty and staff may drop off donations from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. this Thursday and Friday on Skiles Walkway. Donations may also be made before Mock Rock on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Ferst Center for the Arts and before the Ramblin' Reck Parade this Saturday at 8 a.m.
Students wanted to assist with flood relief when they learned that fellow Yellow Jackets were affected by the disaster. "When we heard Governor [Sonny] Perdue give the estimate for damage at $500 million, we quickly realized we had an obligation to do our part," said Undergraduate Student Government member Corey Boone.
For additional information, contact Andrea Fernandez at afernandez6@gatech.edu.
]]>He will serve along with eight other Advisory Board members including Emory University President Jim Wagner and Georgia Tech alumnus Thomas Noonan, former president and chief executive officer of Internet Security Systems.
Established in 1983, NMP focuses on investing in early and early-growth stage companies. The Atlanta-based venture capital firm has funded more than 160 companies primarily in Georgia, North and South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia.
]]>Matthew Higgins and Stuart Graham, assistant professors in the College of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology, argue in their article that the recent surge in Paragraph IV patent challenges -- a provision of the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984 -- is decreasing the incentives for pharmaceutical innovation and contributing to productivity and revenue declines in the pharmaceutical industry.
"With the current healthcare debate, consumers and policy-makers need to understand that while we are getting cheap drugs now, it may be at the cost of novel future innovations and long-term access to new treatments because in our current system, industry revenues support continued research and development, and patents support revenues," explained Higgins, the Imlay assistant professor of strategic management at Georgia Tech.
While Congress passed the Hatch-Waxman Act to ensure timely, affordable access to innovative drugs, 25 years later its balance between pharmaceutical innovation and access is tipping away from the incentives needed to support innovation, the researchers said.
A contributor to this shift is the recent surge in Paragraph IV challenges, which allow manufacturers of generic drugs to challenge a brand company's patents by claiming that either the patent is invalid or the generic drug does not infringe the patent. If the generic company wins the challenge, the brand company loses its remaining market exclusivity for that product.
Federal Trade Commission statistics show that generic firms won 42 percent of the Paragraph IV challenges filed from 1992 to 2000. Since 2001, pharmaceutical companies have filed 749 lawsuits responding to Paragraph IV challenges on 243 unique brand-name products. These suits nearly tripled from 2002-2003 and doubled from 2006-2007.
"A Paragraph IV lawsuit will likely cost a generic manufacturer $5 to $10 million, compared to at least $800 million required for a brand company to develop a drug and bring it to market," said Graham, who is also a licensed attorney. "And the reward for being the first successful Paragraph IV challenger is substantial -- 180 days during which no other generic-producing company may enter the market and an average potential payoff during those 180 days alone of $60 million. The law is creating incentives to bring challenges on more and different types of drugs."
As the number of patent challenges has increased, the number of new compounds approved annually by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has fallen from an average of 35 in 1996-2001 to 20 in 2002-2007. Without policy intervention, the effective life of key patents will continue to decline, which will further compress the payback period during which brand-name firms can recoup research and development investments, according to the researchers.
"Lawmakers should consider increasing the length of time brand-name drugs are on the market before generic drugs can enter, because the current five-year period is typically insufficient to recoup research and development costs," added Higgins.
Graham and Higgins suggest that exclusivity be extended for first-in-class and high-risk, high-necessity drugs, such as a preventive medicine for Alzheimer's disease or osteoarthritis. In addition, they propose that policy-makers use incentives to encourage private investments in research to complement public research or offer increased exclusivity to curative and preventive drugs. Auctions could allow companies to bid on specific research projects in return for extended data or market exclusivity.
A 2007 report from The National Academies recommended that the United States should at least double the duration of data exclusivity to bring it closer to allowances awarded in the European Union, Japan and Canada. Congress is currently debating a rule allowing 12-year data exclusivity for biologic drugs. These drugs include a wide range of products such as vaccines, blood and blood components, allergenics, somatic cells, gene therapy, tissues and recombinant therapeutic proteins.
Currently, the researchers are continuing their investigations into the causes of pharmaceutical productivity decline through a recently formalized relationship that allows them access to IMS Health's databases. The relationship came through Georgia Tech's connection with former IMS board member and Georgia Tech alum John Imlay. The company's databases -- widely considered the gold standard in pharmaceutical and healthcare market intelligence -- cover the entire life cycle of drugs from how doctors and patients used them to how they fared in the marketplace.
In other research, Higgins and Graham are investigating the causes and responses of internal productivity declines experienced by the pharmaceutical industry and Graham is examining the importance of patenting to startup biotechnology firms.
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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>Local activities for National Chemistry Week include the following:
October 20: Science Café at Fernbank Science Center from 6:30 p.m.-8 p.m. Joyce Palmer and David Gottfried from Georgia Tech's Nanotechnology Research Center will lead a public discussion on "Nanotechnology: It's Bigger Than You Think." See http://www.fernbank.edu/ or contact Mary Breen at MARY_BREEN@fc.dekalb.k12.ga.us for more details.
October 21: Georgia Tech radio station WREK, 91.1 FM, will broadcast a special National Chemistry Week episode of "Inside the Black Box" with Professor Pete Ludovice on the topic, "Chemistry: What is it Good For?" The broadcast, which airs from noon - 1 p.m., will feature a panel of chemists and questions from high school students participating live via teleconference.
October 22: Georgia Tech will host students from three area high schools for chemistry demonstrations and talks with chemists.
October 22: ChEmory, the undergraduate chemistry club at Emory University, will host a chemistry demonstration show at 5:30 pm in room 360 of the Atwood chemistry building. Contact Rachel Reiff at rreiff@emory.edu for more details.
October 23: ChEmory will host a Mole Day event outside of the chemistry buildings at Emory University, beginning at 5:30 p.m. This event will include chemistry-themed games, the dropping of a mole ball, and the presentation of the annual "periodic table of the cupcakes." Contact Rachel Reiff at rreiff@emory.edu for more details.
October 24: Fernbank Science Center will host hands-on chemistry activities from 11 a.m. -4 p.m. Hands-on science tables will demonstrate the properties of the elements, make liquids change colors, and more. Chemical Magic Shows at noon and 2 pm. Free and open to the public. See http://www.fernbank.edu/ or contact Mary Breen at MARY_BREEN@fc.dekalb.k12.ga.us for more details.
October 24: A Girl Scout Science event will be heldon the Southern Poly campus from 8 a.m.- 2 p.m. "The Case of the Kidnapped Cookies." Volunteers are needed. Please contact JoAnn Arceneaux at JoAnn.Arceneaux@cytec.com for more details.
]]>Focusing on improved cathodes for devices known as Hall effect thrusters, the research would reduce propellant consumption in commercial, government and military satellites, allowing them to remain in orbit longer, be launched on smaller or cheaper rockets, or carry larger payloads. Sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Defense Sciences Office (DARPA-DSO), the 18-month project seeks to demonstrate the use of propellant-less cathodes with Hall effect thrusters.
"About 10 percent of the propellant carried into space on satellites that use an electric propulsion system is essentially wasted in the hollow cathode that is part of the system," said Mitchell Walker, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Aerospace Engineering and the project's principal investigator. "Using field emission rather than a hollow cathode, we are able to pull electrons from cathode arrays made from carbon nanotubes without wasting propellant. That will extend the life of the vehicle by more efficiently using the limited on-board propellant for its intended purpose of propulsion."
To maintain their positions in space or to reorient themselves, satellites must use small thrusters that are either chemically or electrically powered. Electrically-powered thrusters use electrons to ionize an inert gas such as xenon. The resulting ions are then ejected from the device to generate thrust.
In existing Hall effect thrusters, a single high-temperature cathode generates the electrons. A portion of the propellant -- typically about 10 percent of the limited supply carried by the satellite -- is used as a working fluid in the traditional hollow cathode. The DARPA-funded research would replace the hollow cathode with an array of field-effect cathodes fabricated from bundles of multi-walled carbon nanotubes. Powered by on-board batteries and photovoltaic systems on the satellite, the arrays would operate at low power to produce electrons without consuming propellant.
Walker and collaborators at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have already demonstrated field-effect cathodes based on carbon nanotubes. This work was presented at the 2009 AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference held in Denver, Colo. The additional funding will support improvements in the devices, known as carbon nanotube cold cathodes, and lead to space testing as early as 2015.
"This work depends on our ability to grow aligned carbon nanotubes precisely where we want them to be and to exacting dimensions," said Jud Ready, a GTRI senior research engineer and Walker's collaborator on the project. "This project leverages our ability to grow well-aligned arrays of nanotubes and to coat them to enhance their field emission performance."
In addition to reducing propellant consumption, use of carbon nanotube cathode arrays could improve reliability by replacing the single cathode now used in the thrusters.
"Existing cathodes are sensitive to contamination, damaged by the ionized exhaust of the thruster, and have limited life due to their high-temperature operation," Ready noted. "The carbon nanotube cathode arrays would provide a distributed cathode around the Hall effect thruster so that if one of them is damaged, we will have redundancy."
Before the carbon nanotube cathodes developed by Georgia Tech can be used on satellites, however, their lifetime will have to be increased to match that of a satellite thruster, which is typically 2,000 hours or more. The devices will also have to withstand the mechanical stresses of space launches, turn on and off rapidly, operate consistently and survive the aggressive space environment.
Part of the effort will focus on special coating materials used to protect the carbon nanotubes from the space environment. For that part of the project, Walker and Ready are collaborating with Lisa Pfefferle in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Yale University.
The researchers are testing their cathodes with the same Busek Hall effect thruster that flew on the U.S. Air Force's TacSat-2 satellite. In addition, the cathodes will be operated with Hall effect thrusters developed by Pratt & Whitney and donated to Georgia Tech. The researchers are also collaborating with L-3 ETI on the electrical power system and with American Pacific In-Space Propulsion on flight qualification of the hardware.
The ability to control individual cathodes on the array could provide a new capability to vector the thrust, potentially replacing the mechanical gimbals now used.
The use of carbon nanotubes to generate electrons through the field-effect process was reported in 1995 by a research team headed by Walt de Heer, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics. Field emission is the extraction of electrons from a conductive material through quantum tunneling that occurs when an external electric field is applied.
The improved carbon nanotube cathodes should advance the goals of reducing the cost of launching and maintaining satellites.
"Thrust with less propellant has been one of the major goals driving research into satellite propulsion," said Walker, who is director of Georgia Tech's High-Power Electric Propulsion Laboratory. "Electric propulsion is becoming more popular and will benefit from our innovation. Ultimately, we will help improve the performance of in-space propulsion devices."
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Writer: John Toon
]]>Chair, Finding Common Ground
]]>Trick-or-Treat Week Events
All Week:
Tuesday, October 27
Wednesday, October 28
Thursday, October 29
Friday, October 30
]]>
Assistiant Director, Campus Recreation Center
Vladimir Oge,
Director, Health Promotions
]]>"Traditional cell phones have been ignored by attackers because they were specialty devices, but the new phones available today are handheld computers that are able to send and receive e-mail, surf the Internet, store documents and remotely access data -- all actions that make them vulnerable to a wide range of attacks," said Patrick Traynor, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Traynor and Jonathon Giffin, also an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, recently received a three-year $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop tools that improve the security of mobile devices and the telecommunications networks on which they operate. These Georgia Tech faculty, together with a team of graduate students, are developing methods of identifying and remotely repairing mobile devices that may be infected with viruses or other malware.
Malware can potentially eavesdrop on user input or otherwise steal sensitive information, destroy stored information, or disable a device. Attackers may snoop on passwords for online accounts, electronic documents, e-mails that discuss sensitive topics, calendar and phonebook entries, and audio and video media.
"Since mobile phones typically lack security features found on desktop computers, such as antivirus software, we need to accept that the mobile devices will ultimately be successfully attacked. Therefore our research focus is to develop effective attack recovery strategies," explained Giffin.
The researchers plan to investigate whether cellular service providers -- such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless -- are capable of detecting infected devices on their respective networks. Since infected devices often begin to over-utilize the network by sending a high volume of traffic to a known malicious Internet server or by suddenly generating a high volume of text messages, monitoring traffic patterns on the network should allow these infected phones to be located, according to the researchers.
"While a single user might realize that a phone is behaving differently, that person probably won't know why. But a cell phone provider may see a thousand devices behaving in the same way and have the ability to do something about it," said Traynor.
Once infected devices are located, those phones will need to be cleared of the malicious code. To accomplish this, the researchers are developing remote repair methods, which will allow service providers to assist in the cleaning of infected devices without requiring that the phones be brought to a service center. The methods will also have to work without much effort on the part of the customer.
This repair may require disabling some functionality on the phone, such as the ability to use downloaded programs, until the malicious program is located and removed. While the repair is underway, phone calling and text messaging functionality would continue to operate.
"Using this remote repair strategy, the service provider no longer has to completely disable a phone. Instead they just put the device into a safe, but reduced, mode until the malware can be removed," said Giffin.
To assess their proposed methods of finding and repairing infected mobile devices, the researchers plan to build a cellular network test bed at Georgia Tech that will simulate how cellular devices communicate over a network.
"We hope that developing these attack recovery strategies will let potential mobile phone and network attackers know that these response mechanisms are in place, ultimately making their attacks far less widespread or successful," said Traynor.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. CNS-0916047. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the researchers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
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]]>The gift, made through the Harris Foundation, will help support a capital campaign for construction of a new ECE headquarters facility and the renovation of the school's 47-year-old Van Leer Building, where some 7,000 students receive instruction each year. Harris will donate $500,000 each year for four years beginning in 2010 — the anticipated completion date of the Georgia Tech Foundation's private fund drive for the new facilities. Specifically, the Harris gift is intended for construction of an auditorium or other similar space. Dr. G.P. "Bud" Peterson, president of Georgia Tech and Howard L. Lance, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Harris, today signed an agreement for the donation during a special ceremony at the Harris Customer Briefing Center in Melbourne, Florida. The event also included a reception attended by Harris employees who are Georgia Tech graduates and by other representatives from the university.
"Our faculty and students are currently scattered across 10 buildings around the campus, the Van Leer classrooms are outdated, and the building lacks adequate laboratory facilities," said Dr. Gary S. May, professor and Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE, who also attended the check presentation. "Clearly, this generous lead gift from Harris Corporation provides significant momentum for the school's long-term capital needs and helps to create a new presence that will serve us well in the 21st Century."Harris has a decades-long partnership with Georgia Tech and its School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, which is the largest producer of electrical and computer engineers by degree in the nation. The company employs nearly 200 of the school's graduates.In addition to the $2 million gift announced today, Harris has donated some $280,000 to the university since 2006. This includes a five-year, $250,000 pledge for a research lab in the Nanotechnology Research Center, and another $30,000 to support various programs within the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
]]>Adolfo Carrión Jr., director of Urban Affairs, recently stated, "We want to essentially tease out what the elements of a national agenda ought to be." Ross has extensive experience in regional planning, infrastructure planning and development. She is the author of the recently released "Megaregions: Planning for Global Competitiveness," published by Island Press in July 2009. Ross co-authored "The Inner City: Urban Poverty and Economic Development in the Next Century," published by Transaction Press. President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden created the White House Office of Urban Affairs to develop a strategy for metropolitan America and to help direct federal dollars targeted for urban areas. Carrión reports directly to the President and is responsible for coordinating all federal urban programs.
]]>Dr. Platt is a graduate of Morehouse College where he earned a degree in biology. He completed his PhD in the Emory/Georgia Tech joint program in Biomedical Engineering, an internship at the National Institutes of Health and did postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Platt's lab at Georgia Tech will continue his research on stem cells, focusing on theirreparative and regenerative abilities, with particular attention to their homing and integration into damaged tissue.
]]>Romberg is among 100 recipients of this award, who were named by President Barack Obama on July 9. The honorees will receive their awards this fall at a White House ceremony.Established in 1996, PECASE honors the most promising researchers in the nation within their fields. Nine federal departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the most meritorious young scientists and engineers-researchers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for strengthening America's leadership in science and technology while contributing to the awarding agencies' missions."I am truly honored to receive this award," Romberg said. "I feel blessed for the education and mentoring I received at Rice University and Caltech and for the support which Georgia Tech has given me as a faculty member."Awarded an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award last summer, Justin was nominated for the PECASE award by the U.S. Department of Defense. He was one of 27 investigators selected for the ONR Young Investigator Awards last year from a group of more than 200 applicants. Funding for Justin's ONR award lasts for three years and will fund his project, "Compressive Sampling for Next-Generation Data Acquisition." Justin's research focuses on the mathematics of data acquisition. In particular, he is interested in ways in which randomness can actually help in data acquisition, potentially reducing both the cost and the computational complexity of high-resolution sensing systems. This work will influence the design of next-generation analog-to-digital converters, radar imaging platforms and MRI systems.Justin becomes the sixth PECASE winner from ECE, joining PECASE alumni Elliot Moore, Ali Adibi, David Anderson, David Citrin and Steve McLaughlin.
]]>The MATE competition, a first for Georgia Tech-Savannah, was held at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. The Savannah team received the "design elegance" award and was commended for their ROV's design aesthetics, simplicity and functionality."The success of this team exemplifies Georgia Tech-Savannah's close community of undergraduates and graduate engineering students," said David Frost, director of Georgia Tech-Savannah. "Their inspired creativity and work ethic is typical of our hands-on approach to education."Faculty sponsor Fumin Zhang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, provided limited direct guidance. "Virtually all the labor, ideas, programming and fabrication came from the students," he said.
"We started with a core group of four Georgia Tech-Savannah students six months ago," explained team captain Justin Shapiro, an interdisciplinary robotics Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech who came from Rutgers University. "We realized that this project would allow us to apply what we learned in class, and then push beyond what we learned."Along with Shapiro from Cranbury, N.J., the Georgia Tech-Savannah team included the following members: Angel Berrocal, Silver Spring, Md.; Chasen Born, Tarrytown, Ga.; Steven Bradshaw, Cleveland, Ohio; Spencer Burch, Brunswick, Ga.; Matt Carroll, Lavonia, Ga.; Brandon Groff, Lancaster, Pa.; Scott Hales, Frisco, Texas; Winton Key, Fort Knox, Ky.; Jasmine Magerkurth, Warner Robins, Ga.; Leslie Maldonado, Miami, Fla.; Sean Maxon, Richmond Hill, Ga.; and Richard Nguyen, Marietta, Ga.
]]>Robert M. Nerem joined Georgia Tech in 1987 as the Parker H. Petit Distinguished Chair for Engineering in Medicine. He currently serves as director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and director of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center (GTEC) for the Engineering of Living Tissues, an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center. Nerem earned a PhD in 1964 from Ohio State University, where he was promoted to professor in 1972 and served from 1975-1979 as associate dean for Research in the Graduate School. From 1979 to 1986, he was professor and chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston. The author of more than 200 publications, Nerem is a fellow and was the founding president of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (1992-1994), and he is past president of the Tissue Engineering Society International. In addition, he was part-time senior advisor for bioengineering in the new National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health (2003-2006).
Other awards and honors include:• Election to the National Academy of Engineering, 1988• Member of the National Academy of Engineering Council, 1998-2004• Election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy ofSciences, 1992 • Election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998• Honorary doctorate, University of Paris, 1990• Election as a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 1994• Honorary fellow, Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the United Kingdom, 1998 • Election as an honorary foreign member, Japan Society for Medical and Biological Engineering, 2004• Election as a foreign member, Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences, 2006• National Academy of Engineering Founders Award, 2008• Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009Nerem's research interests include biomechanics, cardiovascular devices, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and stem cell technology.
]]>Shafiq Khan, director of Clark Atlanta's CCRTD, said, "The molecular, bioinformatic and clinical expertise necessary to move forward with such a personalized cancer diagnosis and treatment program exists at the collaborating institutions. Establishment of CCGC will complement the existing experimental infrastructure necessary to generate the genomic data required to attain our goals."
John McDonald, director Georgia Tech's ICRC, added, "We are particularly interested in developing algorithms that will allow us to use gene expression and DNA sequence data that we gather from specific patients to generate a customized prognosis and optimal therapeutic treatment program for individual cancer patients."
Under the collaborative agreement, CCRTD will house and operate the CCGC's high-throughput next generation sequencing instruments. The resulting sequence data will be assembled and analyzed at ICRC. Patient samples will be provided by the Ovarian Cancer Institute (OCI) and Saint Joseph's Hospital's Translational Research Initiatives in Oncology for the Management of Personalized Healthcare (TRIOMPH ) program. Clark Atlanta and Georgia Tech scientists will join clinical experts from OCI and TRIOMPH to interpret and evaluate the resulting data. Housed at CAU in the Thomas W. Cole Jr. Research Center for Science and Technology, the CCGC is scheduled to begin operation in the fall of 2009.
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"It is all about learning and collaboration," said Mathew Marcus, Challenge Course Manager at the Campus Recreation Center. "As teams go through the course, they are learning to solve both mental puzzles and physical challenges."
The new course will celebrate its opening with Georgia Tech President G.P. "Bud" Peterson riding down the zip line beside the Institute's mascot, "Buzz."
"It should be a really exciting grand opening," said Marcus. "We're honored to have President Peterson and Buzz volunteer to be the first to officially slide down the zip line."
Technology is a key component of the Institute, and it is no different for this ropes course. Teams will be able to use computers and cameras throughout the structure and communicate with other team members who may not be present via the Web. The entire structure has Wi-Fi throughout it.
One example of how technology can be used is for a team offsite to load a video onto Youtube describing how to do something on the course or how to complete a challenge. Marcus says that if the team members who are offsite do not make the instructions specific or clear enough, then they will get some quick feedback from their fellow team members who will struggle to complete the task.
"The integration of technology really makes this leadership course unique," said Marcus. "Even the zip line at the end of the course has technology integrated into it. The zip line is hooked up to hydraulics and as you slide out on it, the hydraulics kick in and gently float you down to the ground."
Georgia Tech's new Leadership Challenge Course is open to all members of the Georgia Tech community as well as organizations and businesses that may be interested in leadership development and team building.
"This is a wonderful learning tool, and we are glad that we're able to share it with the extended community as well as campus," said Marcus. "If you're interested in having a group try out the course, then please see www.crc.gatech.edu/lcc."
]]>Peterson became the 11th president of the Georgia Institute of Technology on April 1 and has been meeting with key stakeholders throughout the state to gather input and direction as the Institute begins a strategic planning process.
"Georgia Tech is one of the truly outstanding research universities in the country and benefits the state of Georgia well beyond the city of Atlanta," said Peterson. "As we begin to formulate our strategic vision for the future, we are reaching out to our alumni and to the community and state leaders all across Georgia."
Georgia Tech played a significant role in one of Georgia's recent economic development successes - the move of Fortune 500 corporation NCR to Georgia. The company will be looking to Georgia Tech as a source of engineering talent and as a partner in development of future technology and innovations.
According to NCR's leadership, the opportunity to partner with top-tier academic institutions such as Georgia Tech was one reason among many that the company made the decision to relocate to Georgia.
Georgia Tech not only assists with attracting new industry to the state, the Institute also impacts the economy through research and economic development. For example, for the first time ever, Tech's research activity exceeded the $500 million mark, reaching a record $524.9 million in fiscal year 2008. This represents a 10 percent increase over 2007 and an increase of 99 percent over the past decade, helping the Institute consistently rank among the top ten in research programs among universities without medical schools.
To help meet the state's demand for math and science teachers, this funding also helps support the newly established Tech to Teaching program designed to create pathways for students pursuing K-12 or college teaching careers. Likewise, the Foundations for the Future initiative helps Georgia Educators incorporate technology into the classroom.
Georgia Tech is also leading the effort to create need-based aid for Georgia students who cannot afford the tuition and associated costs with attending a research university.
Launched in 2007, the G. Wayne Clough Georgia Tech Promise program is designed to help Georgia students whose families have an annual income of less than $33,300 (150 percent of the federal poverty level) earn their college degree debt-free. The program is the first of its kind offered by any public university in Georgia.
"The gift of education is the most valuable gift you can give. It not only helps the individual who receives it, but also the family and the larger community," said a student receiving Tech promise who is majoring in electrical engineering. "It truly is the gift that keeps on giving. During these financial times, it's something we can't afford to cut out because it's so beneficial to society. It's really a life-changing gift."
"The Tech Promise program assures that eligible Georgia students from all economic backgrounds have the opportunity to attend Georgia Tech without placing a financial burden on their families," said Peterson. "We don't want a family's financial status to stand in the way of a qualified student pursuing a Georgia Tech degree."
This year, Tech Promise made access to a college education a reality for 198 students from 53 counties across Georgia - from Appling to Wilkes. There were 139 students who entered the program as freshmen, along with 59 transfer students. In addition, 23 Tech Promise scholars graduated this spring.
]]>As Peterson marks his 100th day at Georgia Tech, he reflects on his time at the Institute. "The first three months have been enormously exciting and productive," he noted. "I would like to share with you some of the things I have had the privilege to be a part of and give you a glance at what lies ahead.
Peterson's shares his thoughts at on his initial experience at Georgia Tech and his vision for creating a strategic plan at the link below.
]]>In addition to providing a salary and benefits to support the fellows' research over the course of the yearlong fellowship, the Kauffman Foundation has matched each fellow with an academic advisor to mentor him/her on matters beyond research, and an experienced investor or corporate leader to serve as a business mentor. During the fellowship year, each fellow also will undertake an industry internship suited to his or her research interests and objectives.Kolambkar is a researcher in the biomedical field with a strong focus on translation of research ideas into commercially viable products. Yash has earned a technology commercialization certificate from the nationally recognized TI:GER (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results) program, based at Georgia Tech and Emory Law School. In the program, he developed a commercialization plan for his PhD technology, which would restore cartilage in osteoarthritic patients. He has been a consultant to VentureLab, where he identified and evaluated Georgia Tech technologies with strong commercial potential.He is currently preparing to successfully defend his PhD thesis.
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