“Georgia Tech Savannah students go through the same degree program as the Atlanta students, but they get a little something extra,” says Frost, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, director of Georgia Tech Savannah and a Georgia Tech vice provost. “With the distributed environment utilized for part of their academic engineering program, students are not bound by classroom walls or campus fences, but are very comfortable using technology to connect and interact. A large number of employers have commented that they like this in our graduates.”
Beyond their teaching responsibilities, each of Georgia Tech Savannah’s 25 faculty members is conducting several research projects, ranging from hurricanes, tsunamis and beach erosion to development of technologies and logistics for port operations and distance learning. Frost notes that a growing number of research projects are being facilitated by Savannah-based industries such as Gulfstream and JCB, another benefit of being a coastal Georgia campus.
“We have ties back to the main campus in Atlanta and are able to easily access resources, but our geographic location is a unique asset that allows our students and faculty to complement the programs and activities in Atlanta,” he says. “By working together, we can move the Institute forward and make a greater impact in this state and beyond.”
What follows is a small sampling of the research being conducted at Georgia Tech Savannah.
Monson Hayes, professor and associate chair for electrical and computer engineering programs at Georgia Tech Savannah, says it was the inherent challenges of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program (see sidebar) that led him and his colleagues to explore how to enhance students’ distance learning classroom experiences.
“Oftentimes, faculty here will be teaching students that are distributed on other campuses. Delivering audio and video of lectures over the Internet can sometimes lead to lower quality, and traditional distance learning students can feel a bit detached,” he notes. “That’s what we want to change at Georgia Tech Savannah.”
When Hewlett-Packard (HP) issued a call for proposals to explore how tablet PCs might be used in the classroom, Hayes and Elliot Moore, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, proposed using the PCs to get high-quality video of distance learning lectures to the students. They were awarded funding to jump-start their research project and HP also donated 22 tablet PCs. Due to the success of the program and the novelty of their idea, Microsoft provided additional funding the following year.
Tablet PCs allow users to incorporate aspects of pen and paper into computing via a stylus pen or wireless keyboard. Information such as handwritten class notes or annotated electronic documents can be stored digitally and accessed wirelessly. The portability of the tablet PCs also allows professors to lead classroom discussions even if they are away from campus.
Hayes and Moore began using software called DyKnow, which uses intuitive tools to enhance teaching strategies and engage students. The software allows instructors to turn over control of the classroom to any student, broadcasting material from the students’ tablet PC to everyone else. Students can be engaged – from a distance – to solve problems, take quizzes and answer questions or polls.
“Tablet PCs could probably be used in just about any STEM discipline – science, technology, engineering, mathematics,” Hayes says. “They definitely involve a different teaching style and philosophy.”
Ghassan AlRegib, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is also researching educational technologies that project distant classrooms into a “cyber classroom” that is accessible by instructors and students. Examining multimedia and immersive communications, he is collaborating with colleagues at several institutes and corporations to develop networking and streaming algorithms for sending multimedia objects over the Internet, in particular video and 3-D environments that require large bandwidth.
“I come from a multimedia processing and communications background, and there’s something called immersive communication where you can immerse people – students, teachers, business people, CEOs – in this virtual world,” AlRegib says. “I want to know how we can use multi-camera arrays to capture the real environment.”
The multi-camera array, provided by HP, consists of 24 small cameras aimed at a wall that is 32 feet long and eight feet high. The software developed by HP stitches all of the images together, allowing for high resolution in real time. For example, students in a remote classroom are able to zoom in and out to focus on writing on a whiteboard, and professors can see the facial expressions of students, making the experience as close to the traditional classroom as possible.
The camera is currently operational in an experimental classroom at Georgia Tech Savannah where AlRegib’s research group is conducting research and developing educational tools that utilize the camera.
“The high resolution of the camera and the scenes being stitched together at the pixel level in real time are unique to this camera and make it cutting edge,” AlRegib notes. “My prediction is that this will be the future of imaging in educational environments.”
AlRegib is also conducting research in collaborative virtual environments, a technology he and his colleagues developed for use in science teaching and 3-D manuals, among others. The transmission algorithms – which allow for a networking of multiple virtual environments – dictate when and in what state information is to be transmitted across the network. When multiple virtual environments are networked, users have the opportunity to cooperate or compete with other users. Interacting with humans more realistically models the actual world on which the virtual environment is based.
“All of this fits into communication – the camera captures the visual and the collaborative system captures the motion,” he says. “Both capture the real environment and map it into a virtual environment so people can meet, interact and work together in a natural way. The applications are really endless.”
James Tsai, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech Savannah, probably knows more about Georgia’s 18,000 miles of highways than just about anybody else. For more than 10 years, he has been working with the Georgia Department of Transportation (DOT) to implement a pavement preservation and management system – Georgia Pavement Management System – based on information technology and geographic information systems (GIS).
“The focus of my research is pavement distress, preservation and management,” he says. “Departments of transportation typically spend more than half of their total annual budgets on infrastructure, especially pavements. Applying the right pavement treatment method in the right location at the right time means saving money, so the economic impact of my research is potentially large.”
Tsai works with a 10-member, multidisciplinary Georgia Tech research team on pavement condition assessment, pavement rehabilitation technology, deterioration and forecasting models, long-term system performance simulation, and resource optimization. For local transportation agencies, Tsai and his team have developed and implemented an integrated asset-management system that uses global positioning system technology. They are extending their research to manage other assets, including traffic signs, bridges and railroads.
Some of Tsai’s research, sponsored by the Innovation Deserving Exploratory Analysis Program of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, has involved the development of an intelligent sensing system and vehicle to automatically collect roadway asset and pavement distress information. Tsai and his team developed innovative image-processing technology using cameras and lasers to measure pavement quality, roadway signs, number of lanes, pavement width and shoulder width.
“By using sensing technologies, including lasers and cameras mounted on a van, we can take photographs every 20 feet and obtain laser data to automatically collect information on signs and pavement distress,” Tsai says. “We have developed algorithms to analyze pavement distress and to build a forecasting and optimization model. This sensing technology provides us the most comprehensive and accurate information.”
This year will mark the tenth anniversary of the implementation of Tsai’s Computerized Pavement Condition Evaluation System (COPACES), a program used by Georgia DOT to evaluate its highway system.
Whereas Tsai is using sensing technologies to examine surfaces, David Frost, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of Georgia Tech’s Savannah campus, is using them to go below the surface. He has improved traditional penetrometers – instrumented cylindrical devices made of hardened steel – used to record friction resistance and pore pressure in soils. They are also used to evaluate soil types and predict where soil will liquefy, to determine how foundations of buildings will behave and to study the characteristics of natural and man-made geo-materials under earthquake and other dynamic loading conditions.
“When we first began this research in 1996, we were studying how to quantify the roughness or smoothness of these man-made materials – called geo-membranes – that are often used in landfill liner systems,” he recalls. “This earlier research sparked an idea to build something that would allow us to produce a number that quantitatively relates the device texture to soil behavior. Through the insight we’ve gained, we can now tell you how much texture and what type of texture will work best for a particular application.”
The original cone penetrometer – considered the standard for more than 50 years by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) – was designed to have a smooth surface. Frost and his colleagues modified the device to include multiple sleeves of different roughness that would yield different measurements. The National Science Foundation funded work on the multi-friction penetrometer, and ASTM recognized Frost and his student with its 2003 International Hogentogler Award, an annual award given to the authors of a paper of outstanding merit on soil and rock for engineering purposes.
“This new device gave us the potential to measure multiple values of force with a single device in a single sounding,” says Frost.
Frost has since developed a multipiezo friction penetrometer, which is able to measure not only force, but also water pressure. Each textured sleeve is associated with a piezo sensor so friction force and water pressure can be measured independently. The device is especially useful when studying earthquakes.
Frost, who most recently traveled to China as part of a U.S. delegation to meet with Chinese government officials and study the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province, is currently exploring how to miniaturize the technology for investigating the characteristics of soil on the moon.
“Because of plans to perhaps build permanent bases on the moon and on Mars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has begun investigating soil,” he says. “Our devices, which have been patented by Georgia Tech, represent a dramatically different approach to what technology was available and used when previous lunar explorations occurred in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.”
Frost is passionate about moving the Savannah campus forward by leveraging local assets and opportunities as part of a network of campuses and programs that educates the leaders of a technology-driven world. According to Frost, this will be achieved in part by continuing to develop educational programs, conducting basic and applied interdisciplinary research, stimulating regional economic development, developing an interdisciplinary academic environment, expanding access to an engineering-centered education, and growing a modern campus.
Planning metrics call for 500 students to be enrolled at the Savannah campus by 2012, with more than half participating in an out-of-classroom experience like the cooperative education program or an international program. In the same time, faculty research expenditures will increase, a graduate-student-to-faculty ratio of four to one will be achieved, and at least two dual degree programs with partner institutions will be offered.
“This all comes back to technology,” Frost says. “Technology is the enabler that allows us to achieve our vision. Innovative education has no boundaries.”
Approximately 160 students are enrolled at Georgia Tech Savannah – 132 undergraduates and 32 master’s and doctoral students. Degrees are available in civil, computer, electrical, environmental and mechanical engineering. The first undergraduate degrees were awarded in fall 2001, and since then, nearly 275 students have graduated from the Savannah campus.
There is also a strong transfer program as part of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program (GTREP), a formal academic collaboration between Georgia Tech and three partner institutions: Armstrong Atlantic State University and Savannah State University in Savannah, and Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Ga. Students are taught by Savannah-based faculty complemented by distance instruction from other Georgia Tech campuses.
In addition, students have access to world-renowned researchers in a wide variety of disciplines and expertise. There are 16 instructional labs in areas such as automation and robotics, digital education, electronic circuits and instrumentation, hydromechanics and systems and controls, and 18 research centers and laboratories.
Academics are not the only focus of Georgia Tech Savannah; outreach is also an integral part of the campus. The Savannah office of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) – Georgia Tech’s nationally recognized science and technology incubator – assists new ventures arising from Savannah’s diverse technology community that includes educational institutions such as the Savannah College of Art and Design, established companies and a growing community of startups. Currently, there are six ATDC member companies in Savannah.
The Savannah campus is also home to a regional office of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, an organization that 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.
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Understanding biology at the systems level is difficult, especially when studying complex specimens like tissue slices or communities of organisms in a biofilm. Scientists must be able to identify, quantify and locate the molecules present in the samples.
Mass spectrometry imaging is a powerful analytical technique with the potential to unravel the molecular complexities of such biological systems. It allows researchers to visualize the spatial arrangement and relative abundance of specific molecules – from simple metabolites to peptides and proteins – in biological samples.
At Georgia Tech, researchers from the Colleges of Sciences and Engineering have joined forces to create the Center for Bio-Imaging Mass Spectrometry (BIMS) that aims to tackle these types of challenges.
“We organized this center in 2007 when we saw the enormous potential of mass spectrometry imaging tools and realized that we had a unique ensemble of people at Georgia Tech that would enable us to excel in this field,” says Al Merrill, a professor in the School of Biology and the Smithgall Chair in Molecular Cell Biology.
Mass spectrometry imaging takes advantage of the ability of biological molecules to be converted into ions that can then be separated and analyzed by a mass spectrometer. When data are collected from different regions of a sample, the distribution of molecules can be used to create multidimensional images of that sample.
As a cell biologist, Merrill sees the technique’s potential in its ability to detect all of the important molecules that control cell behavior instead of just a few. Another advantage to mass spectrometry is the ability to test whether all of the cells are being affected in the same ways.
His laboratory uses mass spectrometry to profile sphingolipids, a family of thousands of metabolites that are involved in cell-cell communication and intracellular signaling. He also studies the types and amounts of these metabolites that control whether cells grow or die.
“With mass spectrometry, we have not only been able to profile these compounds, but also to find new metabolites we think are important in inflammation, aging and cancer,” says Merrill.
The BIMS center includes researchers like Merrill who propose biological and clinical problems that may be solved by mass spectrometry imaging. It also brings together researchers who are improving current mass spectrometry imaging technologies and developing innovative techniques, and researchers who are analyzing the large sets of complicated data collected by mass spectrometry systems.
Today, a popular technique for studying biological samples is matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDIMS). In this technique, sample preparation plays a very important role in image quality because it requires that a matrix compound be uniformly deposited over the surface of a histological tissue slice mounted on a special plate.
Professor Thomas Orlando and graduate student Irene Anestis-Richard conduct an experiment with the single-photon ionization mass spectrometer. (Click image for high-resolution version. Credit: Gary Meek)
A research team including Merrill, along with Cameron Sullards, director of Georgia Tech’s Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Facility, and Yanfeng Chen, a research scientist in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, recently showed that the homogeneity of the matrix could be improved. With this development, broader categories of compounds, such as lipids, could be analyzed.
The researchers used an oscillating capillary nebulizer to spray small droplets of matrix aerosol onto the sample surface – a process similar to airbrushing. Using histological samples provided by Timothy Cox, a professor of medicine at the University of Cambridge, the researchers could profile and localize many different lipid species in the samples. Specifically, they localized sphingolipids that accumulate in the brain when there is a genetic defect. This research was published in the April 15 issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry and was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
While MALDI samples must be analyzed in a vacuum, recent advances allow samples to be studied under ambient conditions. Facundo Fernandez, an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been using a technique called desorption electrospray ionization (DESI).
With DESI, a high-speed, charged spray containing alcohol and water is directed at a sample a few millimeters away. The solvent droplets pick up portions of the sample through interaction with the surface and then form highly charged ions that can be analyzed.
Fernandez and his research team recently used DESI to analyze nearly 400 drug samples provided by public health authorities to identify counterfeit anti-malarial drugs.
“We have done a lot of work using DESI to analyze pharmaceutical formulations, but we are moving into new avenues of research including looking at algae samples, as well as ovarian cancer tissue samples provided by the Ovarian Cancer Institute, which is housed at Georgia Tech and headed by School of Biology chair John McDonald,” says Fernandez.
In ovarian cancer research, little is known about how biomarkers and low-mass signaling molecules increase or decrease in abundance with treatment. Fernandez has teamed with Thomas Orlando, chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, to use DESI and laser desorption single photon ionization mass spectrometry (LD/SPI-MS) to investigate this issue. Because the two techniques overlap in mass ranges, using both provides a more complete investigation of the biomarker profiles, says Orlando.
Because it does not use a matrix, LD/SPI-MS can detect low-mass molecules – such as sugars, amino acids, small peptides and cytotoxic compounds – formed as result of cancer treatment. It could achieve higher spatial resolution and sensitivity than typical commercial mass spectrometers that rely on the laser desorption of ions, according to Orlando.
“We hope LD/SPI-MS will lead to a better understanding of the molecular basis of ovarian cancer at its various stages and how treatment affects regulation of low-mass biomarkers in ovarian cancer cells,” says Orlando.
Mass spectrometry experiments produce incredible volumes of data, each composed of thousands of spectra and thousands of peaks, which makes finding molecules of interest very difficult.
“We’ve focused on researching computational methods that can clean up, visualize and look for interesting patterns in thousands of mass spectrometry tissue images that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to find or have time to find with the naked eye,” says May Dongmei Wang, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar.
Wang, post-doctoral fellow Mitchell Parry and graduate students Richard Moffitt and Peter Siy are providing software systems to BIMS center users. The systems acquire the thousands of ion spectra collected from every tissue slide matrix, perform quality control and visualize the distribution of ions on the tissue matrix. The researchers then use data mining methodologies – including principal component analysis, independent component analysis and multivariate analysis – to identify and compare ions of interest present in different locations.
With the advances in software and hardware, the use of mass spectrometry in the life sciences promises to become even more prevalent and diversified for systems biology research.
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“Systems biology is a relatively new field that focuses on complex networks of biological interactions. When we held the workshop, we were really surprised by the enormous interest on the Georgia Tech campus and also by the broad range of research projects presented that day,” says Voit, the David D. Flanagan Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Biological Systems.
Georgia Tech’s move toward systems biology research was under way. Less than a year later, this initiative was formalized by the launch of the Integrative BioSystems Institute (IBSI) with Voit at the helm as the founding director.
IBSI researchers aim to understand the complex biological systems in which molecules, cells, organs, organisms, populations and communities interact. Their ultimate goal is to solve complicated problems related to human health and the environment.
“Georgia Tech created the Integrative BioSystems Institute to provide our faculty members and students with the opportunity to efficiently and effectively explore the intersection of the traditional science and engineering disciplines with the life sciences,” says Gary Schuster, Georgia Tech provost.
To do this, IBSI brought together a cross-disciplinary group of researchers from Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Science, Engineering and Computing. They include:
“These investigations will lead to the development of new understanding, new tools and new procedures that will help us all to lead longer, healthier lives,” adds Schuster.
Georgia Tech researchers plan to understand and fight threatening diseases, develop better pharmaceuticals, create more efficient therapies and determine how to better deal with environmental challenges that affect human health and quality of life.
Systems biology researchers must define all of the components of the system they are studying, including the regulatory relationships between genes and interactions of proteins and biochemical pathways. They can then use this knowledge to formulate conceptual and computational models that test and predict cellular functions and responses.
Complete genome sequences of various organisms are now available, and high-throughput technologies have emerged for molecular-level measurements of gene expression, protein function and protein-protein interactions. These advances make it possible to measure a large number of cellular components simultaneously, and to perform system-level studies at the molecular level with unprecedented breadth and depth.
The available sequenced genomes, however, are not very meaningful until the genes are distinguished from less useful information in the DNA strands. Mark Borodovsky, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics and a Regents’ Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing, has developed several algorithms and computer programs that do just that for genomes with different levels of complexity.
“It’s like deciphering text when you initially don’t have a clue what the sequence of numbers or letters means,” he says. “The information you are looking for may be hidden in just five percent of the whole sequence, but you need to find this very important text.”
Since 1995 – the start of the genomic era – Borodovsky’s line of software programs, with the common name GeneMark, has been frequently used in laboratories worldwide to find genes. The program was used to find genes in the first completely sequenced genomes of bacteria and archea.
Borodovsky has long-term funding from the National Institutes of Health. Currently, he is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, and genome centers in Europe and Japan to find genes in sequences of novel complex genomes.
Although genes get a lot of attention, it’s the proteins produced from the genes that perform most life functions. Unlike the relatively unchanging genome, the dynamic proteome changes every minute in response to thousands of internal and environmental signals.
A protein’s chemistry and behavior are specified by the gene sequence and by the number and identities of other proteins made in the same cell at the same time and with which that protein associates and interacts. David Bader, a professor in the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing, and graduate student Kamesh Madduri, are using a social networking principle called “betweenness centrality” to analyze cellular proteins interacting in complex systems.
“It’s a metric in which you look at all of the proteins that are interacting and find the most important proteins – the ones where, if you remove them, you most likely disconnect the entire network,” explains Bader.
The researchers have examined human protein-protein interaction data sets and discovered proteins important to the cells, including one that has been implicated in breast cancer. What is intriguing though, says Bader, is that the important proteins are not usually those that interact with the greatest number of other proteins. Bader plans to continue studying protein-protein interactions with other IBSI members.
In addition to genomics and proteomics, another key factor in the rise of systems biology is the rapid development of measurement technologies. Modeling biological systems requires highly accurate, high-throughput, quantitative methods and devices to collect data under many different conditions.
Microfluidic devices show much promise for this, and Hang Lu, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, has engineered microfluidic devices to collect multiple pieces of data simultaneously from cells and microscopic organisms.
“We’ve designed a lab-on-a-chip from which we can get lots of data with very high spatial resolution, very high throughput and low error because we’ve taken out the human manipulation of the organisms – it’s all automatic,” says Lu. Details about the device were published in July 2008 in the journal Nature Methods.
The device Lu developed incorporates complete automation, which allows her to conduct quantitative population experiments to study the genetics of developmental processes in complex systems such as the nervous system and the effects of small molecules on biological networks.
The advances in high-throughput measurement techniques also require innovations from computer science. The volume of data is large and the number of genes or proteins being studied at one time is often much greater than the number of samples.
Haesun Park, a professor in the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing, uses numerical linear algebra and optimization techniques to develop computer-based algorithms that dramatically reduce the number of genes that must be studied to only those that may be responsible for specific biomedical conditions.
“With careful consideration of the significance of the biological characteristics of the problem and without losing much information, the amount of data can be reduced so that the problem becomes computationally tractable,” says Park.
When comparing gene data from a set of cancer patients to comparable information from a set of healthy individuals, it is important to determine which genes are important out of the more than 20,000 in the human genome. Effective algorithms for doing that can potentially increase the new knowledge about the roles of specific genes.
The wealth of biological data and availability of computers with enormous power are beginning to enable realistic models to be designed of living cells and organs that can simulate life in a quantitative fashion. Systems biology connects the wet and dry sciences by an iterative cycle of model-driven experimentation and experiment-driven modeling.
“A good mathematical model of a real world system should be able to quantitatively describe, predict and explain the behavior of the system,” says Richard Fujimoto, Regents’ Professor and chair of the Computational Science and Engineering Division in the College of Computing and a member of the IBSI executive committee.
Many researchers begin modeling biological systems with simple organisms, such as bacteria, which are easy to culture, manipulate genetically, maintain under controlled conditions and examine in the laboratory.
“Understanding small systems is a necessary prerequisite before we can deal with bigger systems, such as the human body and its disease processes,” says Voit. “We need to look at microorganisms that have plenty of biological relevance in their own right, but that also allow us to explore the function and coordination of metabolites, enzymes and genes in organisms that are much less complex than humans.”
In collaboration with Helena Santos, a professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, Voit recently showed that high-precision, dynamic experimental metabolite data could be combined with nonlinear systems modeling to characterize regulatory mechanisms in the bacterium Lactococcus lactis. These are difficult to assess with traditional biological analysis.
With a genome of fewer than 300 genes – compared to the more than 20,000 genes in humans – this bacterium served as an attractive model for Voit’s biological systems approaches and for the development of new methodologies to analyze metabolites and optimize the production of valuable compounds for the food industry.
Once researchers understand microorganisms in controlled laboratory systems, they can begin to study them in their more complicated natural environments. The challenge is that although the genomes of hundreds of microbes have been sequenced, microbial ecosystems can encompass hundreds or thousands of different populations, each comprising large numbers of cells that often cannot be differentiated as individuals and must be considered as communities.
Frank Löffler, the Carlton Wilder Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, analyzes complex soil microbial ecosystems so that he can improve the efficiency of environmental decontamination processes. His work focuses on remediating groundwater contaminated by toxic chlorinated solvents, such as those used in dry cleaning and metal degreasing operations.
Löffler found microorganisms that detoxify these chemicals by biodegrading them into ethylene gas, a harmless end-product. The genomes of some bacteria involved in this process have been sequenced, and current efforts are aimed at determining the expression levels of thousands of genes and proteins to identify those responsible for the detoxification processes.
“With computational models, we can better understand the cellular regulatory networks, including how different components in the microbe interact, how populations of microbes interact, and how microbial communities function,” says Löffler. This work is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program and industry partners including DuPont.
Löffler also has funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environmental Remediation Sciences Program to investigate uranium contamination. Uranium is radioactive and can be mobile – that is, it can be transported with the groundwater flow and cause widespread subsurface contamination.
Remediation is difficult, he says, because the actions of one set of microbes can undo the work of another. Microbes transform the soluble form of uranium into an insoluble form that won’t travel or spread, but certain microbes can remobilize the uranium. Löffler aims to understand these complex microbial processes so that computational models can be used to predict contaminant behavior and guide engineering solutions for cleanup.
With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, Patricia Sobecky, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biology, and Martial Taillefert, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, are analyzing aerobic processes that contribute to the remediation of uranium.
In articles published in the August 15, 2007 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology and the December 2007 issue of the journal Environmental Microbiology, Sobecky and Taillefert showed that certain bacteria could promote uranium immobility through the activity of phosphatases. This process, which can occur aerobically and anaerobically, can be included in models to remediate contaminated areas.
“While investigating phosphatase genes, we found that another gene was being transferred between organisms that allowed the organisms to pump heavy metals back out to help them adapt and detoxify their environment,” explains Sobecky.
Currently, Sobecky is developing and applying systems approaches to better understand how these complex processes such as horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer operate. By studying the genetic material of these organisms, scientists can begin to understand how these microbes have evolved and adapted to life in extreme conditions, and isolate the genes that give them their unique abilities to survive and proliferate.
Horizontal gene transfer is also important in human disease because the process is thought to be a significant cause of increased drug resistance. When one bacterial cell acquires resistance, it can quickly transfer the resistance genes to many species. Cells commonly transfer genetic material between one another via bacteriophages, also known as phages, which are diverse and abundant viruses that exclusively infect bacteria.
Joshua Weitz, an assistant professor in the School of Biology, is modeling the mechanisms behind the diversity that can emerge from interactions between phages and bacteria. This is particularly difficult because the evolution of bacterial viruses is intimately linked to their hosts.
“I am trying to understand the strategies by which viruses interact with bacterial hosts at the cellular scale and the diversity of such strategies in different environments,” says Weitz, who is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
With his research team that includes biologists, physicists, mathematicians and bioinformaticians, Weitz has developed simulation models of host-phage dynamics that begin at the site of infection. The researchers analyze the fate of the infected cell and infecting phage, followed by long-term population changes as both viruses and hosts respond to the emergence of newly reproduced – and in some cases newly evolved – strains.
Weitz’s expertise in environmental host-phage interactions led him to begin studying the dynamics of diseases mediated by aquatic reservoirs, such as cholera. Cholera transmission occurs by ingesting contaminated water or food – infection doesn’t require contact with a person already infected.
Weitz has teamed with School of Mathematics professor Howie Weiss, physics graduate student Richard Joh and mathematics postdoctoral scientist Hao Wang to mathematically model the transmission of cholera and predict what conditions lead to endemic or epidemic outbreaks of the disease. The study of cholera dynamics is a multi-scale systems biology problem because the emergence of an outbreak depends on information about how an individual’s immune system contends with a pathogen as well as how the pathogen spreads within a population.
Just as systems approaches improve knowledge of human health, they also provide management options for sustaining and improving the health of natural ecosystems upon which humans depend. Georgia Tech researchers are developing novel approaches to conservation and ecosystem restoration with the goal of sustaining ecosystem services such as food production and water and air purification.
Mark Hay, the Harry and Linda Teasley Chair in Environmental Biology, explores tropical coral reefs in the Caribbean and South Pacific to understand the complex network of interactions that sustain these biodiverse systems.
Hay conducts field experiments by adding or removing different consumers, competitors and nutrients to ecosystems. The goal is to understand complex networks of interactions as a way to maximize the ecosystem’s health and its ability to recover from environmental damage. This work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Hay anticipates that this understanding will be used to develop models for predicting, avoiding and recovering from the effects of global change, invasions of non-native species and environmental stressors. He also hopes that this type of system-wide, multi-scale exploration will lead to better stewardship of the natural environment in the face of a growing human population that both values natural ecosystems and depends on the critical services they provide.
All organisms, regardless of their complexity, live in and rely on diverse and interconnected communities. At Georgia Tech, environmental systems that affect human health are being modeled on the scale and complexity of real living systems and processes.
Modeling and simulation have played relatively minor roles in pharmaceutical research and development to date. Each drug and target combination is typically considered in isolation, which can often be misleading because the mechanisms contributing to the development of disease are complex and not just the result of the contribution of a single gene or its protein product.
With the increased use of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, pathogenic strains have acquired antibiotic resistance, prompting extensive effort in the design of new or improved antibacterial agents. One target of antibiotics is the ribosome – the cellular workhorse that translates the genetic code into proteins.
To discover where new drugs will bind to the ribosome, researchers must know the structural shape of the ribosome, which includes two sub-units that assemble to produce a functional particle at the beginning of the process of protein biosynthesis. School of Biology professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Steve Harvey uses computer models to investigate the structural shape, and in turn, function, of the ribosome.
He developed a structural model of the large subunit of the mammalian ribosome by combining molecular modeling techniques with cryo-electron microscopic data that will allow him to screen where novel drugs will bind to the ribosome and affect its function.
Senior research technologist Bartosz Ilkowski stands in front of the School of Biology computing cluster. (Click image for high-resolution version. Credit: Gary Meek)
Jeffrey Skolnick, a professor in the School of Biology, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and associate director of IBSI, has worked with postdoctoral scientist Michal Brylinski to develop a method for predicting where signal-triggering molecules called ligands will bond to target proteins. The prediction can be made without knowing the protein structure.
To complete the complex calculations required for the prediction, Skolnick has a computing facility that contains 4,600 core processors that perform calculations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The computer rates the quality of the fit to various sites on the protein, analyzing the molecules’ abilities to either enhance or disable the function of the protein, depending on its function in the cell.
Identifying the ligand-binding site is often the starting point for protein function determination and drug discovery. Details of the method were published in January 2008 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
In another project, Skonick and postdoctoral scientist Roman Mezencev, research scientist Adrian Arakaki and School of Biology chair John McDonald aim to discover drug targets for treating ovarian cancer. Their goal is to enhance the non-cancerous pathway by promoting production of specific molecules whose production is reduced by the disease.
“It’s much easier to feed cells a molecule that’s been inhibited because of a disease rather than designing a drug to inhibit a molecule that’s being produced in excess due to a disease,” explains Skolnick.
The researchers have developed a list of metabolites whose production has been reduced in diseased cells, but which may stop cancer cells from multiplying if metabolite production resumes. They have tested these metabolites on leukemia and ovarian cancer cell lines and results have shown a reduced growth rate of the cancer cells by 90 and 50 percent, respectively. This work was published in June 2008 in the journal Molecular Cancer.
A wealth of biological and clinical data is available for health professionals to examine, but existing modeling and computational techniques limit their ability to handle such heterogeneous large-scale data sets. This limits the ability of researchers to uncover discriminatory factors that might assist in predicting health risk, detecting disease early and predicting treatment outcome.
Working with clinicians and experimental biologists, Eva Lee, an associate professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare, has developed a general-purpose predictive modeling and software system that determines predictive rules for a wide range of biological and medical problems. These rules can assist in early disease prediction and diagnosis, identification of new target sites – genomic, cellular and molecular – for treatment and drug delivery, disease prevention and early intervention and optimal treatment design.
For one project, Lee has developed a model to predict atherosclerosis by examining inexpensive physiological measurements, traditional risk factors and novel biomarkers. In another, she has completed genomic analyses to predict the abnormal methylation of certain genomic regions. Methylation is a process that has been shown to silence genes responsible for tumor suppression.
Lee is also fingerprinting microvascular networks to provide early diagnosis of diabetes, premature aging, macular degeneration and tumor metastasis. Her predictive models have yielded correct classification rates ranging from 80 to 100 percent. Lee and her medical collaborators have also conducted blind tests, where diagnoses are predicted for new patient data based on a developed rule. These tests resulted in correct predictions more than 83 percent of the time.
These results provide a strong basis for pursuing their use as medical diagnostic, monitoring and decision-making tools, Lee says. This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
In addition to diagnoses, systems biology approaches can also be used to improve disease treatments. Hang Lu and Melissa Kemp, an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Professor, aim to improve a new cancer therapy called adoptive transfer of T-cells.
During this process, clinicians remove T-cells from a cancer patient, multiply them in the laboratory and then infuse them back into the patient’s body to attack the cancer. However, this type of therapy is limited by the difficulty of generating sufficient numbers of active T-cells in the laboratory.
“Researchers use an artificial method of population growth that may cause the cells to divide too many times and become unresponsive and inactive,” says Kemp.
Kemp and Lu are using microfluidic devices to stimulate and break open T-cells to analyze their properties dynamically. By measuring molecules downstream from the T-cells in a high-throughput manner, Kemp and Lu can build mathematical models to assess the quality of the T-cell population before infusing the cells into the patient. That could potentially improve the therapeutic outcome. The researchers were recently awarded funding from the National Institutes of Health to continue this project.
As the field of systems biology expands, Georgia Tech’s Integrative BioSystems Institute is working to be on the forefront. The Institute will continue to encourage the integration of information about cells and organisms at multiple levels and the integration of knowledge from biological science and tools from mathematics, engineering and computer science for a better understanding of the biological systems.
“Georgia Tech has a culture of interdisciplinary research and education that goes back several decades and enables us to address issues such as systems biology in ways that other institutions can’t,” notes Don Giddens, dean of the College of Engineering, the Lawrence L. Gellerstedt, Jr. Chair in Bioengineering and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.
Views, opinions, findings and/or conclusions contained in this article are those of the scientists mentioned and should not be construed as official positions or decisions of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation or the Department of the Navy.
The term “systems biology” entered the vocabulary of the scientific community only a few years ago, but what does it really mean?
Front and center is a clear focus on systems, which are collections of components that interact with each other and in the process make something happen. Typical components in the engineering world – screws, wires, wheels and transistors – don’t do much when left to their own devices. However, let clever engineers put them together and the parts seemingly come to life, with the creation of a television set or a car. Something dynamic emerges out of a collection of objects.
On a coarse level, biological systems have quite a few similarities with engineered systems, but they are incomparably more complicated and intriguing. Not only do they move, but they also reproduce and develop on their own out of a single cell.
In contrast to cars, they search for their own food and adapt to new situations and even to entirely novel environments. They respond to challenges appropriately and intelligently, although the latter is sometimes disputed.
The grand challenge of systems biologists is to understand how biological systems function. This is an important goal, not just from an academic perspective, but also for very practical reasons.
Understanding how cellular control works—or fails—will suggest new options for cancer treatment. Insights into the organization of bacterial pathways will help harness the power of microorganisms for the biotechnological production of valuable organics or bulk products like ethanol and for novel, yet natural, means of cleaning up the environment.
Integrative systems biology adds a new and exciting set of tools to the repertoire of biological research techniques. It uniquely complements the more traditional paradigm of “reductionist” experimentation in which well-controlled experiments crisply focus on the characterization of select components or processes.
Reductionist biology has provided researchers with a rapidly growing list of molecular building blocks, along with details on their features and functions. The results of this reductionist paradigm have been truly amazing and have affected every aspect of life. Just look at the advances in medicine over the past decades!
Systems biology complements the reductionist paradigm by revealing how higher-level functionality emerges from interactions among the building blocks. They are intimately interwoven – after all, how could systems biology succeed without detailed knowledge of the players in a system? And why would anyone be interested in one particular gene or signaling process if it did not contribute to some higher-level function that is important in a cell, organism or ecological system?
Biological systems are complex and modeling them requires researchers in many areas of expertise to unite. The three main areas of expertise are described here. The first typically uses high-throughput experiments that, for instance, simultaneously measure the expression of thousands of genes in an organism. The ultimate goal of these investigations is to establish complete molecular inventories and characterize the function of each biological component.
The second area of expertise falls into the realm of engineering. Without innovative machinery, none of the high-throughput biology would be possible. Brilliant engineering advances in sensing, probing, miniaturization, robotics and many other areas allow biological building blocks to be investigated rapidly and with a clarity and resolution never seen before.
The third area of expertise is computational. Here the goal is the construction of numerical models that reliably quantify the interactions among the many components and processes within a biological system. Following Richard Feynman’s observation, “What I cannot create, I do not understand,” and glancing at the enormous successes in engineering, the “creating” is accomplished first with computer models, whose results later guide the creation of actual, yet synthetic, biological systems.
The technical aspects of experimentation, device creation and computation will certainly be the crucial drivers of the success of systems biology. Motivating these drivers is a systems-oriented mind-set.
Systems biology encourages us to look at the living world with different eyes. Systems biologists appreciate the role and function of each biological building block – not in isolation, but as a vital part in the larger context of intricately fine-tuned machines that hierarchically form larger ensembles and, in concert with all parts, bring innate molecules to life.
Systems biology is a fascinating, mind-altering endeavor. So beware – engaging in systems biology may irreversibly change your views of the living world!
Written by Eberhard Voit
Voit is the David D. Flanagan Chair in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and director of Georgia Tech’s new Integrative BioSystems Institute.
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]]>But Kevin Melendy, president of the company, says Spectral Response had to develop innovative ways of thinking to survive and thrive.
"Like everybody, we faced an onslaught of competition from low-cost manufacturing. We had to find a way to compete," he said. "We had to either fight to survive or try to find new and expanding business segments that have higher margins and less competition, and those just don't exist."
To improve the company's manufacturing process, Melendy turned to Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute for assistance. Lean specialists Kelley Hundt and Jennifer Trapp-Lingenfelter initially visited Spectral Response to help streamline the way the company initiated product orders. After developing a value stream map - a diagram used to analyze the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer - they suggested the project focus on the entire manufacturing floor plan.
"The factory floor was being driven by the how orders were loaded. If a customer called, we had to figure out a way to get it done, whether it was working nights, weekends or three shifts," Melendy recalled. "But as our business grew and the margin pressures were layered on top of that, we didn't have that luxury any more. We had to take an order from a customer and make sure our supply chain commitments matched up to our manufacturing processes."
After meeting with Spectral Response's leadership, Hundt and Trapp-Lingenfelter both thought the company's manufacturing process would benefit from a cellular design. At the time, the company was arranged in functional departments that caused excess work-in-process, long lead times and lack of flexibility. Cellular manufacturing, sometimes referred to as cell production, arranges factory floor labor into semi-autonomous and multi-skilled teams that manufacture complete products. These more flexible cells are able to manage processes, defects, scheduling, equipment maintenance and other manufacturing issues more efficiently.
After training the entire 137-member workforce on lean manufacturing principles, a cross-functional team of eight employees examined the 'before' process, brainstormed ideas and used lean tools to highlight areas of improvement. The team decided to shut down operations during the week of July 4, 2007, to re-arrange all of the equipment into nine different cellular production lines.
"We used to refer to the floor plan as the snake, and a product had to travel through the entire snake, meaning it was in a single file. If we started a product on Monday, it might be ready to be shipped on Friday," said David Shockley, vice president of operations. "With the cell production, we can have nine parallel lines - much shorter in length - producing nine products at once. Now, products are ready to be shipped within 48 hours after the order is launched in the system."
Not only did the cellular design reduce the length of time from the order initiation until it was ready to be shipped, but it also helped with orders that needed to be re-worked or changed. Todd Owens, lean manager for Spectral Response, estimates that inventory in this area was cut by more than one-third.
"Before, the boards that did not pass the testing area would just get set aside into what we called the bone pile. We would have to find time to go back and re-work them, and that inventory became a significant dollar amount," he said. "Now, we handle the failed board as we run them through the individual cells. A year ago, the value of the bone pile inventory was more than $300,000; today, it's around $80,000."
As a result of the lean implementation, Spectral Response has seen a number of impressive impacts. Total work-in-process has decreased by more than one-half, from $2 million to approximately $800,000 worth of inventory. Lead times have been cut in half, overtime is down from 15 percent to less than five percent, and there is 40 percent more floor space for future growth. Melendy also estimates that the company's electricity bill has decreased by 20 percent, since it is using big, power-hungry equipment less.
"It's easy to quit on this because it's difficult, but ultimately you come out on the other side with a company that's more efficient and better run than when you first started,' Shockley noted. "In July 2008, we will implement cell number ten, and it will be our highest volume product. We are committed to this being a never-ending, continual process."
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]]>Aid organizations currently don't have a quick and accurate way to determine how many people need assistance. Satellites can collect images of areas affected by a natural disaster, but there are dissemination restrictions and cloud cover can prevent collection of images.
"Without a real-time map, it's very hard to do population estimates and demographic estimates to figure out where people are, how they're moving, how they're spaced out and even how many people you have on the ground," said Benjamin Sklaver, a project officer from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) International Emergency and Refugee Health Branch. "This technology does not exist currently, so GTRI's imaging system is really an innovative project."
The imaging system was developed with funding from the CDC, and agency officials would like to begin using this device as soon as possible. After responding to the recent devastation caused by Hurricanes Hanna and Ike, the CDC asked GTRI to accelerate delivery of the imaging device for use during the 2008 hurricane season.
"We plan to package the system for use on Coast Guard UH-60J Black Hawk helicopters, which were among the first to fly over Haiti following Hanna's devastation," said David Price, a GTRI senior research technologist.
The imaging system - designed by Price and senior research engineer Gary Gray - is called the 'Mini ModPOD,' which stands for 'Miniature Modular Photographic Observation Device.' It consists of an off-the-shelf Canon Digital Rebel XTi digital camera, a global positioning system receiver, a small circuit board that uploads mission parameters, and an inertial measurement unit that measures the aircraft's rate of acceleration and changes in rotational attributes, including pitch, roll and yaw. The images collected from the system can be stitched together to create a complete picture of the affected area.
The research team has tested the device on several flights, selecting areas with large populations of people likely to be outdoors.
"During the first test flight, we wanted to test the clarity and resolution of the images collected during the run, and we were very pleased," said Price. "We could see tennis balls on the ground and people reading books at outdoor tables. This was sufficient detail to allow accurate counting the number of people in an area."
After the first flight, the researchers reduced the weight of the device and developed a more accurate geo-referencing capability, which allowed the physical location of the scenes shown in each photograph to be determined with precision. With the modifications made, the researchers went for a second flight test in July.
The research group selected a rectangular zone of interest and loaded the latitude and longitude coordinates of the zone into the system from a USB drive. As soon as the helicopter flew into the zone, the camera began snapping pictures. The electronics were set to measure the speed of the aircraft so that each photo overlapped 60 percent of the preceding photo, making it easier to stitch together the photos to create a complete picture. The pilot made two passes, at altitudes of 500 and 1,000 feet above ground level.
"This test flight was successful in confirming the Mini ModPOD's ability to activate the camera within the zone of interest. The resulting photos were extremely sharp and clear - they were free of any vibration or motion effects," added Price.
The photos were successfully matched to the flight data, which enabled the CDC to adjust them for geospatial reference. However, due to a software glitch, they were not overlapped as planned. The researchers made a small adjustment to the software and completed a third a third test flight in August.
"This flight resulted in images that were 60 percent overlapped, enabling CDC engineers to build a high-resolution mosaic image," noted Price. "Individuals on the ground were easily distinguishable as people separate from other objects."
The imaging system will also be available to the CDC and other agencies, such as the American Red Cross, to count people in refugee camps in order to plan for health and humanitarian services.
The research described in this article was supported by cooperative agreement #U38 EH000363 from the CDC. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the CDC.
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]]>"We designed a coating that specifically communicates with cells and we're telling the cells to grow bone around the implant," said Andrés Garcia, professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
Details of the new coating appear in the July issue of the journal Biomaterials. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Arthritis Foundation and the Georgia Tech/Emory National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center on the Engineering of Living Tissues.
Total knee and hip replacements typically last about 15 years until the components wear down or loosen. For many younger patients, this means a second surgery to replace the first artificial joint. With approximately 40 percent of the 712,000 total hip and knee replacements in the United States in 2004 performed on younger patients 45-64 years old, improving the lifetime of the titanium joints and creating a better connection with the bone becomes extremely important.
Current clinical practice includes roughening the surface of the titanium implant or coating it with a flaky, hard-to-apply ceramic that bonds directly to bone.
In collaboration with Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry professor David Collard, graduate students Tim Petrie and Jenny Raynor, and research technician Kellie Burns, Garcia coated the titanium with a thin, dense polymer.
"Our coating consists of a high density of polymer strands, akin to the bristles on a toothbrush, that we can then modify to present our bio-inspired, bioactive protein," explained Garcia.
In this case, the polymer presented controlled amounts of an engineered protein that mimics fibronectin, a protein in the body that acts as a binding site for cell surface receptors called integrins.
It is important to control the integrins binding to the titanium implant because integrins provide signals that direct bone formation. Therefore, controlling integrin binding to the titanium will result in targeted signals that enhance bone formation around the implant.
To bind integrins to titanium, researchers previously coated titanium with a small biological signal containing the sequence arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) that binds to integrins. However, this region alone binds many different integrin receptors and with much less affinity than the full fibronectin protein.
"It has been common to mimic only very small sections of fibronectin, but when you take a small section and ignore the rest of the molecule you lose specificity and activity, and therefore signaling is impaired," said Garcia.
For that reason, Garcia engineered a much longer region of the same type of fibronectin that included the RGD peptide sequence as well as new sections also known to have sites that participate in integrin binding.
To evaluate the in vivo performance of the coated titanium in bone healing, chemists Raynor and Collard coated the surfaces of tiny clinical-grade titanium cylinders with the polymer brushes. Then engineers Petrie and Garcia modified them with peptide sequences.
Two-millimeter circular defects were drilled into a rat's tibia bone and the cylinders were pressed into the holes. The researchers tested three types of coatings: uncoated titanium, titanium coated with the RGD peptide and titanium coated with different densities of the engineered fibronectin fragment.
To investigate the function of these novel surfaces in promoting bone growth, the researchers quantified osseointegration, or the growth of bone around the implant and strength of the attachment of the implant to the bone.
Analysis of the bone-implant interface four weeks later revealed extensive and contiguous bone matrix and a 70 percent enhancement in the amount of contact between the implant and bone with the titanium implants coated with the engineered fibronectin fragment over the uncoated or RGD-coated titanium.
Garcia and Petrie tested the fixation of the implants by measuring the amount of force required to pull the implants out of the bone. The study showed significantly higher mechanical fixation of the implants coated with the engineered fibronectin fragment over the implants with the other coating and uncoated titanium.
In addition to total joint replacements, Garcia is studying how to fill large gaps between bones, which sometimes occur after a traumatic injury or tumor removal.
"We are developing a strategy to present peptides that encourage the surrounding bone to grow in and fill in around the gap," said Garcia.
By improving communication with the body's cells, Garcia can control the integration and healing response of the body to any implanted device. Currently, most become encapsulated by a collagen sheath, which affects the performance and long-term viability of the device. Garcia aims to use these biomaterials to help integrate devices implanted in the body.
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]]>A report scheduled to be published this week in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that maintaining the proper balance of herbivorous fishes may be critical to restoring coral reefs, which are declining dramatically worldwide. The conclusion results from a long-term study that found significant recovery in sections of coral reefs on which fish of two complementary species were caged.
Coral reefs depend on fish to eat the seaweeds with which the corals compete, and without such cleaning, the reefs decline as corals are replaced by seaweeds. Different fish consume different seaweeds because of the differing chemical and physical properties of the plants.
"Of the many different fish that are part of coral ecosystems, there may be a small number of species that are really critical for keeping big seaweeds from over-growing and killing corals," explained Mark Hay, the Harry and Linda Teasley Professor of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Our study shows that in addition to having enough herbivores, coral ecosystems also need the right mix of species to overcome the different defensive tactics of the seaweeds."
By knowing which fish are most critical to maintaining coral health, resource managers could focus on protecting and enhancing the highest-impact species. In situations where local peoples depend on fishing, they might better sustain the reefs on which they depend by harvesting only less critical species.
"This could offer one more approach to resource managers," Hay added. "If ecosystems were managed for critical mixes of herbivorous species, we might see more rapid recovery of the reefs."
Believed to be the first study to demonstrate the importance of herbivore diversity in enhancing the growth of coral reefs, the research was conducted at the National Undersea Research Center in Key Largo, Florida. It was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Teasley Endowment at Georgia Tech.
Working 60 feet below the surface near the underwater laboratory Aquarius, Hay and co-author Deron E. Burkpile - who is now at Florida International University in North Miami - constructed 32 cages on a coral reef. Each cage was about two meters square and one meter tall and was sealed so that larger fish could neither enter nor leave.
The number and type of fish placed into each four-square-meter cage varied. Some cages had two fish that were able to eat hard, calcified plants; some had two fish able to eat soft, but chemically-defended plants; some had one of both types, and some had no fish at all. The cages were observed for a period of ten months starting in November 2003, and the change in coral cover and seaweed growth was measured.
"For the cages in which we mixed the two species of herbivores, the fish were able to remove much more of the upright seaweeds, and the corals in those areas increased in cover by more than 20 percent during ten months," Hay said. "That is a dramatic rate of increase for a Caribbean reef."
Though the percentage growth was impressive, the actual growth in size of each coral was small, Hay noted. Prior to the experiment, the coral reef areas studied had just four to five percent coverage of live coral. After ten months, the corals caged with the two species showed six to seven percent coverage. Corals caged with just one type of fish or no fish lost as much as 30 percent of their cover during the time period.
Hay and Burkepile attempted to repeat their experiment with a different species of fish, but the underwater cages were wiped away by Hurricane Dennis in July 2005 after only seven months of study.
The researchers studied the effects of the redband parrotfish (Sparisoma aurofrenatum) and the ocean surgeonfish (Acanthurus bahianus) in the first experiment, and the redband parrotfish and princess parrotfish (Scarus taeniopterus) in the second. The two fish per cage was at the 'high end' of fish density found on present-day Caribbean reefs, but historic densities might have been much higher before extensive fishing of the Caribbean, Hay said.
Just two decades ago, coral coverage in the Caribbean was commonly 40 to 60 percent. Scientists blame many factors - disease, overfishing, pollution, excessive nutrients and global climate change - for the rapid decline, which has also been seen to differing degrees among coral reefs worldwide.
"Some people would argue that coral reefs really don't exist as functional ecosystems in the Caribbean anymore," Hay said. "The best reefs we have today are poor cousins to what was only average 20 years ago."
For the future, Hay would like to expand the experiments to study the effects of additional species, and repeat the studies in different areas, such as the Fiji Islands, where residents are concerned about sustainability of the coral reefs. Though dependent on local fish for their protein, he said the Fiji Islanders may be able to change their fishing habits if researchers can determine which fish must be protected to help the reefs.
"The data we are seeing in Fiji suggests that diversity may be even more important there than it was in the Caribbean," he said. "There are a lot of different species doing a lot of very different things. These consumers are very important, and in areas where they are over-fished, the reefs are crashing."
The study provides more proof of how important biodiversity can be to maintaining healthy ecosystems.
"Species diversity is critically important, but we are losing critical components of the Earth's ecosystem at an alarming rate," Hay said. "There has been little work on the role of diversity among consumers and the effect that has on communities. This study will help add to our knowledge in this critical area."
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]]>Scientists have long been interested in the ability of gecko lizards to scurry up walls and cling to ceilings by their toes. The creatures owe this amazing ability to microscopic branched elastic hairs in their toes that take advantage of atomic-scale attractive forces to grip surfaces and support surprisingly heavy loads. Several research groups have attempted to mimic those hairs with structures made of polymers or carbon nanotubes.
In a paper published in the October 10 issue of Science, researchers from the University of Dayton, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the University of Akron describe an improved carbon nanotube-based material that for the first time creates directionally-varied (anisotropic) adhesive force. With a gripping ability nearly three times the previous record - and ten times better than a real gecko at resisting perpendicular shear forces - the new carbon nanotube array could give artificial gecko feet the ability to tightly grip vertical surfaces while being easily lifted off when desired.
Beyond the ability to walk on walls, the material could have many technological applications, including connecting electronic devices and substituting for conventional adhesives in the dry vacuum of space. The research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.
"The resistance to shear force keeps the nanotube adhesive attached very strongly to the vertical surface, but you can still remove it from the surface by pulling away from the surface in a normal direction," explained Liming Dai, the Wright Brothers Institute Endowed Chair in the School of Engineering at the University of Dayton. "This directional difference in the adhesion force is a significant improvement that could help make this material useful as a transient adhesive."
The key to the new material is the use of rationally-designed multi-walled carbon nanotubes formed into arrays with 'curly entangled tops,' said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents' Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. The tops, which Wang compared to spaghetti or a jungle of vines, mimic the hierarchical structure of real gecko feet, which include branching hairs of different diameters.
When pressed onto a vertical surface, the tangled portion of the nanotubes becomes aligned in contact with the surface. That dramatically increases the amount of contact between the nanotubes and the surface, maximizing the van der Waals forces that occur at the atomic scale. When lifted off the surface in a direction parallel to the main body of the nanotubes, only the tips remain in contact, minimizing the attraction forces, Wang explained.
"The contact surface area matters a lot," he noted. "When you have line contact along, you have van der Waals forces acting along the entire length of the nanotubes, but when you have a point contact, the van der Waals forces act only at the tip of the nanotubes. That allows us to truly mimic what the gecko does naturally."
In tests done on a variety of surfaces -including glass, a polymer sheet, Teflon and even rough sandpaper - the researchers measured adhesive forces of up 100 Newtons per square centimeter in the shear direction. In the normal direction, the adhesive forces were 10 Newtons per square centimeter - about the same as a real gecko.
The resistance to shear increased with the length of the nanotubes, while the resistance to normal force was independent of tube length.
Though the material might seem most appropriate for use by Spider-Man, the real applications may be less glamorous. Because carbon nanotubes conduct heat and electrical current, the dry adhesive arrays could be used to connect electronic devices.
"Thermal management is a real problem today in electronics, and if you could use a nanotube dry adhesive, you could simply apply the devices and allow van der Waals forces to hold them together," Wang noted. "That would eliminate the heat required for soldering."
Another application might be for adhesives that work long-term in space. "In space, there is a vacuum and traditional kinds of adhesives dry out," Dai noted. "But nanotube dry adhesives would not be bothered by the space environment."
In addition those already mentioned, the research team also included Liangti Qu from the University of Dayton, Morley Stone from the Air Force Research Laboratory, and Zhenhai Xia from the University of Akron.
Qu, a research assistant in the laboratory of Liming Dai, grew the nanotube arrays with a low-pressure chemical vapor deposition process on a silicon wafer. During the pyrolytic growth of the vertically-aligned multi-walled nanotubes, the initial segments grew in random directions and formed a top layer of coiled and entangled nanotubes. This layer helped to increase the nanotube area available for contacting a surface.
Qu noted that sample purity was another key factor in ensuring strong adhesion for the carbon nanotube dry adhesive.
For the future, the researchers hope to learn more about the surface interactions so they can further increase the adhesive force. They also want to study the long-term durability of the adhesive, which in a small number of tests became stronger with each attachment.
And they may also determine how much adhesive might be necessary to support a human wearing tights and red mask.
"Because the surfaces may not be uniform, the adhesive force produced by a larger patch may not increase linearly with the size," Dai said. "There is much we still need to learn about the contact between nanotubes and different surfaces."
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Writer: John Toon
]]>An assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Doyoyo has developed a new structural material based on these leftovers from coal burning. Known as Cenocell, the material offers attributes that include high strength and light weight - without the use of cement, an essential ingredient of conventional concrete.
With broad potential applications and advantages such as good insulating properties and fire resistance, the "green" material could replace concrete, wood and other materials in a broad range of applications in construction, transportation and even aerospace.
"Dealing with the ash left over from burning coal is a problem all over the world," said Doyoyo. "By using it for real applications, our process can make the ash a useful commodity instead of a waste product. It could also create new industry and new jobs in parts of the world that need them badly."
Fly ash is composed of small particles removed from combustion gases by pollution control systems. Most of it must now be disposed of as a waste product, though certain types of fly ash can be used to replace a portion of the cement used in conventional concrete.
Cenocell, produced from either fly ash or bottom ash in a reaction with organic chemicals, requires none of the cement or aggregate - sand and rock - used in concrete. And unlike concrete, it emerges from curing ovens in final form and does not require a lengthy period to reach full strength.
"This is a new material very different from concrete," Doyoyo said.
Because it uses what is now considered a waste material to replace cement - which generates carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas - the new material is considered an asset to the environment. The material can have a wide range of properties that make it competitive with concrete, especially the new classes of autoclaved lightweight concrete.
For instance, specific densities range from 0.3 to 1.6, and the material can be manufactured to withstand pressures of up to 7,000 pounds per cubic inch. The properties can be controlled by choosing the proper ash particles size, chemical composition, and the curing time, which can range from three to 24 hours.
"We have a wide range in terms of texture, properties, performance and applications," said Doyoyo. "The possibilities for this material are very broad."
Among the potential applications for the material are:
- Building and construction industry : infrastructure materials that provide sound, crash and fire barriers; permeable pavements; drainage fillers; ultra-light truss stiffeners, foam, wood and concrete replacements in residential and commercial buildings; and acoustical tiles. Cenocell is lighter than most "lightweight" concrete, and lightweight versions can be machined and cut with standard band saws.
- Transportation industry : cores for shock and crash absorbers; fillers for trailer floors or b-pillars in vehicle frames.
- Aerospace industry : ultra-light heat shielding.
- Protective installations : fireproof blast walls or structural fillers for hazardous fluids.
Though for competitive reasons he won't disclose the precise chemical composition of Cenocell, Doyoyo says the processing involves mixing the ash with organic chemicals. The chemical reaction produces foaming, and results in a gray slurry that resembles bread dough. The material is then placed in forms and cured in ovens at approximately 100 degrees Celsius until the desired strength is attained.
"We form a final compound through a combination of chemical and mechanical processes," Doyoyo explained. "Once it comes out of our process, it is ready to go and does not continue to change over time."
Unlike concrete, which remains a mixture of materials held together by chemical bonds, Cenocell is a homogenous material. The cell sizes and final strength depend on both the curing time and size of the ash particles used. Estimates suggest the material could be manufactured for an average cost of $50 per cubic yard.
Doyoyo and his research team - which also includes Paul Biju-Duvall, Julien Claus, Dereck Major, Rolan Duvvury and Josh Gresham - have so far made only small samples for testing. They are working with a Georgia-based maker of autoclaved concrete to produce larger samples for additional testing. Large-scale manufacturing could be done with the same equipment now used to make autoclaved concrete, he says.
Doyoyo will present information about the material at the inception workshop of the Resource-Driven Technology Concept Center in South Africa (RETECZA) December 1-3, 2008, and at the World of Coal Ash meeting May 4-7, 2009.
"We are focusing a lot on the construction industry," Doyoyo said. "When this material is used to build a structure, it will save a lot of energy for heating and air conditioning because of its good insulating properties."
A native of South Africa who was educated at the University of Cape Town, Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Doyoyo sees value beyond the re-use of a waste material. He believes Cenocell could provide low-cost housing in developing countries and economic development impact from a new industry.
"This material could help develop communities by allowing people living near coal-burning facilities to create a new industry and new jobs," he said. "This could be an engine of development for people who have been struggling. It really is a material with a social conscience."
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]]>Research presented on July 8 at the International Conference on Science and Technology of Synthetic Metals in Brazil provides insight into factors that influence the injection efficiency. A balanced injection of positive and negative charge carriers into the organic layer is important to achieve high quantum efficiency, but the interface between the metallic coating and organic layer where the injection occurs is poorly understood.
Placing an organic layer on top of the conductive layer modifies each layer's individual work function, or the minimum energy needed to extract the first electron from the metal.
"Measuring the work functions independently for each layer does not provide an indication of how their energy levels match when they touch each other,' explained Jean-Luc Brédas, a computational materials chemist, professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.
The energy levels for each layer should align when attached; otherwise, a barrier will form and a higher voltage will be required to send current in.
With funding from the Office of Naval Research, Brédas first developed a theoretical model of the interface between conventional metals and a single layer of organic molecules forming a self-assembled monolayer on the metal. His goal was to determine how the metal work function could be modified by depositing the self-assembled monolayer.
Brédas and postdoctoral research fellow Georg Heimel, who is now at the Humboldt University in Berlin, looked for changes in the work function of gold when they modified the chemical nature of the head group of the organic molecules in the self-assembled monolayer and the nature of the docking group, which directly connected the organic layer and metal.
The study, published in the April 2007 issue of the journal Nano Letters, showed that changing the head group of the organic molecules located far from the surface and changing the docking group provided two nearly independent ways to modify the metal work function.
While studying two metal substrates - gold and silver - the researchers found that even though the chemical interface between the metal and thiol-based self-assembled monolayer were different, the organic-covered metals had virtually identical work functions.
Postdoctoral research fellow Pavel Paramonov, who is now an assistant research professor at the University of Akron, expanded the original work to model the interface between a self-assembled monolayer and indium tin oxide, the conducting material commonly used as the transparent electrode in liquid crystal displays and organic light-emitting diodes.
"Researchers frequently cover the hydrophilic indium tin oxide surface with a self-assembled monolayer containing a hydrophobic subgroup pointing away from the surface, providing much better adherence and compatibility with the active organic layer that comes on top," said Brédas.
The cover layer also prevents the indium from diffusing into the active organic layer and degrading the device, but adding this layer also provides a way to fine-tune the work function.
With funding from the Solvay Group, Paramonov modeled the indium tin oxide surface, which was a complex task because indium tin oxide is not stoichiometric - every vendor's indium tin oxide is somewhat different. Then he modeled the binding of a self-assembled monolayer of phosphonic acid to the indium tin oxide surface. Paramonov's first goal was to determine how the oxygen and phosphorus atoms of the self-assembled monolayer bind to the indium tin oxide surface.
In collaboration with Seth Marder, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Neal Armstrong, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona, the researchers were able to characterize the main binding modes of the phosphonic acid molecules on indium tin oxide. This work has led to further research characterizing the impact of the self-assembled monolayer on the indium tin oxide work function, according to Brédas.
"More theoretical work needs to be done to study conducting oxides used as transparent electrodes in organic solar cells and organic transistors," added Brédas. "On the experimental side, the quality of the self-assembled monolayer coverage also needs to be improved."
Researchers usually design devices with potentially well-aligned energy levels when the layers are measured individually, but they should be examining the layers when they are attached, according to Brédas. This is because the reorganization of the chemical, electronic and geometric structures of the two layers at the interface has a major impact on the overall device characteristics.
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]]>"The models are flexible so that multiple scenarios can be investigated to see which options meet a certain goal," said Pinar Keskinocak, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). "This goal can be different for various groups, such as serving the most people given the availability of limited resources or minimizing the number of people infected while not negatively affecting businesses."
Details of the models, developed with ISyE associate professor Julie Swann and graduate student Ali Ekici, were presented on October 12 at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Annual Meeting.
Knowing how many people will need food, how many food distribution facilities will be necessary, where the facilities should be located and how the resources should be allocated among the facilities is very important, according to Marilyn Self, who is the manager of disaster readiness for the Metropolitan Atlanta Chapter of the American Red Cross. Self has been collaborating with Georgia Tech researchers on this project.
"These models have provided solid food distribution data that has helped us formulate the questions we have to ask and the decisions that we have to make about food distribution during a pandemic on a local and statewide level," said Self.
- Watch a video showing where active cases of the flu would be located during a pandemic if the initial infection location was Fulton County, Georgia - the county where the city of Atlanta is located - here (QuickTime-30 Megs). The video begins 10 days after the start of the pandemic and ends 180 days after the start of the pandemic.
- Watch a video showing where active cases of the flu would be located during a pandemic if the initial infection location was Atkinson County, Georgia - a rural county in southern Georgia - here (QuickTime-30Megs). The video begins 10 days after the start of the pandemic and ends 180 days after the start of the pandemic.
The Georgia Department of Education is using Georgia Tech's models to investigate whether or not schools should be closed during a pandemic.
"Closing schools affects both families and businesses because parents will have to stay home and take care of children," said Garry McGiboney, associate state superintendent at the Georgia Department of Education. "We have to worry about important emergency workers like hospital staff members and law enforcement officers not being able to work because they have to tend to their children because schools are closed."
To estimate the number of meals required for a given area or determine if closing schools would be beneficial, the researchers first needed to determine how many people and/or households would be infected. To do this, they constructed a generic disease spread model, which described how the influenza disease would spread among individuals.
The researchers used U.S. Census Bureau tract data - including household statistics, work flow data, classroom sizes and age statistics - to test the model. Crowded areas, including Atlanta and its suburbs, were always affected around the same time regardless of where the disease initiated. However, the time required for the disease to spread to rural areas depended on where the disease started.
With this information, the Georgia Tech researchers used the disease spread model as a forecasting tool to calculate the number of meals that would be required in metropolitan Atlanta during a flu pandemic. They tested three major scenarios: feeding every household with an infected individual (someone symptomatic or hospitalized), every household with an infected adult, or every household with all adults infected.
The simulations showed that the 15 counties surrounding Atlanta would require approximately 2.2 million, 1.4 million or 150,000 meals per day for the respective scenarios during the peak infection period. For the entire pandemic, the number of meals would reach 62, 38 or 3.8 million for the three scenarios respectively.
The researchers also determined the number of meals that would be necessary if only those households that fell below a certain income level were fed. The results showed that 200,000; 120,000 or 14,000 meals per day would be required for the respective scenarios during the peak infection period in that case.
Interventions such as voluntary quarantine or school closures could also affect food distribution by changing the number of infected individuals.
"Voluntary quarantine means that if an individual is sick in a household, everyone in that household should stay home," explained Keskinocak. "However, we realize that not everyone will follow this rule, so the model assumes that only a certain percentage of infected individuals will stay home."
The researchers investigated the effects of voluntary quarantine on disease spread, as well as the best time to begin the quarantine and how long it should last.
The results showed that the number of people infected at the peak time and the total number of individuals infected decreased as the length of the quarantine was extended, but there was a diminishing rate of return. The researchers determined that an eight-week quarantine was the most effective in terms of reducing the number of individuals infected during the peak time if it was implemented at the beginning of the fourth week.
"These results are important because during a pandemic, communities have limited resources, including food and volunteers to distribute the food," noted Swann. "If fewer people require the resources, especially during the peak time period, organizations like the American Red Cross can meet the needs of more people."
The researchers also compared the two interventions -- quarantine and school closure. The results showed that closing schools reduced the number of people infected with the virus. However, a four-week voluntary quarantine was found to be at least as effective as a six-week school closure for reducing the percentage of the population infected with the virus and the number of people infected at the peak time.
The Georgia Department of Education and the Metropolitan Atlanta Chapter of the American Red Cross have used the models to gain insight into the best ways for their organizations to respond to a flu pandemic.
"Running all of these different scenarios has helped us realize that we will have a lot more people to feed in metropolitan Atlanta during a pandemic flu than we imagined. The models have provided us with a realistic idea of where we'll need to locate community food distribution facilities and how many we might need to have given certain assumptions and decisions," said Self.
The researchers plan to conduct future work in two areas - developing models for other states and extending the model to also include vaccine distribution. The model may also be useful for other purposes such as estimating hospital capacity needs, according to Keskinocak.
"While we hope that a pandemic never occurs, our models will help Georgia and other states across the United States prepare response plans for the potential," added Keskinocak.
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]]>"While gold nanoparticles are being used by so many researchers - chemists, materials scientists and biomedical engineers - no one understood their molecular and electronic structures until now," said Robert Whetten, a professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Physics and School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "This research opens a new window for nanoparticle chemistry."
Gold and sulfur atoms tend to aggregate in specific numbers and highly symmetrical geometries. Sometimes these clusters are called 'superatoms' because they can mimic the chemistry of single atoms of a completely different element.
Researchers commonly use gold nanoparticles because they are stable and exhibit distinct optical, electronic, electrochemical and bio-labeling properties. However, understanding the physicochemical properties of such clusters is a challenge, according to Whetten, because that requires knowledge of their atomic structures.
A significant advance came in late 2007 though, when Stanford University researchers reported the first-ever total structure determination of a 102-atom gold cluster. The X-ray structure study revealed that pairs of organic sulfur ('thiolate') groups extracted gold atoms from the gold layer to form a linear thiolate-gold-thiolate bridge while interacting weakly with the metal surface below. These gold-thiolate complexes formed a sort of protective crust around the nanoparticles.
"This discovery contradicted what most chemists believed was going on - which was that the sulfur atom merely sat atop the uppermost gold layer, bound to three adjacent metal atoms," said Whetten.
With the experimentally determined structural coordinates, an international team of researchers from Georgia Tech, Stanford University, the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden set out to determine the electronic principles underlying the 102-atom gold compound and others like it. The team conducted large-scale electronic structure calculations in supercomputing centers in Espoo, Finland; Stockholm, Sweden; and Juelich, Germany.
The researchers found that the 102-atom gold cluster was a 'superatom' with a core of 79 gold atoms arranged into a truncated decahedron: two pyramids with pentagonal bases joined together into a faceted shape, but with the pyramids-tips chopped off. Around the core, 23 gold atoms formed an unusual pattern, joining the thiolates in shapes that resemble handles.
The results confirmed the 'divide and protect' structure first predicted by team member Hannu Hakkinen, a professor at the University of Jyvaskyla and former senior research scientist at Georgia Tech in the laboratory of Uzi Landman. Hakkinen and Henrik Gronbeck of the Chalmers University of Technology previously proposed that a cluster of 38-atom gold contained a central metallic core of 14 gold atoms and a protective layer of 24 gold atoms bound to sulfur.
"In 2006, we predicted that gold atoms in this bonding motif were divided in two groups - those that made the metal core and those that helped to protected it," explained Hakkinen. "Now there was evidence that this was true."
In the study reported in PNAS, the researchers found that the clusters were stable because the surface gold atoms in the core each had at least one surface-chemical bond and the gold core exhibited a strong electron shell closing.
With the 102-atom gold cluster, each gold atom in the cluster donated one valence electron. Forty-four of those electrons were immobilized in bonds between gold atoms and thiolates, leaving 58 electrons to fill a shell around the 'superatom.' In this configuration, the cluster wouldn't benefit from adding or shedding electrons, which would destabilize its structure. This process is similar to what happens in noble gases, which are chemically inert because they have just the right number of electrons to fill a shell around each atom's nucleus.
Associated with the filled electron shell, the gold-thiolate compound also had a major energy gap to unoccupied states. The calculated energy gap between the highest occupied molecular orbital and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital states for the 102-atom compound was significant - 0.5 electron volts. Metals typically have a gap of zero, so this gap indicates an atypical electronic stability of the compound, explained Whetten.
Besides the 102-atom compound, the researchers also determined the electronic structures for 11-, 13- and 39-atom gold cluster compounds. They found that the 11- and 13-gold atom clusters form closed electronic shells with 8 electrons and the 39-atom gold clusters with 34.
"The theoretical concepts published in this paper provide a solid background for further understanding of the distinct electrical, optical and chemical properties of the stable mono-layer-protected gold nanoclusters," said Whetten, whose funding for this research came from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. Former Georgia Tech graduate student Ryan Price and current graduate student James Bradshaw also contributed to this work.
The study also shows that experimentally well-characterized, structure-resolved, thermodynamically stable species of thiolate-, phosphine-halide-, and phosphine-thiolate-protected gold nanoparticles share common factors underlying their stability.
Once this initial work was completed, the researchers started predicting the structures of other stable gold cluster compositions that are still awaiting a precise structure determination.
In the March 26 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the research team predicted the structure for a cluster containing 25 gold atoms. They determined that the structure was comprised of an icosahedron-like 13-atom gold core protected by six 'V-shaped' long units, creating a 'divide and protect' composition. The structural prediction was recently confirmed by another group's experimental work.
"We now have a unified model that provides a solid background for nanoengineering ligand-protected gold clusters for applications in catalysis, sensing, photonics, bio-labeling and molecular electronics," said Hakkinen.
Additional authors on the PNAS paper included Michael Walter, Jaakko Akola and Olga Lopez-Acevedo of the University of Jyvaskyla; and Pablo Jadzinsky, Guillermo Calero and Christopher Ackerson of Stanford University.
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]]>Nagi Gebraeel, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has developed models that use data from real-time sensor measurements to calculate and continuously revise the amount of remaining useful life of different engineering systems based on their current condition and health status. These predictions are then integrated with maintenance management and spare parts supply chain policies as part of an autonomous 'sense and respond' logistics paradigm.
"Recent advances in sensor technology and wireless communication have enabled us to develop innovative methods for indirectly monitoring the health of different engineering systems," said Gebraeel, who started working on this project at the University of Iowa. "This has created an environment with an abundance of data that can be exploited in decision-making processes across different application domains such as manufacturing, aging infrastructure, avionics systems, military equipment, power plants and many others."
Gebraeel's predictive models were detailed during two presentations on October 14 at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Annual Meeting. Funding for model development was provided by the National Science Foundation.
Because Gebraeel's sensor-driven prognostic models combine general reliability characteristics with real-time condition-based signals, they provide an accurate and comprehensive assessment of a system's current health status and its future evolution. These accurate predictions are then used to determine the most economical time to order a spare part component and schedule a maintenance replacement by accounting for different costs, including those due to unexpected failures, spare part inventory holding and out-of-stock situations.
Gebraeel began his research by monitoring the vibration and acoustic emissions signals from rotating machinery, namely bearings. He extracted degradation-based characteristics pertaining to key components on the machinery and used them to develop condition-based signals. Gebraeel then created stochastic models to characterize the evolution of these condition-based signals and predict the remaining life of these critical components.
After extensive experimentation and testing, results showed that his techniques can potentially reduce the total failure costs and costs associated with running out of spare parts inventory by approximately 55 percent. With such positive results, Gebraeel turned his attention to developing models for electronics. He recently began working with Rockwell Collins to develop adaptive models to estimate the remaining useful life of aircraft electronic components.
"Aircraft take off at ambient ground temperatures and quickly reach their cruising altitudes, where the temperatures tend to be below zero," explained Gebraeel. "It's these changes in temperature coupled with inherent vibrations that affect the deterioration and lifetime of electronic equipment."
Gebraeel's goal is to embed his prognostic methodology into key avionic systems so that decisions can be made about whether an aircraft is capable of carrying out a specific mission or if it should be assigned to a shorter mission or grounded.
Gebraeel is also working closely with Virginia-based Global Strategic Solutions LLC, which has funding from two U.S. Navy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. The focus of one of the grants is to advance the development of embedded diagnostics and prognostics to predict the remaining life distributions of electrical power generation systems on board U.S. Naval aircraft. The focus of the second grant is to develop advanced health monitoring and remaining useful life models for aircraft communication, navigation and identification (CNI) avionics systems used on the Joint Strike Fighter.
"The long term impact of all of these projects on human safety and maintenance costs will be tremendous, especially in the airline industry," noted Gebraeel.
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]]>The 800,000 square feet of new buildings in the complex represent the convergence of bioscience and engineering, providing the foundation for a $27 million biomedical engineering research program that is now the second largest university-based program in the United States.
The centerpiece academic department for this research is the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Created in 1997, the Department joined the engineering expertise of Georgia Tech with the medical expertise of Emory University. Since then, the Department has grown to include 45 primary faculty members, 175 graduate students and more than 800 undergraduate students.
Beyond research, the Coulter Department has become an innovative center for education with a strong focus on problem-based learning, a student-centered instructional strategy in which students work in small collaborative groups to solve open-ended problems with a faculty member serving as facilitator. In the 'America's Best Colleges 2008' edition of U. S. News & World Report, the undergraduate program ranked third and the doctoral program ranked second in the biomedical engineering specialty category.
Marking its 10th anniversary this year, the Coulter Department continues to build its interdisciplinary programs to tackle the challenges of the 21st century, including cardiovascular disease, nerve injuries, neurological disorders and cancer.
Detecting Cardiovascular Disease
A team of Coulter Department researchers led by John Oshinski, assistant professor in the Coulter Department and Emory's Division of Radiology, has funding from the National Institutes of Health to use magnetic resonance imaging scans to predict where atherosclerotic plaques will form. Plaques form in artery walls because of cholesterol build-up. When they rupture, they can block blood vessels, leading to heart attack or stroke.
Coulter Department Professor Hanjoong Jo is developing drugs that inhibit the genes that are over-expressed when arteries are exposed to abnormal, nonlinear flow patterns.
Coulter Department Professor Gang Bao leads the Program of Excellence in Nanotechnology at Georgia Tech, which focuses on creating advanced nanotechnologies, such as nanoparticles and quantum dots, to detect and analyze cardiovascular disease. The $11.5 million program funded in April 2005 includes Coulter Department biomedical engineers and Emory University cardiologists and is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Reconnecting Nerves
Motor vehicle accidents and surgical procedures can damage peripheral nerves to varying degrees. Coulter Department professor Ravi Bellamkonda has demonstrated that thin polymer films made of aligned nanometer-diameter fibers provide topographical cues to stimulate nerve regeneration without growth-promoting proteins. Unlike peripheral nervous system damage, injury to the central nervous system, such as the brain or spinal cord, is not followed by extensive regeneration because of the hostile growth environment caused in large part by the injury.
To encourage the regeneration of damaged central nervous system neurons, Yadong Wang, a Coulter Department assistant professor, has shown that incorporating neurotransmitters into a biodegradable polymer spurs the growth of neurites, which are projections that form the connections among neurons and between neurons and other cells. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
The Complex Brain
How brains learn, or more specifically, how they acquire memories and behaviors, is of interest to Steve Potter, a Coulter Department associate professor. The process of learning is thought to correspond to changes in the relationships between neurons in the brain, but exactly how those changes are expressed at the network level is not well understood.
Xiaoping Hu, a Coulter Department professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to study drug addiction, elderly brain health and long-term effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on brain development.
Eberhard Voit, a Coulter Department professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and Gary Miller, an associate professor in Emory's Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, aim to better understand how genetic, environmental and pharmacological factors alter how dopamine functions in the brain. To do this, they developed a mathematical model of the dopamine network that allows them to study dopamine in healthy neurotransmission as well as in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia.
Zenda Technologies, a company founded by associate professor Michelle LaPlaca and Emory's David Wright, aims to commercialize DETECT, a portable device that makes quick neuropsychological assessments. Such assessments could be important in identifying brain disorders such as concussion and early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
Understanding Cancer Pathways
Melissa Kemp, a Coulter Department assistant professor and Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Professor, is using systems biology approaches to understand complex cancer pathways involved in drug-resistant acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of cancer of the white blood cells. Children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia exhibit a diverse response to chemotherapy, with about one-fourth of them relapsing with drug-resistant disease.
In collaboration with Harry Findley, an associate professor in Emory's Department of Pediatrics, Kemp is developing individualized computational models to identify key enzymes involved in regulating the protein NF-κB, which seems to play a role in drug resistance. This research is funded by Georgia Tech's Health Systems Institute and the Georgia Cancer Coalition.
The Coulter Department also hosts the Nanotechnology Center for Personalized and Predictive Oncology, funded by the National Cancer Institute. Led by Coulter Department Professor Shuming Nie, the center was launched in October 2005 and now boasts six projects and five support teams that focus on developing nanotechnologies for cancer applications. The amount awarded is expected to reach $27 million over a five-year period, which includes $19 million from the National Cancer Institute.
Center researchers are developing nanoparticles to image cancer inside the body and examine metastasis. They are also developing probes to study gene expression of cancer cells and treat cancer.
"A unique strength of this center is that we have broad faculty expertise from translational bioinformatics to clinical oncology, which will allow us to move some of these technologies into clinical trials in the next two to three years," says Nie.
This story was excerpted from a longer article in the Winter/Spring issue of Research Horizons Magazine.
The research projects described in this article that are funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or NSF.
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]]>The new record - 7 milliseconds for rubidium atoms stored in a dipole optical trap - was reported December 7 in the online version of the journal Nature Physics by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The previous record for storage time was 32 microseconds, a difference of more than two orders of magnitude.
"This is a really significant step for us, because conceptually it allows long memory times necessary for long-distance quantum networking," said Alex Kuzmich, associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics and a co-author of the paper. "For multiple architectures with many memory elements, several milliseconds would allow the movement of light across a thousand kilometers."
The keys to extending the storage time included the use of a one-dimensional optical lattice to help confine the atoms and selection of an atomic phase that is insensitive to magnetic effects. The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the A.P. Sloan Foundation and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
The general purpose of quantum networking or quantum computing is to distribute entangled qubits - two correlated data bits that are either "0" or "1" - over long distances. The qubits would travel as photons across existing optical networks that are part of the global telecommunications system.
Because of loss in the optical fiber that makes up networks, repeaters must be installed at regular intervals - about every 100 kilometers - to boost the signal. Those repeaters will need quantum memory to receive the photonic signal, store it briefly and then produce a photonic signal that will carry the information to the next node, and on to its final destination.
For their memory, the Georgia Tech researchers used an ensemble of rubidium-87 atoms that is cooled to almost absolute zero to minimize atomic motion. To store information, the entire atomic ensemble is exposed to laser light carrying a signal, which allows each atom to participate in the storage as part of a "collective excitation."
In simple terms, each atom "sees" the incoming signal - which is a rapidly oscillating electromagnetic field - slightly differently. Each atom is therefore imprinted with phase information that can later be "read" from the ensemble with another laser.
Even though they are very cold, the atoms of the ensemble are free to move in a random way. Because each atom stores a portion of the quantum information and that data's usefulness depends on each atom's location in reference to other atoms, significant movement of the atoms could destroy the information.
"The challenge for us in implementing these long-lived quantum memories is to preserve the phase imprinting in the atomic ensemble for as long as possible," explained Stewart Jenkins, a School of Physics research scientist who participated in the research. "It turns out that is difficult to do experimentally."
To extend the lifetime of their memory, the Georgia Tech researchers took two approaches. The first was to confine the atoms using an optical lattice composed of laser beams. Because of the laser frequencies chosen, the atoms are attracted to specific locations within the lattice, though they are not held tightly in place.
Because the ensemble atoms are affected by environmental conditions such as magnetism, the second strategy was to use atoms that had been pumped to the so-called "clock transition state" that is relatively insensitive to magnetic fields.
"The most critical aspect to getting these long coherence times was the optical lattice," Jenkins explained. "Although atoms had been confined in optical lattices before, what we did was to use this tool in the context of implementing quantum memory."
Other research teams have stored quantum information in single atoms or ions. This simpler approach allows longer storage periods, but has limitations, he said.
"The advantage of using these ensembles as opposed to single atoms is that if we shine into them a "read" laser field, because these atoms have a particular phase imprinted on them, we know with a high degree of probability that we are going to get a second photon - the idler photon - coming out in a particular direction," Jenkins explained. "That allows us to put a detector in the right location to read the photon."
Though the work significantly advances quantum memories, practical quantum networks probably are at least a decade away, Kuzmich believes.
"In practice, you will need to make robust repeater nodes with hundreds of memory elements that can be quickly manipulated and coupled to the fiber," he said. "There is likely to be slow progress in this area with researchers gaining better and better control of quantum systems. Eventually, they will get good enough so we can make a jump to having systems that can work outside the laboratory environment."
In addition to Kuzmich and Jenkins, the research team included Ran Zhao, Yaroslav Dudin, Corey Campbell, Dzmitry Matsukevich, and Brian Kennedy, a professor in the School of Physics.
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Writer: John Toon
]]>Homoon Kang, CEO of Korea-based Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co., led a recent dedication ceremony that marked the expansion of the company's North American Design Center on the Georgia Tech campus. The Samsung Design Center focuses on research and development of mixed-signal integrated circuits, primarily for use in wireless applications.
The new Samsung facility, located in the Centergy One Building at 75 Fifth St. NW, houses 5,400 square feet of laboratory and office space. The new center is located close to its Georgia Tech research partner, the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC), which is headquartered in the Technology Square Research Building at 85 Fifth St. NW.
"This is a very satisfying day for us at Samsung," said Kang. "We are proud of our research work in Georgia, and we look forward to ongoing success in our partnership with the Georgia Electronic Design Center."
The Samsung Design Center first opened in 2005 in the Technology Square Research Building. It has now grown to more than 50 full- and part-time employees, and Samsung has announced its intention to have 100 full-time and 50 part-time people working for the center within two years.
"The Samsung project is a prime example of the importance of the city's and the Atlanta Development Authority's (ADA) focus on strong, long-term economic development partnerships," said Shirley Franklin, mayor of Atlanta. "ADA has been a partner with Georgia Tech since the inception of Technology Square and maintains a great working relationship with the Georgia Department of Economic Development, the Georgia Electronic Design Center and the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute."
Mayor Franklin praised Samsung for its investment and expressed confidence in the continued growth of the company's research center.
Among the dignitaries on hand at the opening ceremonies was Ken Stewart, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. Stewart later noted that since its inception the Samsung effort has had the combined support of his department, the Georgia Research Alliance and Georgia Tech.
"The expansion of the Samsung design center is a true win-win event for both Samsung and the State of Georgia," he said. "This successful center can be expected to serve as an ongoing economic asset for the city and the state, as well as a beacon to other top international microelectronics players."
Kwang Wook Bae recently took over as executive director of the Samsung center. Chang-Ho Lee, Ph.D., who has been with the center since it began, now serves as research director.
The Samsung center is currently researching core technologies for next-generation communication systems, with particular focus on development of CMOS-based system-on-chip devices for modem, digital and RF systems. One device under development is a cost-effective, highly efficient CMOS-based transmitter for wireless communication applications.
Innovations developed by researchers at the Atlanta-based design center are expected to impact a broad spectrum of Samsung's worldwide product offerings, according to company executives.
Samsung's former space in the Technology Square Research Building will continue to be used by GEDC for work related to Samsung's research interests.
"We are delighted that Samsung is increasing its research profile here," said Joy Laskar, director of GEDC and Schlumberger Chair in Microelectronics in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "We expect this partnership between Samsung and GEDC to continue to develop key new technologies in cognitive radio and other important wireless fields."
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]]>The research, published in the September 15 issue of the Biophysical Journal, shows that when multiple viruses infect a cell, this increases the number of viral genomes and therefore the overall level of viral gene expression. Changes in viral gene expression can have a dramatic nonlinear effect on gene networks that control whether viruses burst out of the host cell or enter a latent state.
"What has confounded the virology community for quite some time is the observation that the cell fate of a bacteria infected by a single virus can be dramatically different than that infected by two viruses," said Joshua Weitz, an assistant professor in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Our study suggests that viruses can collectively decide whether or not to kill a host, and that individual viruses 'talk' to each other as a result of interactions between viral genomes and viral proteins they direct the infected host to produce."
To study viral infections, Weitz teamed with postdoctoral fellow Yuriy Mileyko, graduate student Richard Joh and Eberhard Voit, who is a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, the David D. Flanagan Chair Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Biological Systems and director of the new Integrative BioSystems Institute at Georgia Tech.
Nearly all previous theoretical studies have claimed that switching between 'lysis' and 'latency' pathways depends on some change in environmental conditions or random chance. However, this new study suggests that the response to co-infection can be an evolvable feature of viral life history.
For this study, the researchers analyzed the decision circuit that determines whether a virus initially chooses the pathway that kills the host cell - called the lytic pathway - or the pathway where it remains dormant inside the host cell - called the lysogenic pathway.
When the lytic pathway is selected, the virus utilizes bacterial resources to replicate and then destroys the host cell, releasing new viruses that can infect other cells. In contrast, in the lysogenic pathway, the viral genome inserts itself into the bacterial genome and replicates along with it, while repressing viral genes that lead to lysis. The virus remains dormant until host conditions change, which can result in a switch to the lytic pathway.
The decision of the genetic circuit that controls whether a virus initially chooses lysis or lysogeny is not random. Instead, cell fate is controlled by the number of infecting viruses in a coordinated fashion, according to the new study, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
"In the case of perhaps the most extensively studied bacteriophage, lambda phage, experimental evidence indicates that a single infecting phage leads to host cell death and viral release, whereas if two or more phages infect a host the outcome is typically latency," explained Weitz, who is a core member of the new Integrative BioSystems Institute at Georgia Tech. "We wanted to know why two viruses would behave differently than a single virus, given that the infecting viruses possess the same genetic decision circuit."
To find out, the researchers modeled the complex gene regulatory dynamics of the lysis-lysogeny switch for lambda phage. They tracked the dynamics of three key genes - cro, cI and cII - and their protein production. The decision circuit involved both negative and positive feedback loops, which responded differently to changes in the total number of viral genomes inside a cell. The positive feedback loop was linked to the lysogenic pathway and the negative feedback loop was linked to the lytic pathway.
With a single virus, cro dominated and the lytic pathway prevailed. If the number of co-infecting viruses exceeded a certain threshold, the positive feedback loop associated with cI dominated, turning the switch to the lysogenic pathway. The differences in bacterial cell fate were stark and hinged upon whether or not one or two viruses were inside a given cell.
The researchers found that the cII gene acted as the gate for the system. Increasing the number of viruses drove the dynamic level of cII proteins past a critical point facilitating production of cI proteins leading to the lysogenic pathway.
"The decision circuit is a race between two pathways and in the case of a single virus, the outcome is biased toward lysis," explained Weitz. "In our model, when multiple viruses infect a given cell, the overall production of regulatory proteins increases. This transient increase is reinforced by a positive feedback loop in the latency pathway, permitting even higher production of lysogenic proteins, and ultimately the latent outcome."
The central idea in the model proposed by Weitz and collaborators is that increases in the overall amount of viral proteins produced from multiple viral genomes can have a dramatic effect on the nonlinear gene networks that control cell fate.
"Many questions still remain, including to what extent subsequent viruses can change the outcome of previously infected, but not yet committed, viruses, and to what extent microenvironments inside the host impact cell fate," added Weitz. "Nonetheless, this study proposes a mechanistic explanation to a long-standing paradox by showing that when multiple viruses infect a host cell, those viruses can make a collective decision rather than behaving as they would individually."
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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>"Georgia Tech Savannah students go through the same degree program as the Atlanta students, but they get a little something extra," says Frost, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, director of Georgia Tech Savannah and a Georgia Tech vice provost. "With the distributed environment utilized for part of their academic engineering program, students are not bound by classroom walls or campus fences, but are very comfortable using technology to connect and interact. A large number of employers have commented that they like this in our graduates."
Beyond their teaching responsibilities, each of Georgia Tech Savannah's 25 faculty members is conducting several research projects, ranging from hurricanes, tsunamis and beach erosion to development of technologies and logistics for port operations and distance learning. Frost notes that a growing number of research projects are being facilitated by Savannah-based industries such as Gulfstream and JCB, another benefit of being a coastal Georgia campus.
"We have ties back to the main campus in Atlanta and are able to easily access resources, but our geographic location is a unique asset that allows our students and faculty to complement the programs and activities in Atlanta," he says. "By working together, we can move the Institute forward and make a greater impact in this state and beyond."
What follows is a small sampling of the research being conducted at Georgia Tech Savannah.
Developing Educational Technologies that Enhance Student Experiences
Monson Hayes, professor and associate chair for electrical and computer engineering programs at Georgia Tech Savannah, says it was the inherent challenges of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program that led him and his colleagues to explore how to enhance students' distance learning classroom experiences.
"Oftentimes, faculty here will be teaching students that are distributed on other campuses. Delivering audio and video of lectures over the Internet can sometimes lead to lower quality, and traditional distance learning students can feel a bit detached," he notes. "That's what we want to change at Georgia Tech Savannah."
When Hewlett-Packard (HP) issued a call for proposals to explore how tablet PCs might be used in the classroom, Hayes and Elliot Moore, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, proposed using the PCs to get high-quality video of distance learning lectures to the students. They were awarded funding to jump-start their research project and HP also donated 22 tablet PCs. Due to the success of the program and the novelty of their idea, Microsoft provided additional funding the following year.
Tablet PCs allow users to incorporate aspects of pen and paper into computing via a stylus pen or wireless keyboard. Information such as handwritten class notes or annotated electronic documents can be stored digitally and accessed wirelessly. The portability of the tablet PCs also allows professors to lead classroom discussions even if they are away from campus.
Hayes and Moore began using software called DyKnow, which uses intuitive tools to enhance teaching strategies and engage students. The software allows instructors to turn over control of the classroom to any student, broadcasting material from the students' tablet PC to everyone else. Students can be engaged - from a distance - to solve problems, take quizzes and answer questions or polls.
"Tablet PCs could probably be used in just about any STEM discipline - science, technology, engineering, mathematics," Hayes says. "They definitely involve a different teaching style and philosophy."
Ghassan AlRegib, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is also researching educational technologies that project distant classrooms into a 'cyber classroom' that is accessible by instructors and students. Examining multimedia and immersive communications, he is collaborating with colleagues at several institutes and corporations to develop networking and streaming algorithms for sending multimedia objects over the Internet, in particular video and 3-D environments that require large bandwidth.
"I come from a multimedia processing and communications background, and there's something called immersive communication where you can immerse people - students, teachers, business people, CEOs - in this virtual world," AlRegib says. "I want to know how we can use multi-camera arrays to capture the real environment."
The multi-camera array, provided by HP, consists of 24 small cameras aimed at a wall that is 32 feet long and eight feet high. The software developed by HP stitches all of the images together, allowing for high resolution in real time. For example, students in a remote classroom are able to zoom in and out to focus on writing on a whiteboard, and professors can see the facial expressions of students, making the experience as close to the traditional classroom as possible. The camera is currently operational in an experimental classroom at Georgia Tech Savannah where AlRegib's research group is conducting research and developing educational tools that utilize the camera.
"The high resolution of the camera and the scenes being stitched together at the pixel level in real time are unique to this camera and make it cutting edge," AlRegib notes. "My prediction is that this will be the future of imaging in educational environments."
AlRegib is also conducting research in collaborative virtual environments, a technology he and his colleagues developed for use in science teaching and 3-D manuals, among others. The transmission algorithms - which allow for a networking of multiple virtual environments - dictate when and in what state information is to be transmitted across the network. When multiple virtual environments are networked, users have the opportunity to cooperate or compete with other users. Interacting with humans more realistically models the actual world on which the virtual environment is based.
"All of this fits into communication - the camera captures the visual and the collaborative system captures the motion," he says. "Both capture the real environment and map it into a virtual environment so people can meet, interact and work together in a natural way. The applications are really endless."
Applying Sensing Technologies to Real-World Problems
James Tsai, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech Savannah, probably knows more about Georgia's 18,000 miles of highways than just about anybody else. For more than 10 years, he has been working with the Georgia Department of Transportation (DOT) to implement a pavement preservation and management system - Georgia Pavement Management System - based on information technology and geographic information systems (GIS).
"The focus of my research is pavement distress, preservation and management," he says. "Departments of transportation typically spend more than half of their total annual budgets on infrastructure, especially pavements. Applying the right pavement treatment method in the right location at the right time means saving money, so the economic impact of my research is potentially large."
Tsai works with a 10-member, multi-disciplinary Georgia Tech research team on pavement condition assessment, pavement rehabilitation technology, deterioration and forecasting models, long-term system performance simulation, and resource optimization. For local transportation agencies, Tsai and his team have developed and implemented an integrated asset-management system that uses global positioning system technology. They are extending their research to manage other assets, including traffic signs, bridges and railroads.
Some of Tsai's research, sponsored by the Innovation Deserving Exploratory Analysis Program of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, has involved the development of an intelligent sensing system and vehicle to automatically collect roadway asset and pavement distress information. Tsai and his team developed innovative image-processing technology using cameras and lasers to measure pavement quality, roadway signs, number of lanes, pavement width and shoulder width.
"By using sensing technologies, including lasers and cameras mounted on a van, we can take photographs every 20 feet and obtain laser data to automatically collect information on signs and pavement distress," Tsai says. "We have developed algorithms to analyze pavement distress and to build a forecasting and optimization model. This sensing technology provides us the most comprehensive and accurate information."
This year will mark the tenth anniversary of the implementation of Tsai's Computerized Pavement Condition Evaluation System (COPACES), a program used by Georgia DOT to evaluate its highway system.
Whereas Tsai is using sensing technologies to examine surfaces, David Frost, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of Georgia Tech's Savannah campus, is using them to go below the surface. He has improved traditional penetrometers - instrumented cylindrical devices made of hardened steel - used to record friction resistance and pore pressure in soils. They are also used to evaluate soil types and predict where soil will liquefy, to determine how foundations of buildings will behave and to study the characteristics of natural and man-made geo-materials under earthquake and other dynamic loading conditions.
"When we first began this research in 1996, we were studying how to quantify the roughness or smoothness of these man-made materials ' called geo-membranes ' that are often used in landfill liner systems," he recalls. "This earlier research sparked an idea to build something that would allow us to produce a number that quantitatively relates the device texture to soil behavior. Through the insight we've gained, we can now tell you how much texture and what type of texture will work best for a particular application."
The original cone penetrometer - considered the standard for more than 50 years by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) - was designed to have a smooth surface. Frost and his colleagues modified the device to include multiple sleeves of different roughness that would yield different measurements. The National Science Foundation funded work on the multi-friction penetrometer, and ASTM recognized Frost and his student with its 2003 International Hogentogler Award, an annual award given to the authors of a paper of outstanding merit on soil and rock for engineering purposes.
"This new device gave us the potential to measure multiple values of force with a single device in a single sounding," says Frost.
Frost has since developed a multi-piezo friction penetrometer, which is able to measure not only force, but also water pressure. Each textured sleeve is associated with a piezo sensor so friction force and water pressure can be measured independently. The device is especially useful when studying earthquakes.
Frost, who most recently traveled to China as part of a U.S. delegation to meet with Chinese government officials and study the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province, is currently exploring how to miniaturize the technology for investigating the characteristics of soil on the moon.
"Because of plans to perhaps build permanent bases on the moon and on Mars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has begun investigating soil," he says. "Our devices, which have been patented by Georgia Tech, represent a dramatically different approach to what technology was available and used when previous lunar explorations occurred in the late '60s and early '70s."
Imagining Georgia Tech's Coastal Future
Frost is passionate about moving the Savannah campus forward by leveraging local assets and opportunities as part of a network of campuses and programs that educates the leaders of a technology-driven world. According to Frost, this will be achieved in part by continuing to develop educational programs, conducting basic and applied interdisciplinary research, stimulating regional economic development, developing an interdisciplinary academic environment, expanding access to an engineering-centered education, and growing a modern campus.
Planning metrics call for 500 students to be enrolled at the Savannah campus by 2012, with more than half participating in an out-of-classroom experience like the cooperative education program or an international program. In the same time, faculty research expenditures will increase, a graduate-student-to-faculty ratio of four to one will be achieved, and at least two dual degree programs with partner institutions will be offered.
"This all comes back to technology," Frost says. "Technology is the enabler that allows us to achieve our vision. Innovative education has no boundaries."
Georgia Tech Savannah in a Snapshot
Approximately 160 students are enrolled at Georgia Tech Savannah - 132 undergraduates and 32 master's and doctoral students. Degrees are available in civil, computer, electrical, environmental and mechanical engineering. The first undergraduate degrees were awarded in fall 2001, and since then, nearly 275 students have graduated from the Savannah campus.
There is also a strong transfer program as part of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program (GTREP), a formal academic collaboration between Georgia Tech and three partner institutions: Armstrong Atlantic State University and Savannah State University in Savannah, and Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Ga. Students are taught by Savannah-based faculty complemented by distance instruction from other Georgia Tech campuses.
In addition, students have access to world-renowned researchers in a wide variety of disciplines and expertise. There are 16 instructional labs in areas such as automation and robotics, digital education, electronic circuits and instrumentation, hydromechanics and systems and controls, and 18 research centers and laboratories.
Academics are not the only focus of Georgia Tech Savannah; outreach is also an integral part of the campus. The Savannah office of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) - Georgia Tech's nationally recognized science and technology incubator - assists new ventures arising from Savannah's diverse technology community that includes educational institutions such as the Savannah College of Art and Design, established companies and a growing community of startups. Currently, there are six ATDC member companies in Savannah.
The Savannah campus is also home to a regional office of Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, an organization that 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.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of Research Horizons, Georgia Tech's research magazine.
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Writer: Nancy Fullbright
]]>"Blood flows to the toes because of gravity, but the body uses vein valves to pump blood in one direction back to the heart," said David Ku, the Lawrence P. Huang Endowed Chair in Engineering and Entrepreneurship and Regents' Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. "However, sometimes a vein valve dissolves away after a blood clot. The loss of the valve leaflets allows blood to flow the wrong way, causing swelling in the legs and ankles."
Ku is leading a research team that has developed a prosthetic vein valve to replace damaged, non-functioning valves. The prosthetic vein valve design and results from laboratory studies were presented at the Society for Biomaterials Fall Symposium in Atlanta on September 12. The research - under way for the past five years - is funded by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.
Ku's collaborators on this project include Rudy Gleason, an assistant professor with joint appointments in the Georgia Tech School of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Biomedical Engineering; Ross Milner, an assistant professor of surgery at Emory University; consultant Harris Bergman, a former Georgia Tech graduate student and now president of Amigent; former Georgia Tech graduate students Rahul Sathe and Laura-Lee Farrell; and current graduate students David Bark and Prem Midha.
Individuals with chronic venous insufficiency are commonly prescribed therapies - including anticoagulants, bed rest and compression hosiery - that target their symptoms rather than the cause. Damaged vein valves can sometimes be repaired, but when that isn't possible, some surgical options are available to replace deep venous valves, such as valve transplantation. However, replacing the valve with a prosthetic one is likely the better option because finding a suitable donor valve in one of the patient's legs can be difficult, according to Ku.
"Previous studies have shown that even if a donor valve is found, implanting it can cause significant trauma to the patient's leg," explained Ku, who has doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering and medicine. "To avoid these complications, other prosthetic vein valves have been designed, but most have demonstrated poor clinical potential for humans."
Ku and his collaborators believe the valve they have developed will overcome previous difficulties. The one-way flap is made of poly(vinyl alcohol) cryogel, a material patented by Georgia Tech in 1999. The material has many useful attributes, including its biocompatibility with body tissue because of its attraction to water; the ability to adjust its mechanical strength; flexibility comparable to that of natural body tissue; and composition of organic polymer, rather than silicone.
The researchers will begin conducting preclinical animal trials at Emory University in October to test the in vivo biocompatibility and performance of the prosthetic vein valve prototype in sheep. Sheep were chosen because their cardiovascular geometry and physiology are similar to those of humans.
In each animal trial, two prosthetic vein valves will be implanted by Milner. The researchers will test the biocompatibility and performance of the devices for four weeks, using imaging techniques to check that the valves remain in the proper location, are open and allow blood to pass through the vein.
The animal trials will be conducted after several years of optimizing the valve design and testing it in the laboratory. When the Georgia Tech researchers started designing the valve, they wanted it to be as similar as possible to normal, anatomic venous valves. They focused on two major design criteria: the valve had to withstand high pressures without leaking and the valve had to open with small pressure gradients, even after 500,000 cycles of opening and closing, which is equivalent to a half year.
"It was important for us to test the long-term feasibility of these valves because they're going to be implanted and used for years," explained Ku. "But since test methods have not been well established for evaluating a prosthetic vein valve, we developed our own."
Sathe conducted the initial laboratory tests and found that the valve met the mechanical design criteria - it could withstand pressures of more than 500 millimeters of mercury and opened with a pressure gradient of 2.6 millimeters of mercury, which matched physiologic vein valve function. Detailed laboratory testing procedures and results were described in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Medical Devices.
Next, Farrell developed a laboratory method to test whether blood clots would form inside the prosthetic valve. Results showed that the new generation of valves remained open with no clot formation after 120 minutes of blood flow, whereas control valves lined with polyester closed up after approximately six minutes of perfusion and showed blood cells adhering to the valves.
The laboratory tests showed that the prosthetic vein valve exhibited low flow resistance, strong competency, fatigue-resistance, low clot formation probability and material flexibility, which allowed the researchers to move forward to the animal studies.
The next step after conducting the animal studies will be human clinical trials. The device will require an investigational device exemption from the Food and Drug Administration so that the device can be used in a clinical study to collect safety and effectiveness data.
"There are 400,000 patients per year who are just miserable with the complications from this disease and could benefit from these valves, so we'd like to help them as soon as possible," added Ku.
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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).
Technical Contact: David Ku (404-894-6827); E-mail: (david.ku@me.gatech.edu)
Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>"I have spent my career studying how people interact with and use technology - whether it's simple technology, like a telephone, or complicated technology, like a ship, aircraft or automobile," said Dennis Folds. "Since GTRI researchers frequently develop new technologies, I realize the importance of thinking about how people will use the technology from the beginning of the design process."
Folds earned his Ph.D. in engineering psychology from Georgia Tech in 1987 and he has more than twenty five years of experience in research and development related to human factors engineering. His unique academic background has provided him the opportunity to work with researchers in many of the GTRI laboratories.
As chief scientist, he will meet with current and prospective customers and oversee GTRI's independent research and development (IRAD) program, which fosters exploration and accelerates entry into new research areas. Folds has several ideas for improving the program, including making it easier for researchers in different laboratories to collaborate on projects.
"The IRAD program allows us to expand into hot areas like energy, the environment, biotechnology and sustainable development," explained Folds, who recently succeeded Jeffrey Sitterle as chief scientist.
Another way he hopes to expand cross-laboratory collaboration is by creating 'communities of interest' around technical areas, such as high-performance computing or information security. The groups communicate online or hold weekly or monthly meetings to discuss developments in the field and possible IRAD projects.
As chief scientist, Folds also plans to encourage collaboration with academic faculty at Georgia Tech and increase the number of scholarly publications authored by GTRI researchers.
"While our sponsored projects don't typically require publishing papers, I want to encourage researchers - especially the younger ones - to develop the skills required to write scholarly papers, such as journal articles and conference proceedings, and present their research at conferences," he said.
In addition to his new position as chief scientist, Folds will remain chief of GTRI's Human Systems Integration Division in the Electronic Systems Laboratory. In this position, he leads a variety of research efforts.
The goal of one major research program is to develop training and technical assistance related to the accessibility of electronic and information technology for individuals with disabilities. Folds' research team has examined the ability of persons with disabilities to use items such as photocopiers, ATMs, cell phones, televisions, printers and scanners.
The Division is also the sole independent laboratory authorized to test products for the Ease of Use programs of the U.S. Arthritis Foundation, the Arthritis Society of Canada and Arthritis Australia. The researchers evaluate products based on an arthritis-specific set of accessibility guidelines, as well as user testing by people with arthritis. If a product passes rigorous testing and its manufacturer chooses to participate in the program, the company can use the Arthritis organization's logo in its advertisements and on its packaging.
Additionally, Folds is currently involved in projects to determine the crew requirements for an unmanned aerial vehicle program, to create guidelines for how the military should design and build the next generation expeditionary medical treatment facilities, and to develop better ways to display sonar information.
Since he joined GTRI in 1983, Folds' favorite research project involved transforming a complex older aircraft, which required a three-person crew into a state-of-the-art system that could be successfully flown by a two-person crew.
"We worked on this project with the Royal Australian Navy for 10 years, starting in 1997, and it was a lot of fun to redesign the cockpit of the Super Seasprite helicopter to fit Australia's requirements," he said. "GTRI has the perfect blend of technical know-how and practical understanding of how to make something work and work in a way that's affordable and supportable."
In addition to his roles as chief scientist and division chief, Folds is also a teacher. He frequently leads a three-and-a-half day course on human systems integration. Demand for the course is high - just this year Folds has taught it seven times, with plans to teach it at least three more times before the end of the year.
Folds earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and master's degree in applied psychology from Jacksonville State University. He lives in Carrollton, Georgia with his wife, Renita, and daughters Ria, 17, and Caroline, 16. He also has twin daughters, Jessica and Elizabeth, age 20, who are attending college. Folds' hobbies include vegetable and flower gardening on the 130 acres of property he owns in Carrollton, and playing brass and keyboard instruments.
"It is striking to me how much I enjoy doing what I do at GTRI. I get to do something different every day and I'm constantly learning - I love that," added Folds.
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Media Relations Contacts: Abby Vogel (404-385-3364); E-mail: (avogel@gatech.edu) or Kirk Englehardt (404-407-7280); E-mail: (kirk.englehardt@gtri.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu)
Technical Contact: Dennis Folds (404-407-7262); E-mail: (dennis.folds@gtri.gatech.edu)
Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>"The field of unmanned and autonomous systems is evolving rapidly, and new techniques are needed to effectively test and evaluate the capabilities that are being inserted into these systems. This is especially challenging for systems that are increasing in levels of autonomy," said Lora Weiss, a GTRI principal research engineer. "Our task is to develop a roadmap that identifies new approaches to testing autonomous systems and details what needs to be tested, how the autonomous technologies can be tested, and when the testing needs to occur."
Known as the Roadmap Development and Technology Insertion Plan (RD-TIP), the one-year $430,000 award is funded through the U.S. Army at White Sands Missile Range. The initiative is headed by Derrick Hinton, T&E/S&T program manager with the Test Resources Management Center in the U.S. Department of Defense.
"Many new technologies are being developed for unmanned and autonomous systems that must be tested and evaluated before they can be deployed. New approaches are needed for testing and measuring the robustness of these systems, especially in non-deterministic and evolving environments," Weiss noted. "The only way to know how to test them is to understand both the details of the technology and the system that it is going into. GTRI has extensive experience in both areas and can uniquely couple fundamental research with warfighter systems."
The effort will address all five major unmanned and autonomous systems domains, including systems that operate in the air, on the ground, underwater, on the sea surface and in space. The roadmap will address both vehicles and the socio-technical environments in which they operate.
"There is a strong desire from the warfighter to get these systems into the field," Weiss added. "This, coupled with the rapid pace at which unmanned and autonomous systems are developing, creates a need to consider new options for more flexible testing of unmanned systems. Through this roadmap, the government has asked us to help define these options."
Test and evaluation has traditionally been a focus area for GTRI, noted Rusty Roberts, a principal research engineer who oversees all of GTRI's test and evaluation programs. "The current roadmap award builds on GTRI's long-term experience with test and evaluation for government customers and couples it with GTRI's strong knowledge of unmanned systems," he said.
The unmanned systems test and evaluation project is a new area within the Test and Evaluation Science and Technology Program, which is sponsored by the Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
GTRI has ongoing projects in four areas of the T&E Science and Technology Program: unmanned and autonomous systems, directed energy, net-centric systems and non-intrusive instrumentation.
The applied research arm of the Georgia Institute of Technology, GTRI is also involved in other test and evaluation projects for the government, Roberts said. Its test and evaluation capabilities cover a broad range of engineering and scientific disciplines, including tracking new technologies and their effect on test and evaluation, planning and executing programs for the government's operational test agencies and providing and/or sponsoring test and evaluation professional education courses and workshops, as well as meetings such the annual ITEA Technology Conference.
Unmanned and autonomous systems are recognized as critical components to all aspects of modern warfare across the joint forces, and they are growing in mission effectiveness. They have proved effective in Afghanistan and Iraq by providing commanders at both the operational and tactical levels with improved intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and precision strike capabilities.
"They are being chosen over manned systems when the situation involves the dull (long mission times), the dirty (sampling for hazardous materials) and the dangerous (lethal exposure to hostile action) -- and when the unmanned systems can provide capabilities that are not achievable by manned systems," Weiss noted.
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Writer: Rick Robinson
]]>"The need for exascale-sized machines is well-established," said Karsten Schwan, a professor in the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "With exascale machines, weather simulations will be able to operate at finer resolution, biologists will be able to model more complex systems, and businesses will be able to run and manage many applications at the same time on a single large machine."
Schwan recently received a 2008 HP Labs Innovation Research Award to work with HP Labs, HP's central research arm, to help solve some of the key problems in developing exascale machines. The high-impact research award, one of only two granted for exascale research and 41 granted overall to professors around the world, encourages open collaboration with HP Labs. The award amount is renewable for a total of three years based on research progress and HP business requirements.
With the petaflop barrier broken, researchers like Schwan are focusing on the next goal - improving that processing power a thousandfold to reach the exascale. Schwan's expertise in high performance and enterprise computing will help him solve some of the challenges surrounding exascale systems.
"We believe that machines will reach exascale size only by combining common chips - such as quad core processors - with special purpose chips - such as graphics accelerators," said Schwan, who is also director of the Georgia Tech Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS).
A challenge that arises from this scenario is how to efficiently run programs on these heterogeneous many-core chips. To investigate possible methods for doing this, Schwan will team with Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Sudhakar Yalamanchili, an expert in heterogeneous many-core platforms.
Exascale machines must also be able to run multiple systems and applications on a single platform at the same time, while guaranteeing that they will not interfere with each other. An approach called virtualization may help solve this challenge by hiding some of the underlying computer architecture issues from applications.
"With virtualization, decisions have to be made about where, when and for how long certain programs should run, but there are many ways of determining what might be appropriate because there might be multiple goals," explained Schwan. "For instance, one might want to minimize the exascale machine's power consumption while at the same time meet some performance goal for the application. In other words, virtualized systems must be actively 'managed' to attain end user, institutional or corporate goals."
Ada Gavrilovska, a specialist in virtualization and multi-core operation and research scientist in the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing, will collaborate with Schwan to determine how to manage multiple programs on exascale machines that consist of hundreds of thousands of processors.
Though exascale machines are high-performance computing systems, the vision for these future systems goes beyond the typical vision painted for high performance computing. Instead of scaling a single program to run on hundreds of thousands of cores, exascale systems will also be used to run multiple programs on a single large machine.
"This future virtualized and managed exascale system will guarantee some level of service even when parts of the machine get too loaded or too hot or fail, since applications can be moved while they are running," said Schwan.
Though it will be several years before exascale systems are developed, scientists at Georgia Tech will use the HP Labs Innovation Research Award to lay the foundation for solving emerging science and engineering challenges in national defense, energy assurance, advanced materials and climate.
"Around the world, HP partners with the best and the brightest in industry and academia to drive open innovation and set the agenda for breakthrough technologies that are designed to change the world," said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs. 'HP Labs' selection of Karsten Schwan for a 2008 Innovation Award demonstrates outstanding achievement and will help accelerate HP Labs' global research agenda in pursuit of scientific breakthroughs."
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]]>The two-year demonstration project, to be led by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Enterprise Innovation Institute through a $349,000 grant from Healthcare Georgia Foundation, will help train hospital staff in "lean" techniques that identify waste in processes and find ways to eliminate it.
Georgia Tech has successfully used the approach with hospitals in Atlanta, Columbus, Newnan and Vidalia. Its "lean health care" training programs have been licensed for use nationwide by the American Hospital Association.
"We want to take the techniques that have proven to be so successful in large hospitals and use them in small, rural hospitals," said Frank Mewborn, director of the Healthcare Performance Group in Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute. "Rural hospitals typically don't have the resources to hire outside consultants to help with performance improvement issues, so we very much appreciate the support from Healthcare Georgia Foundation to make this initiative possible."
Georgia Tech project leaders will work with health care professionals at the participating hospitals to conduct lean assessments, teach basic lean concepts, develop value stream maps to analyze the flow of materials and information, and implement rapid process improvement techniques. Because the techniques rely on input from those closest to the processes being improved, each hospital will dedicate staff members to work with Georgia Tech.
"This is a substantial investment on the part of the hospitals because they must pull front-line staff from their normal responsibilities during the process improvement activities," Mewborn noted. "Involvement of these key people is essential to the process, and it pays off long-term through better processes and buy-in from those who are on the front lines of providing patient care."
Beyond direct process improvements, the initiative will also provide long-term benefits through senior leadership and hospital staff who have been trained in the lean techniques and who will share them with other departments and facilities. Success will be measured by improvements made during the process, and by the ability of each hospital to continue the process improvement efforts after the initiative's conclusion.
Rural hospitals in Georgia face a financial crisis because their patients are less likely than those of metropolitan hospitals to have health insurance. At the same time, hospitals in underserved areas face other competitive disadvantages as they confront rising costs.
"A lot of rural hospitals are struggling to make payroll every month," Mewborn noted. "They don't have revenue opportunities from more profitable kinds of surgeries because they may not have a large enough market. They are meeting an essential need for health care in their areas, but their reimbursement rates tend to be low."
Such facilities need to find sustainable ways to become more efficient, which is why Healthcare Georgia Foundation provided the grant to Georgia Tech.
"This grant award represents a tremendous opportunity to achieve greater efficiencies in health care quality and costs," said Gary D. Nelson, president of the Foundation. "By taking this issue on from both clinical and operational perspectives, we can achieve sustainable efficiencies where they are most needed in our state."
One of Georgia Tech's first lean health care projects was with the emergency department at Meadows Regional Medical Center in Vidalia, Ga. As a result of the process improvement activities done there, the average time patients remained in the emergency department was reduced 44 percent and physicians were able to see more patients per hour - all while maintaining a 92 percent patient satisfaction rating.
Other hospital process improvement projects done by Georgia Tech have:
- Shortened the lead time and reduced errors in blood testing,
- Developed a time-saving system for managing intravenous pumps,
- Reduced errors and lead time for collecting and processing tissue samples,
- Increased capacity by reducing room down-times between patients,
- Boosted laboratory capacity and reduced errors through improved organization,
- Increased physician productivity through standardized work processes, and
- Streamlined pre-registration processes.
Hospitals that have agreed to participate in the program include Upson Regional Medical Center in Thomaston, Peach Regional Medical Center in Fort Valley, Monroe County Hospital in Forsyth, Morgan Memorial Hospital in Madison, Banks-Jackson-Commerce Hospital in Commerce, West Georgia Medical Center in LaGrange, and Hutcheson Medical Center in Fort Oglethorpe.
The projects are expected to be completed by June 2010.
About Healthcare Georgia Foundation: Healthcare Georgia Foundation is a statewide, private independent foundation. The Foundation's mission is to advance the health of all Georgians and to expand access to affordable, quality healthcare for underserved individuals and communities. Through its strategic grant-making, Healthcare Georgia Foundation supports organizations that drive positive change, promotes programs that improve health and healthcare among underserved individuals and communities, and connects people, partners and resources across Georgia.
About the 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.
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]]>The new 'flexible charge pump' generator is the fourth generation of devices designed to produce electrical current by using the piezoelectric properties of zinc oxide structures to harvest mechanical energy from the environment. Its development was reported November 9, 2008 in the advance online publication of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
"The flexible charge pump offers yet another option for converting mechanical energy into electrical energy," said Zhong Lin Wang, Regent's professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the Center for Nanostructure Characterization at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This adds to our family of very small-scale generators able to power devices used in medical sensing, environmental monitoring, defense technology and personal electronics."
The new generator can produce an oscillating output voltage of up to 45 millivolts, converting nearly seven percent of the mechanical energy applied directly to the zinc oxide wires into electricity. The research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Emory-Georgia Tech Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence.
Earlier nanowire nanogenerators and microfiber nanogenerators developed by Wang and his research team depended on intermittent contact between vertically-grown zinc oxide nanowires and an electrode, or the mechanical scrubbing of nanowire-covered fibers. These devices were difficult to construct, and the mechanical contact required caused wear that limited how long they could operate. And because zinc oxide is soluble in water, they had to be protected from moisture.
"Our new flexible charge pump resolves several key issues with our previous generators," Wang said. "The new design would be more robust, eliminating the problem of moisture infiltration and the wearing of the structures. From a practical standpoint, this would be a major advantage."
To boost the current produced, arrays of the flexible charge pumps could be constructed and connected in series. Multiple layers of the generators could also be built up, forming modules that could then be embedded into clothing, flags, building decorations, shoes - or even implanted in the body to power blood pressure or other sensors.
When the modules are mechanically stretched and then released, because of the piezoelectric properties, the zinc oxide material generates a piezoelectric potential that alternately builds up and then is released. A Schottky barrier controls the alternating flow of electrons, and the piezoelectric potential is the driving force of the charge pump.
"The electrons flow in and out, just like AC current," Wang explained. "The alternating flow of electrons is the power output process."
Constructed with zinc oxide piezoelectric fine wires with diameters of three to five microns and lengths of 200 to 300 microns, the new generator no longer depends on nanometer-scale structures. The larger size was chosen for easier fabrication, but Wang said the principles could be scaled down to the nanometer scale.
"Nanoscale materials are not required for this to work," he said. "Larger fibers work better and are easier to work with to fabricate devices. But the same principle would apply at the nanometer scale."
The wires are grown using a physical vapor deposition method at approximately 600 degrees Celsius. Using an optical microscope, the wires are then bonded onto a polyimide film and silver paste applied at both ends to serve as electrodes. The wires and electrodes were then encased in polyimide to protect them from wear and environmental degradation.
To measure the electric energy generated, the researchers subjected the substrate and attached zinc oxide wires to periodic mechanical bending created by a motor-driven mechanical arm. The bending induced tensile strain which created a piezoelectric potential field along the laterally-packaged wires. That, in turn, drove a flow of electrons into an external circuit, creating the alternating charge and discharge cycle - and corresponding current flow.
Increasing the strain rate increased the magnitude of the output electricity, both in voltage and current. Wang believes the frequency of the current is limited only by the mechanical properties of the polyimide substrate.
The researchers conducted a number of tests to verify that the current measured was produced by the generator - and not an external measurement artifact. Using the same experimental setup, they stretched carbon fibers and Kevlar fibers coated with polycrystalline zinc oxide, and did not observe current flow. The research team also developed two criteria and eight tests for ruling out experimental artifacts, Wang noted.
In addition to Wang, the research team included Rusen Yang and Yong Qin from Georgia Tech and Liming Dai of the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Dayton.
For the future, Wang sees the family of small-scale generators enabling development of a new class self-powered wireless sensing systems. The devices could gather information, store it and transmit the data - all without an external power source.
"Self-powered nanotechnology could be the basis for a new industry," he said. "That's really the only way to build independent systems."
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Writer: John Toon
]]>"We've shown that the hydrocyanines we developed are able to detect the reactive oxygen species, superoxide and the hydroxide radical, in living cells, tissue samples, and for the first time, in vivo," said Niren Murthy, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Details of the hydrocyanine synthesis process and experimental results showing the ability of the dyes to detect reactive oxygen species in cells, tissues and mouse models were reported on December 8 in the online version of the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition. This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
The researchers have created six hydrocyanine dyes to date; hydro-Cy3, hydro-Cy5, hydro-Cy7, hydro-IR-676, hydro-IR-783 and hydro-ICG, but say that there are potentially 40 probes that could be created. The dyes vary in their ability to detect intracellular or extracellular reactive oxygen species and by their emission wavelength - from 560 to 830 nanometers.
Fluorescing at higher wavelengths allows the hydrocyanine dyes to be used for deep tissue imaging in vivo, a capability that dihydroethidium (DHE), the current "gold standard" for imaging reactive oxygen species, does not have. The dyes also have other advantages over DHE.
"When DHE comes into contact with reactive oxygen species, it oxidizes into ethidium bromide, a common mutagen, which means it's toxic and can't be injected inside the body," explained Murthy. "DHE also auto-oxidizes in the presence of aqueous solutions, which creates high levels of background fluorescence and interferes with reactive oxygen species measurements."
Hydrocyanines are also simple and quick to synthesize, according to Coulter Department postdoctoral fellow Kousik Kundu. Sodium borohydride is added to commercially available cyanine dyes and the solvent is removed - the one-step process takes less than five minutes.
W. Robert Taylor, a professor in the Coulter Department and Emory's Division of Cardiology, and Emory postdoctoral fellow Sarah Knight, tested the ability of the dyes to detect reactive oxygen species inside of cells and animals.
For their first experiment, they tested the ability of hydro-Cy3, which has an emission wavelength of 560 nanometers, to detect reactive oxygen species production in the aortic smooth muscle cells of rats. They incubated the cells with hydro-Cy3 and angiotensin II, which is a stimulator of reactive oxygen species that is implicated in the development of atherosclerosis and hypertension.
Results showed that cells incubated with angiotensin II and hydro-Cy3 displayed intense intracellular fluorescence, whereas control cells incubated with hydro-Cy3 and phosphate buffer saline displayed significantly lower fluorescence. When they introduced TEMPOL, a molecule that intercepts the reactive oxygen species so that they cannot interact, the cells treated with angiotensin II and hydro-Cy3 displayed a dramatic decrease in fluorescence.
"This test demonstrated that the cellular fluorescence was due to intracellular reactive oxygen species production," said Murthy. "What was even more exciting was that we saw that once the hydrocyanine dye was oxidized, it stayed in the cell and the fluorescence was not extinguished by cellular metabolism, which is what happens with DHE."
The researchers also investigated the ability of hydro-Cy3 to image reactive oxygen species production in live mouse aorta tissue, which exhibit a physiological environment that closely resembles in vivo conditions. Explants were incubated with hydro-Cy3 and either lipopolysaccharide endotoxin (LPS), an inflammatory molecule that binds to aortic cells and causes reactive oxygen species to be produced, or the control saline solution.
Samples treated with hydro-Cy3 and LPS showed fluorescence intensity almost four times greater than explants treated with hydro-Cy3 and saline. Once more, adding TEMPOL to the sample with hydro-Cy3 and LPS decreased the fluorescence to a level comparable to the control saline explants.
After the successful cell culture and tissue experiments, the researchers progressed to in vivo mouse imaging studies. Hydro-Cy7 was selected for the in vivo tests because of its higher emission wavelength of 760 nanometers. LPS-treated mice showed twofold greater fluorescence intensity in the abdominal area than those treated with saline.
"Given their ability to detect reactive oxygen species in living cells, tissue samples and in vivo, we believe these dyes will enhance the ability of researchers to measure reactive oxygen species," noted Murthy.
The researchers' ultimate goal, though, is to use the dyes in clinical applications.
"We want to use these hydrocyanine dyes to detect overproduction of reactive oxygen species at an early stage inside the body so that we can identify patients who are more likely to suffer from these inflammatory diseases," added Murthy.
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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>The Georgia Institute of Technology has received a five-year grant to lead and coordinate a new initiative that will develop foundational research in massive data analysis and visual analytics. A research team headed by Haesun Park, a professor and associate chair in the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the Georgia Tech College of Computing, will investigate ways to improve the visual analytics of massive data sets through machine learning, numerical algorithms and optimization, computational statistics, and information visualization.
"Developing new and improved mathematical and computational methodologies will further enable systems developers, intelligence analysts, biologists and health care workers to implement new methods to 'detect the expected and discover the unexpected' among massive data sets," Park explained.
The $3 million joint National Science Foundation and Department of Homeland Security grant establishes Georgia Tech as the lead academic research institution for all national Foundations of Data and Visual Analytics (FODAVA) research efforts. Seven other FODAVA Partnership Awards will be announced later this year, all working in conjunction with eleven Georgia Tech investigators to advance the field.
Over the next five years, the Georgia Tech-led research team will work to establish FODAVA as a distinct research field and build a community of top-quality researchers that will collaborate on research workshops and conferences, industry engagement and technology transfer.
"FODAVA seeks to put an improved science base under one portion of the problem - how can we transform large, complex data sets into reduced computational models or mathematical formalisms that retain the information content while better supporting the human in extracting critical information from the data," said Lawrence Rosenblum, program director for graphics and visualization at the National Science Foundation. "Scientific advances here are critical to future advances in the science of data and visual analytics that will keep us safe and provide technological and commercial advances that benefit mankind."
Georgia Tech's expertise in advanced computer-based analysis, probability and statistics, numerical algorithms and optimization, machine learning, and human-computer interaction techniques provides a strong foundation to lead this new initiative.
Park specializes in using numerical linear algebra and optimization techniques to develop computer-based algorithms that dramatically reduce the dimension and number of data points in massive data sets. Dimension reduction is essential for efficient processing of high-dimension data sets while removing the noise in the data.
Park is especially interested in developing methods for dimension reduction that exploit prior knowledge in the data sets - such as clustered structures and non-negativity. This process is important because it leads to more accurate classification and prediction results.
Alexander Gray, an assistant professor in the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing, has experience developing efficient algorithms that allow statistical and machine learning methods to be applied to massive datasets. He employs ideas from computational geometry and computational physics to statistical computations.
"Reducing the computation time for an analysis from hours to seconds makes all the difference, since data analysis is inherently an iterative and interactive process," explained Gray, also a principal investigator on the project.
Large data sets may also include multiple objects of high dimensionality, such as images, that must be analyzed based on a relatively small number of samples. The mathematical analysis of problems like these requires expertise in statistics and probability methods, which Georgia Tech School of Mathematics professor and principal investigator Vladimir Koltchinskii will contribute to the new initiative.
Once massive amounts of data are collected and processed, relevant information must be pulled from it and presented using visual and interactive means. John Stasko, a principal investigator on this project and professor in the School of Interactive Computing, conducts research in the field of visual analytics.
He heads a team that developed Jigsaw, a visual analytics system that helps analysts better assess, analyze and make sense of large document collections. The system provides multiple coordinated views to show connections between entities extracted from a document collection.
"Jigsaw essentially acts as a visual index of the document collection - helping analysts identify particular documents to read and examine next," explained Stasko, whose team won the university division of the 2007 Visual Analytics Science and Technology contest using Jigsaw.
Stasko also serves as Georgia Tech's director in the Department of Homeland Security-sponsored SouthEast Regional Visualization and Analytics Center (SRVAC), a regional center created in 2006 to perform research in visual analytics. SRVAC is a partnership between the Georgia Tech and the University of North Carolina Charlotte, and is one of five national university centers connected to the National Visualization and Analytics Center located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
All of the steps involved in massive data analysis and visual analytics - data collection, processing, analysis and visualization - require optimization. Renato Monteiro, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and principal investigator, specializes in this research field.
"This new center provides me the opportunity to apply optimization techniques to new and unique problems and applications that I haven't studied in the past," said Monteiro.
From law enforcement and intelligence gathering to electronic heath records and computational biology, the accurate and timely analysis of massive amounts of information is critical to deeper understanding and effective decision making.
"Collaborations across Georgia Tech's computing, engineering and mathematics disciplines aim to develop better scientific and foundational methods to help practitioners in many different lines of work analyze and interactively explore large data sets more efficiently and effectively," Park added.
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]]>The 2008 Georgia Manufacturing Survey also found that Georgia companies are making significant progress in adopting sustainable techniques - another form of innovation - though they tend to focus on short-term cost reduction rather than long-term profitability and growth.
Results of the survey, done periodically to assess the business and technological condition of Georgia's manufacturing community, were released this week by the Enterprise Innovation Institute and the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The results are based on responses from 738 companies with more than 10 employees.
"Innovation remains as important as ever," said Philip Shapira, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy and one of the study's co-authors. "Those Georgia companies that innovate receive rewards for doing so. But a significant number of companies still have not adopted innovation as a leading strategy."
The survey showed that companies competing on the basis of innovation had a three-year average return on sales of 14.5 percent - nearly twice the 7.6 percent average for companies competing with low prices. In the 2005 Georgia Manufacturing Survey, companies relying on innovation saw an average return on sales of 6.3 percent, compared to about 3.6 percent for the low-cost competitors. The gap between the rewards for these two competitive strategies nearly doubled during the 2005 to 2008 period.
Slightly less than 20 percent of Georgia manufacturers compete based on price, compared to fewer than 10 percent that use innovation as the competitive edge, the study found. Half of Georgia manufacturers report gaining a competitive edge from quality products or services. Other strategies include quick delivery, adding value and adapting to customer needs.
Wage rates are also associated with competitive strategy. Innovative companies pay an average of nearly $42,000 annually per employee, compared to a range of $33,000 to $37,000 for other firms.
The survey studied innovation in products, processes, organizational structures and marketing. About 70 percent of the manufacturers responding to the survey report that they had introduced a new or technologically improved product or process in 2008.
About three-quarters of the Georgia manufacturers report adopting at least one practice aimed at making their operations more sustainable. These include sustainability considerations in the choice of suppliers, selection of raw materials and processing techniques; application of sustainable principles to product design, processing, facility design, packaging and marketing; employee training in sustainable practices; logistics and transportation services; the use, re-use and maintenance of the product, and product 'end-of-life' issues.
However, only one in five Georgia manufacturers has an environmental stewardship program, and just 18 percent have set targets for reducing energy use in their facilities. Sustainability is defined as steps taken to minimize the use of natural resources, toxic materials, waste emissions and production materials over the life cycle of the product produced. But it also includes functions to expand sales, such as green branding and eco-labeling - not just cost savings benefits.
"The importance of sustainability is driven by the growth in energy costs, the rise in the cost of natural resources and of waste disposal, and demand from customers who consider sustainability issues when making purchasing decisions," said Jan Youtie, a study co-author and manager of policy services in the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute. "In the broadest sense, sustainability is about sustaining business, so if manufacturers want to succeed long-term, they need to pay attention to environmental and equity issues, not just economics."
Manufacturers have long focused on cutting costs through approaches like lean manufacturing, and many companies see sustainability primarily as a way to further those efforts. Such viewpoints may miss important opportunities, Shapira warned.
"Companies continue to focus on near-term cost savings and easily-achievable energy reductions," he said. "Too few are pursuing the long-term investments in innovation and product lifecycle costing that would help sustain them over the long term."
Adoption of sustainable techniques varies with the size of companies. "We usually see that large companies adopt new technologies earlier and at a higher rate than small companies, and energy has an inherent scale issue," Youtie noted. "But there are also benefits for small companies, which can be more agile in adapting to change."
The 2008 survey is the sixth in the series, and in each edition, manufacturers are asked their top concerns. In 2005, those issues related to process improvement through adoption of lean manufacturing principles. For the 2008 study, those concerns shifted, with a third of manufacturers indicating problems with marketing and sales. Concerns about energy cost grew, with 23 percent of respondents indicating a problem in that area - up from just 10 percent in the 1999 study.
Educational needs also generated attention, with manufacturers concerned about workers having basic skills such as reading and mathematics, as well as more sophisticated technical abilities. Despite the concerns, however, company training investments per employee average only about $150 per year.
The study also found a correlation between the use of public knowledge sources - such as technical or management assistance from Georgia Tech, other universities or public agencies - and higher productivity growth. Companies using outside assistance reported as much as 15 percent more value added for each employee.
And despite its prominence in national public-policy discussions, research and development tax credits were used by only five percent of respondents. This percentage is in contrast to the 45 percent of respondents who said that lack of funds was an important limitation to engaging in innovation.
"Taxes don't really have a big impact on a company's strategic decision making," said Shapira. "If they are doing to do research and development, they're going to do it regardless. If there are tax breaks available, some companies may apply for them, but we don't find that the availability of tax credits much affects strategy decisions."
Support for the study came from the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership at Georgia Tech, the Center for Paper Business and Industry Services, the Georgia Department of Labor, the QuickStart Program of the Technical College System of Georgia, and Habif, Arogeti and Wynne, LLP. Beyond Shapira and Youtie, authors included Luciano Kay, Ashley Rivera, Bryan Lynch and Andrea Fernandez Ribas.
For more details about the Georgia Manufacturing Survey and to download the 2008 report, please visit (www.cherry.gatech.edu/survey).
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Writer: John Toon
]]>At Georgia Tech, researchers from the Colleges of Sciences and Engineering have joined forces to create the Center for Bio-Imaging Mass Spectrometry (BIMS), which aims to tackle these types of challenges.
"We organized this center in 2007 when we saw the enormous potential of mass spectrometry imaging tools and realized that we had a unique ensemble of people at Georgia Tech that would enable us to excel in this field," said Al Merrill, a professor in the School of Biology and the Smithgall Chair in Molecular Cell Biology.
Mass spectrometry imaging is a powerful analytical technique with the potential to unravel the molecular complexities of biological systems. It allows researchers to visualize the spatial arrangement and relative abundance of specific molecules - from simple metabolites to peptides and proteins - in biological samples.
The technique also takes advantage of the ability of biological molecules to be converted into ions that can then be separated and analyzed by a mass spectrometer. When data are collected from different regions of a sample, the distribution of molecules can be used to create multidimensional images of that sample.
Today, a popular method for studying biological samples is matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS). In this technique, sample preparation plays a very important role in image quality because it requires that a matrix compound be uniformly deposited over the surface of a histological tissue slice mounted on a special plate.
In the April 15 issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry, a research team including Merrill, Cameron Sullards, director of Georgia Tech's Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Facility, and Yanfeng Chen, a research scientist in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, showed that the homogeneity of the matrix could be improved. With this development, broader categories of compounds, such as lipids, could be analyzed.
The researchers used an oscillating capillary nebulizer to spray small droplets of matrix aerosol onto the sample surface - a process similar to airbrushing. Using histological samples provided by Timothy Cox, a professor of medicine at the University of Cambridge, the researchers could profile and localize many different lipid species in the samples. Specifically, they localized sphingolipids that accumulate in the brain when there is a genetic defect. This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
While MALDI samples must be analyzed in a vacuum, recent advances allow samples to be studied under ambient conditions. Facundo Fernandez, an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been using a technique called desorption electrospray ionization (DESI).
With DESI, a high-speed, charged spray containing alcohol and water is directed at a sample a few millimeters away. The solvent droplets pick up portions of the sample through interaction with the surface and then form highly charged ions that can be analyzed.
Fernandez and his research team recently used DESI to analyze nearly 400 drug samples provided by public health authorities to identify counterfeit anti-malarial drugs. Activities aimed at addressing the widespread problem of counterfeit anti-malarial drugs were reported February 12th in the journal PLoS Medicine. Georgia Tech's efforts to develop faster analytical techniques were sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, while the sample analysis was supported by a small grant from the World Health Organization.
"We have done a lot of work using DESI to analyze pharmaceutical formulations, but we are moving into new avenues of research including looking at algae samples, as well as ovarian cancer tissue samples provided by the Ovarian Cancer Institute, which is housed at Georgia Tech and headed by School of Biology chair John McDonald," noted Fernandez.
In ovarian cancer research, little is known about how biomarkers and low-mass signaling molecules increase or decrease in abundance with treatment. Fernandez has teamed with Thomas Orlando, chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, to use DESI and laser desorption single photon ionization mass spectrometry (LD/SPI-MS) to investigate this issue. Because the two techniques overlap in mass ranges, using both provides a more complete investigation of the biomarker profiles, says Orlando.
Because it does not use a matrix, LD/SPI-MS can detect low-mass molecules - such as sugars, amino acids, small peptides and cytotoxic compounds - formed as result of cancer treatment. It could achieve higher spatial resolution and sensitivity than typical commercial mass spectrometers that rely on the laser desorption of ions, according to Orlando.
"We hope LD/SPI-MS will lead to a better understanding of the molecular basis of ovarian cancer at its various stages and how treatment affects regulation of low-mass biomarkers in ovarian cancer cells," said Orlando.
Mass spectrometry experiments produce incredible volumes of data, each composed of thousands of spectra and thousands of peaks, which makes finding molecules of interest very difficult.
"We've focused on researching computational methods that can clean up, visualize and look for interesting patterns in thousands of mass spectrometry tissue images that you wouldn't necessarily be able to find or have time to find with the naked eye,- explained May Dongmei Wang, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar.
Wang, post-doctoral fellow Mitchell Parry and graduate students Richard Moffitt and Peter Siy are providing software systems to BIMS center users. The systems acquire the thousands of ion spectra collected from every tissue slide matrix, perform quality control and visualize the distribution of ions on the tissue matrix. The researchers then use data mining methodologies - including principal component analysis, independent component analysis and multivariate analysis - to identify and compare ions of interest present in different locations.
As a cell biologist, Merrill sees potential in the ability of mass spectrometry imaging to detect all of the important molecules that control cell behavior instead of just a few. Another advantage to mass spectrometry is the ability to test whether all of the cells are being affected in the same ways.
His laboratory uses mass spectrometry to profile sphingolipids, a family of thousands of metabolites that are involved in cell-cell communication and intracellular signaling. He also studies the types and amounts of these metabolites that control whether cells grow or die.
"With mass spectrometry, we have not only been able to profile these compounds, but also to find new metabolites we think are important in inflammation, aging and cancer," added Merrill.
The BIMS center at Georgia Tech includes researchers like Merrill who propose biological and clinical problems that may be solved by mass spectrometry imaging. It also brings together researchers who are improving current mass spectrometry imaging technologies and developing innovative techniques, and researchers who are analyzing the large sets of complicated data collected by mass spectrometry systems.
With the advances in software and hardware, the use of mass spectrometry in the life sciences promises to become even more prevalent and diversified for systems biology research.
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]]>Georgia ranks high among tornado-plagued areas of the United States. It was 18th among the most affected states between 1953 and 2004. And in 2007, Georgia experienced 42 twisters; only seven states suffered more hits.
Helping to protect Georgia residents against such violent weather is the job of the researchers of the Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC) at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). One of their tasks: to explore and develop new technologies able to improve both the accuracy and the timeliness of tornado warnings.
Currently, NEXRAD Doppler radar technology is state-of-the-art in the U.S., which is ravaged by more tornadoes than anyplace else on Earth. NEXRAD offers about a 15-minute average advance warning that a tornado may hit.
"That's a big improvement over the old days, when a funnel cloud on the horizon was often the first warning," said John Trostel, deputy director of the SSRC. "Before NEXRAD was established in the 1990s, you would have been lucky to have gotten a 30-second warning."
The GTRI center was founded after a tornado struck Gainesville, Ga., with no warning in March 1998, leaving 11 people dead in Hall County, recalls SSRC Director Gene Greneker. A task force formed by then-Georgia Gov. Zell Miller recommended a severe-storms center with several missions, including conducting cutting-edge research, collecting and archiving storm data and improving detection and warning. The center was initially funded through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and on-going support has come through the state of Georgia with the continuing involvement of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA).
"Part of our goal is to explore what's different about the severe storms of north Georgia," Greneker said. "Tornadoes in Georgia are often short-lived events that take place over a few minutes, while those in Kansas or Oklahoma may last for an hour."
NEXRAD continues to be the first line of tornado defense, Greneker explains. Earlier weather radars dating back to the 1950s could sometimes reveal the classic "hook" echo on some tornadoes, but NEXRAD is far more effective.
Today's national network of NEXRAD stations uses three-dimensional Doppler technology to detect wind direction and other factors; the information shows up on-screen in brightly colored cells that resemble the pixels of a heavily magnified digital photo. When winds in a given area begin to twist in opposite directions - a tornadic phenomenon called wind shear - two cells form a distinctive on-screen "couplet" that alerts weather watchers a tornado may be forming.
SSRC uses several tools to amass and study NEXRAD data, including GR2Analyst software, developed in Georgia, and a WDSS-II analysis station.
"I'm seeing very interesting trends in the number of tornadoes that occur annually in Georgia," Trostel said. "There was an average of about 15 to 25 events from 1950 through 1970, then a peak in the early 1970s to over 40 events, and then a return to 15 to 25. But since 2000, the trend in the number of annual events appears to be again increasing."
New Insights into Tornadoes
NEXRAD is an important tool, Trostel acknowledges. Yet to increase the weather watcher's arsenal, and potentially improve warning times and accuracy, GTRI researchers are developing additional approaches to tornado detection and monitoring.
Currently, SSRC studies North Georgia weather using 12 research systems that use a wide variety of instruments, sensors, computers and software, with two more systems under development. Researchers involved in the effort include Greneker, Trostel, Ed Reedy, Tom Perry and Jenny Matthews, as well as a number of students.
Among the SSRC's top areas of study is the complex role that lightning and acoustics play in North Georgia's severe storms and in the formation of tornadoes.
Lightning - Researchers based at GTRI's Cobb County Research Facility are pursuing several approaches that could potentially correlate lightning's behavior with tornado activity:
Lightning mapping arrays use multiple receiving stations to monitor severe storms as they move through an area. The SSRC and other Atlanta-area weather stations - such as the National Weather Service at Peachtree City - are developing a six-station array that will augment data already coming from an existing array in northern Alabama;
Electric field mills measure the enormous changes in electric fields between fair weather and severe storms, providing important data that can even correlate raindrop size and frequency with other storm parameters;
A lighting polarization ratio station monitors the horizontally and vertically polarized radio-frequency signals created by lightning strokes, providing data on the behavior of cloud- to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning. Greater understanding of lightning, especially the less-understood cloud-to-cloud variety, could shed light on tornado formation;
Gamma-ray detectors record the gamma- and X-rays that emanate from lightning strokes, and offer the potential to correlate the appearance of these powerful phenomena with tornado activity.
Acoustic signals - Severe storms emit very low-frequency sounds -- in the range of 50 hertz and below, which is analogous to the sonic footprint of an earthquake. Tornado vortices appear to emit these "infra-sounds" in frequencies ranging from 1 hertz down to tenths of a hertz. At the Cobb Country Research Facility, GTRI researchers are building an array of low-frequency sensors that may allow them to identify sonic signatures unique to tornadoes.
Trostel notes that there are myriad ways to study severe storms, many of them surprisingly cost-efficient. He points to a field mill developed by a local high-school student; constructed from such materials as a coffee can, it can detect electrical fields associated with storms.
"This device does a very good job, and it cost $87," Trostel said. "We want to get Georgia high-school science classes to construct and deploy these detectors - and then we could track storm-related electrical fields as they progress across the state."
This article was originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine.
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]]>Fungi - which range from yeast to mushrooms - are important for industry and human health, so understanding the recently sequenced fungal genomes can help in developing and producing critical pharmaceuticals. Gene prediction can also help to identify potential targets for therapeutic intervention and vaccination against pathogenic fungi.
"While we previously showed that our unsupervised training program worked well to predict genes in many eukaryotes, it didn't work as well for various fungal genomes that carry a significant part of the information that facilitates accurate gene prediction in locations called branch point sites," said Mark Borodovsky, director of Georgia Tech's Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics.
Branch point sites are located inside introns, which are non-coding regions of DNA located between genetic-code carrying regions called exons.
"Previously during the process of predicting the exon-intron structure of eukaryotic genes, we didn't search for branch point sites, but doing so in the new program helps to better delineate intron regions inside fungal genes," added Borodovsky, who is also a Regents' Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing.
Borodovsky and his colleagues expanded the eukaryotic genome self-training software program they developed in 2005 to address the issue that fungal genes are more complex than other eukaryotes. The research team included graduate student Vardges Ter-Hovhannisyan, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering research scientist Alexandre Lomsadze and School of Biology professor Yury Chernoff.
Details of the new program, called GeneMark.hmm-ES (BP), are available online in the journal Genome Research and will be included in the journal's December print edition. The software will also be freely available for academic researchers.
Borodovsky developed the first version of GeneMark in 1993. In 1995, this program was used to find genes in the first completely sequenced genomes of bacteria and archea. The research team then developed self-training versions of the gene finding program for prokaryotic (organisms that lack a cell nucleus) and eukaryotic (organisms that contain a cell nucleus) genomes in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Development of these programs has been supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Unlike other programs that require a pre-determined training set along with the genome sequence, GeneMark.hmm-ES (BP) only requires the genome sequence. The program is able to iteratively identify the correct algorithm parameters from the anonymous sequence. The program uses a probabilistic mathematical model called the Hidden Markov Model to pinpoint the boundaries between coding sequences (exons) and non-coding sequences (introns and intergenic regions).
Most introns start from the dinucleotide guanine-thymine (abbreviated GT) and end with the dinucleotide adenine-guanine (abbreviated AG). However, finding these dinucleotides is not sufficient to signal the presence of an intron. Several nucleotides that surround GT and AG are also important, but the similarity of the pattern is not deterministic. Locating the branch site - which is nine nucleotides in length, almost always contains an adenine and is located 20-50 bases upstream of the acceptor site - helps to accurately identify an intron.
An initial run of the program with a reduced model containing heuristically defined parameters breaks the sequence into coding and non-coding regions. With this information, the researchers apply machine-learning techniques to refine the parameters of the recognition algorithm with respect to the specific patterns found in the newly identified protein-coding and non-coding sequences as well as the border sites.
The prediction and training steps are repeated, each time detecting a larger set of true coding and non-coding sequences that are used to further improve the model employed in statistical pattern recognition. When the new sequence breakdown coincides with the previous one, the researchers record their final set of predicted genes.
To test the algorithm, the researchers selected 16 fungal species from the phyla Ascomycota, Basidiomycota and Zygomycota and compiled sets of genome sequences containing previously validated genes. The species spanned large evolutional distances and exhibited significant variability in genome size, gene number and average number of introns per gene. The results showed that by including branch site information in the model, the researchers could more accurately predict exon-intron structures of fungal genes.
"The enhanced program predicted fungal genes with higher accuracy than either the original self-training algorithm or known algorithms with supervised training," noted Borodovsky. "And because we didn't need any additional training information for our program, the sequencing teams could immediately proceed with gene annotation right after the genomic sequence was in hand without spending time and effort to extract a set of validated genes necessary for estimating parameters of traditional algorithms."
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute and the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have already realized the advantages of the new algorithm. They have already used the new program to annotate about 20 novel fungal genomes. In addition, hundreds of fungal genome sequencing projects currently in progress should benefit from the new method as well, according to Borodovsky.
With the fungal software completed, Borodovsky and his team are already looking to expand their gene prediction algorithms to accurately interpret even more complex eukaryotic genomes.
"There are genome sequencing projects where large repeat populations, a significant number of pseudogenes or substantial sequence inhomogeneity hamper ab initio gene prediction and we're ready to tackle them next," added Borodovsky.
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]]>To address this situation, engineers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are turning to innovative materials that make possible a new approach to the physics of noise reduction. They have found that honeycomb-like structures composed of many tiny tubes or channels can reduce sound more effectively than conventional methods.
"This approach dissipates acoustic waves by essentially wearing them out," said Jason Nadler, a GTRI research engineer. "It's a phenomenological shift, fundamentally different from traditional techniques that absorb sound using a more frequency-dependent resonance."
The two-year project is sponsored by EADS North America, the U.S. operating entity of EADS.
Most sound-deadening materials - such as foams or other cellular materials comprising many small cavities - exploit the fact that acoustic waves resonate through the air on various frequencies, Nadler explains.
Just as air blowing into a bottle produces resonance at a particular tone, an acoustic wave hitting a cellular surface will resonate in certain-size cavities, thereby dissipating its energy. An automobile muffler, for example, uses a resonance-dependent technique to reduce exhaust noise.
The drawback with these traditional noise-reduction approaches is that they only work with some frequencies - those that can find cavities or other structures in which to resonate.
Nadler's research involves broadband acoustic absorption, a method of reducing sound that doesn't depend on frequencies or resonance. In this approach, tiny parallel tubes in porous media such as metal or ceramics create a honeycomb-like structure that traps sound regardless of frequency. Instead of resonating, sound waves plunge into the channels and dissipate through a process called viscous shear.
Viscous shear involves the interaction of a solid with a gas or other fluid. In this case, a gas - sound waves composed of compressed air - contacts a solid, the porous medium, and is weakened by the resulting friction.
"It's the equivalent of propelling a little metal sphere down a rubber hose when the sphere is just a hair bigger than the rubber hose," Nadler explained. "Eventually the friction and the compressive stresses of contact with the tube would stop the sphere."
This technique, Nadler adds, is derived from classical mechanical principles governing how porous media interact with gases - such as the air through which sound waves move. Noise abatement using micro-scale honeycomb structures represents a new application of these principles.
"You need to have the hole big enough to let the sound waves in, but you also need enough surface area inside to shear against the wave," he said. "The result is acoustic waves don't resonate; they just dissipate."
In researching this approach, Nadler constructed an early prototype from off-the-shelf capillary tubes, which readily formed a low-density, honeycomb-like structure. Further research showed that the ideal material for broadband acoustic absorption would require micron-scale diameter tubes and a much lower structural density.
Creating such low-density structures presents an interesting challenge, Nadler says. It requires a material that's light, strong enough to enable the walls between the tubes to be very thin, and yet robust enough to function reliably amid the high-temperature, aggressive environments inside aircraft engines.
Among the likely candidates are superalloys, materials that employ unusual blends of metals to achieve desired qualities such as extreme strength, tolerance of high temperatures and corrosion resistance.
Nadler has developed what could be the world's first superalloy micro honeycomb using a nickel-base superalloy. At around 30 percent density, the material is very light - a clear advantage for airborne applications - and also very strong and heat resistant.
He estimates this new approach could attenuate aircraft engine noise by up to 30 percent. Micro-honeycomb material could also provide another means to protect the aircraft in critical areas prone to impact from birds or other foreign objects by dissipating the energy of the collision.
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Writer: Rick Robinson
]]>"The polyketal microparticles we developed are simply a vehicle to get the drugs inside the body to the diseased area as quickly as possible," said Niren Murthy, assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "The major advantage to using these polyketals to deliver drugs is that they degrade into biocompatible compounds that don't accumulate in a patient's tissue or cause additional inflammation."
Details about the polyketals and clinical applications were described during three presentations on August 18-20 at the 236th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Philadelphia. This research - initially started in 2003 - is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
In a presentation on August 19, graduate student Scott Wilson detailed a new polyketal derivative aimed at enhancing the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease - an illness that causes the large and small intestines to swell.
The new polymer has the advantage of stability in both acids and bases. It degrades only in the presence of reactive oxygen species, which are present in and around inflamed tissue. Cell culture experiments have demonstrated that the microparticles degraded more rapidly in cells that overproduced superoxide, a reactive oxygen species.
The researchers are currently collaborating with Didier Merlin, a professor in the Division of Digestive Diseases at Emory University, to investigate loading these polyketals with therapeutics to treat inflammatory bowel disease.
"We think these microparticles are going to be fantastic for oral drug delivery because they can survive the stomach conditions before they release their contents in the intestines," noted Murthy.
Murthy's group is also examining the use of polyketals to treat acute liver failure - a condition in which the liver stops functioning because macrophages in the liver create reactive oxygen species. One treatment is the delivery of superoxide dismutase, an enzyme that detoxifies superoxide. Incorporating the enzyme inside a polyketal - poly(cyclohexane-1,4-diyl acetone dimethylene ketal) - allows the enzyme to be released very quickly in an acidic environment.
"Patients with acute liver failure need drugs as soon as possible or else they'll die," said Murthy. "We've tailored the polyketal's hydrolysis rates to deliver the drug in one or two days."
Nick Crisp, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and Robert Pierce, currently head of anatomic pathology at Schering-Plough Biopharma and formerly of the University of Rochester Medical Center, are collaborating on this project. Georgia Tech, Emory and the University of Rochester have filed three patent applications on the polyketal drug delivery system.
To treat other illnesses, it may be necessary to deliver proteins to a diseased organ. In a presentation on August 18, Georgia Tech researchers described such a method, which was developed by Murthy, Michael Davis, an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and graduate student Jay Sy.
"Delivering proteins inside microparticles has been limited because getting the protein into the microparticles required organic solvents that frequently destroyed the proteins," explained Murthy. "To overcome this problem, we developed a method of simply immobilizing the protein on the surface of the microparticles."
The researchers incorporated a nitrilotriacetic acid-lipid conjugate into the polyketal. In a one-step procedure, they mixed the microparticles with the proteins and centrifuged them. That immobilized the proteins on the surface of the polyketals. Laboratory experiments conducted under physiological conditions have shown that half of the bound proteins were released within 24 hours.
Also in collaboration with Davis, the researchers are testing the ability of the protein-bound polyketals to treat heart attacks.
In the next few years, Murthy and his team of graduate students and collaborators plan to continue developing new polyketals and conducting efficacy tests in cell cultures and animal studies.
"In the past few years, we have developed methods to tailor the polyketal's properties, which have already allowed us to target many different medical conditions, but our end goal is to test these treatments in humans," noted Murthy.
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]]>The effort has implications for the public and private sectors alike, providing a process for managing energy use and implementing sustainable practices that would help hold down costs and minimize environmental impacts. This first-ever international energy management system standard - to be known as ISO 50001 - would also level the playing field for companies competing in the global marketplace.
With broad applicability across economic sectors, the standard could ultimately affect as much as 60 percent of the energy used in the world.
"Effective implementation of an energy management system standard often yields resource and cost savings, as well as risk avoidance," explained Bill Meffert, manager of energy and sustainability services at Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute. "Reduction in the use of non-renewable fuels provides environmental benefits to the nation, improves security and leads to use of more sustainable sources of energy. Process and behavioral changes from targeted energy management projects frequently result in reduced raw materials usage, less waste generation and disposal, and lower air emissions."
Beyond the direct benefits, adoption of ISO 50001 could also lead to long-term cultural changes that benefit organizations in other ways. "An energy management system standard establishes a culture of continual improvement to sustain the gains made, placing the organization in a position to realize even greater energy efficiencies and further savings," Meffert added.
The U.S. Department of Energy is supporting the effort through a combination of active participation in the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) and through financial support for the administration of the U.S. TAG. The U.S. TAG is responsible for developing the U.S. consensus position on the proposed standard.
Rising energy prices have made managing energy a higher priority for industrial, commercial and governmental organizations worldwide. Beyond helping manage costs and controlling environmental impacts, large energy users may be driven to adopt the voluntary standards as evidence of their good corporate citizenship.
"Many countries around the world will use the standard as the basis for national programs that encourage large energy users to demonstrate their environmental stewardship," Meffert said. "It is expected that national incentives - taxes, credits and similar vehicles - will be used to promote its use and adoption."
Companies that adopt the new standard may also gain a public relations and marketing advantage.
"Companies that conform to an international energy management system standard will be publicly stating that they have adopted best practices for managing their energy supply and use, which helps make them competitive," Meffert added. "They are also showing that they are managing their natural resources wisely. Many companies will also want to ensure that their suppliers and partners are environmentally responsible."
In general, Meffert noted, standards are useful to helping organizations establish the order and consistency to manage key business components, whether they address quality, environmental protection or energy issues.
"By applying this standard, the organization uses the 'Plan-Do-Check-Act' steps of the continual improvement framework to manage energy resources, incorporating energy management into everyday business operations and strategies," he said. "This framework encompasses both the management and the technical elements of energy management. The effective management of energy requires both to be present and integrated."
While industry has driven development of the new standard, it could be used by any energy-consuming organization. The standard will define a management system for all energy sources - including electricity, liquid and solid fuels, renewable sources, steam, compressed air and chilled water.
The new ISO 50001 is being developed through a consensus process of the International Standards Organization (ISO) that involves representatives from national standards organizations in more than 36 countries who develop proposals, discuss issues, build consensus, and adopt the final standard.
The United States and Brazil are leading the overall effort under ISO's framework. In addition to member nation representatives, two liaison members - the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the World Energy Council - are also contributing to the effort.
The ISO/PC 242 committee established to develop the standard held its first meeting in Washington in early September, and will hold additional meetings on a regular basis. The goal is to have ISO 50001 ready for publication by the end of 2010, said Deann Desai, project manager with the Enterprise Innovation Institute who serves as secretary to the U.S. TAG.
"Excellent progress was made during the first meeting, and a working draft has already been developed," she noted. "Among the issues discussed was the need to ensure compatibility between the new ISO 50001 and existing ISO management standards."
Georgia Tech was heavily involved in developing the existing American National Standards Institute (ANSI) MSE 2000:2008 standard for energy management systems. That standard has seen limited adoption in the United States, but Meffert said globalization of commerce now requires an international standard that will be widely adopted.
"Many businesses today are multinationals that have facilities and/or trading partners overseas," he explained. "When conducting business on a multinational basis, it is important that the competitive playing field be as even as possible - which is what standardization attempts to accomplish."
Georgia Tech worked closely with the Department of Energy in activities leading up to the formal launch of the ISO 50001 development effort. Members of Georgia Tech's energy and sustainability staff helped develop a comparison document that was used to facilitate initial international meetings, and they participated with ANSI in the process of producing an application to ISO explaining the need for the new standard.
Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute is administering the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for ANSI. The group is composed of many energy management experts and helps shape the U.S. position for the international standard.
Organizations interested in participating should contact Deann Desai at (706) 542-8902 or (deann.desai@innovate.gatech.edu).
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]]>"Attention. Attention. This is a test of the Georgia Tech Emergency Notification System. This is only a test. This is a test of the Georgia Tech Emergency Notification System. This is only a test."
The Siren Warning System is comprised of seven speaker stations located across campus. Designed to notify people who are outdoors, the system complements the Georgia Tech Emergency Notification System (GTENS) which delivers time-sensitive emergency messages in the form of e-mail, voice mail and text messages to the campus community.
For more information on emergency preparedness, visit www.gatech.edu/emergency.
]]>Alumni Eric A. Boe, 44, Robert Shane Kimbrough, 42, and Sandra A. Magnus, 44, will be on board. All three astronauts earned their post-graduate degrees at Georgia Tech during the 1990s. For updates on the mission and launch. Visit the following NASA link for updates launch information: http://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/sts126/index.asp
]]>The recent study analyzed trends and new developments in environmental performance and sustainability at 1,068 institutions recognizing colleges and universities for exemplary efforts and awards for collective, national performance on environmental literacy, energy, water, transportation, landscaping, waste reduction and more. The 2008 survey is the nation's largest study to date created to gauge trends and new developments in campus sustainability. It was also the first study of its kind when conducted in 2001.
Georgia Tech emphasizes sustainability throughout its campus with 21 endowed chairs and 23 research centers that include significant sustainability components. The Institute has also set a goal that every student takes at least one of more than the 100 courses with a sustainability emphasis. In addition, the Institute has a number of environmental sustainability programs that embrace initiatives ranging from green cleaning and solid waste recycling to landscape and building design to a sustainable food project.
]]>Dr. Yang will begin his tenure at Georgia Tech on January 1, 2009. Current chair, Professor Bob Loewy, will remain in the position through December 31, 2008.
The selection of Dr. Yang ends an extensive search to fill the position, which included several highly qualified candidates in the field of aerospace engineering.
"Dr. Yang's professional contributions and activities offer the School of Aerospace Engineering a national and international visibility that adds to our reputation," said Don Giddens, dean of the Georgia Tech College of Engineering. "His passion for research and ambition for the department set us on a course for new successes in academics and discovery."
Dr. Yang received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1984. He spent a year as a research fellow in the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech before joining the faculty of Pennsylvania State University in 1985. He is currently the John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair of Engineering at Penn State, teaching classes on thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, propulsion, combustion and mathematics.
"It is with a deep sense of humility and honor that I accept the responsibility of chair for the School of Aerospace Engineering," Yang said. "The position is challenging, but also exciting. My top priority is to continue the traditions of excellence at the school in both teaching and research, as well as in service. The Aerospace Engineering school already has a wonderful reputation for excellence, but I hope that I can work to further advance educational goals."
Currently, eight graduate students are working under Dr. Yang's direction at Penn State. He has previously supervised 35 Ph.D. and 15 M.S. theses.
Dr. Yang's research interests include combustible instabilities in propulsion systems, chemically reacting flows in rocket engines and high-pressure thermodynamics and transport. His accolades include the Penn State Engineering Society Outstanding Teaching and Premier Research Awards and several publication and technical awards from The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), including the Air-Breathing Propulsion and Pendray Aerospace Literature Awards.
Boasting more than 300 technical papers he has authored or co-authored, Dr. Yang has functioned as the editor-in-chief of the AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power since 2001. He also serves on the editorial advisory boards of Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, Combustion, Explosion, and Shock Waves, the Journal of Aeronautics, Astronautics, and Aviation, the Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers and the JANNAF Journal of Propulsion and Energetics. He has consulted with several industrial and governmental organizations, including NASA, General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, Siemens, Aerojet and Rolls Royce.
U.S. News and World Report currently ranks the Guggenheim School fourth in graduate programs and second in undergraduate programs.
]]>Known as 'Tech to Teaching,' the program integrates existing NSF-funded projects that provide instruction and support for faculty and students who are interested in teaching. The goal of the program is not only to support Georgia Tech students who choose teaching careers at any level, but also to help supply qualified K-12 teachers, with an emphasis on STEM fields, to Georgia classrooms.
"Georgia Tech is in a unique position to be a leader in this area and to assume the responsibility of educating more teachers at all levels in the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines," says Anderson Smith, senior vice-provost for Academic Affairs. "Georgia imports a large number of science and math teachers. It makes sense for these teachers to be home-grown."
The Tech to Teaching program creates an infrastructure at Georgia Tech that encourages and enables students to pursue careers in K-12 or college teaching, according to Donna Llewellyn, director of the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL).
"It is Georgia Tech's responsibility to help solve the shortage of math and science teachers in Georgia," explains Llewellyn. "We not only need to supply top-quality teachers to support an educated workforce in our state, but we also need to provide our K-12 schools with teachers equipped to fully prepare students to pursue a higher education here at Georgia Tech."
The Tech to Teaching program will also reinforce existing collaborations between Georgia Tech and schools such as Georgia Perimeter College and Spelman College, where Georgia Tech graduate students will gain teaching experience by serving as instructors in introductory STEM courses. In addition, a partnership with Kennesaw State University provides the opportunity for undergraduate students to receive National Science Foundation stipends while completing their undergraduate degrees, and while working toward their Master's degree in chemistry or physics teaching. Finally, nearby Georgia State University serves as the provider of professional training and licensure through convenient cross-registration options.
"An increasingly popular educational path for students interested in K-12 teaching is to get their four-year bachelor's degree in a particular content field, and then pursue a one-year Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree to earn their teacher certification," says Marion Usselman, senior research scientist at the Institute's Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC). "Georgia Tech students interested in STEM teaching are perfectly positioned to complete their teacher education training at one of the many colleges and universities in Georgia offering MAT degrees. Given the shortage of high school math and science teachers, they are very likely to quickly land a job, even before they are fully certified."
"We aren't going into the education degree business, but we are sending our exceptional students to our colleague universities that offer advanced education degree options," says Llewellyn. "We also hope to initiate and develop partnerships with other universities as the program evolves."
Tech to Teaching, led by Georgia Tech Interim President Gary Schuster, is an initiative funded by a $1 million NSF grant combined with a $1.67 million commitment from Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech is one of six institutions that received NSF funding via the Innovation through Institutional Integration (I3) program, an effort intended to link institutions' existing NSF-funded projects in STEM education and to leverage their collective strengths. The goal of I3 is threefold: to broaden participation of underrepresented minorities in STEM; to focus on critical educational junctures; and to integrate research and education resulting in a more globally engaged workforce.
"Our goal is to add a new stanza to the Georgia Tech fight song," says Usselman. "Students can come to Georgia Tech to be a 'helluva teacher,' not just a 'helluva engineer.'"
The Tech to Teaching program will formally begin in January 2009. For more information, please contact Donna Llewellyn at donna.llewellyn@cetl.gatech.edu.
]]>The following Georgia Tech faculty received this prestigious honor:
Bridgette A. Barry: For distinguished contributions to understanding energy conversion and oxygen evolution of photosynthesis by innovative integration of molecular spectroscopy with chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology.
Charles A. Eckert: For distinguished contributions in collaborative research with a wide variety of chemical companies in developing green and sustainable chemical processes.
Gary S. May: For distinguished contributions to electrical and computer engineering, particularly for innovative approaches to education and workforce diversity.
This year, AAAS has awarded 486 members this honor because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on Saturday, February 14, from 8 to 10 a.m. at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago.
These AAAS Fellows will be announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on December 19, 2008.
The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the Association's 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with the nominee's institution), or by the AAAS chief executive officer.
Each steering group then reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and a final list is forwarded to the AAAS Council, which votes on the aggregate list.
The Council is the policymaking body of the Association, chaired by the AAAS president, and consisting of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division, and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science.
]]>The idea began as the Women's Student Union, proposed by two students. With the support of the then-recently named Associate Dean of Students Stephanie Ray, the WRC opened, operating under the auspices of that office, just prior to the end of spring quarter 1998.
For the first two years, a graduate student oversaw WRC's operations. In January 2000, Assistant Dean of Students Yvette Upton was hired as the center's first full-time staff member. She was named director of the center in 2002.
"When I first came to campus, I was told by some students that they were uncomfortable having programs to help them-they didn't want to be perceived as being different," Upton said. "After 2000, the Institute climate changed a lot." As evidenced by the 1,800 people subscribing to the WRC weekly e-mail, Upton says that women on campus are more open to having a place and support opportunities. "I see women being involved and having support groups as a Tech student."
WRC programs offer support for both the academic performance and the personal development of women at the Institute, as well as promote understanding and dialogue among Tech's diverse community. "We work with all kinds of issues that might keep these students from academic success-family issues, relationship issues," Upton said. We want to be sure that women who want to be at Tech have the resources they need to succeed."
Examples of the programs sponsored by the WRC include:
Women's Awareness Month-During March, the WRC presents events and programming to help raise awareness of women's issues and create a community for women at Tech. Started as a week, the event expanded to a month in 2002. During last year's Take Back the Night, an annual event to bring awareness to and end sexual violence, turnout was rather large. "This year, we estimate we'll have nearly 800 people," Upton said. "We hold it more as an educational event. We still have survivor's stories, but we also focus on the concepts of sexual violence and consent." Women's Awareness Month is organized by a student committee advised by the WRC, Upton said.
Women's Leadership Conference-This annual two-day conference, chaired by a 15-member student organizing committee, develops leadership skills of current students and alumnae.
Women in the Wilderness-A partnership with Outdoor Recreation at Georgia Tech (ORGT), women learn empowerment in a non-competitive, supportive outdoor environment, such as camping and rafting.
The WRC also serves as a link for students and Institute academic programs, such as the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE, the Society of Women Engineers, Women at the College of Computing, Women in Engineering, Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Women, Science and Technology. A number of programs at the WRC are targeted toward graduate students, Upton said, helping give advice and tips on moving into an academic career.
While the WRC concentrates on the Institute as a whole, Upton says the center is also looking into programs offered on the departmental level. "We work to raise awareness for women based on what their needs may be," Upton said.
During its first year, the WRC occupied a small physical space, holding its programs in different areas of campus. In 2004, the Women's Resource Center moved into a permanent suite of offices in the Student Services building, which Upton says offers the best of both worlds: accessibility and privacy. "We're in a central part of campus, but we're not in a high-traffic area." Offices are located at the end of a hallway filled with photos and images of women's experiences at Tech in the 2003 exhibit "50 Years of Women at Georgia Tech."
"Students helped paint the space themselves," she said, explaining the varied colors and d'cor throughout the WRC that differs from most other Institute administrative offices. "Graduate students in the math program, for their first women's group outing, came and helped us paint."
According to Upton, women comprise roughly 27 percent of the student population. "For the last two years the freshman classes have trended 30 percent women," she said. "It's not necessarily a 50-50 goal. We just need to create an environment where women who can be successful at Tech choose to come here and stay."
And something that may be surprising to an observer-but not to Upton-is that on several occasions members of Tech's male student population have gotten involved with the WRC. "We focus on women, but we work with all students," she said. "I think it's important for a women's organization on campus to include men in the discussion."
"We worked a lot with men on the campus to help understand what it means to have consent," Upton said.
"To make changes, you really have to involve everyone."
For example, the WRC has worked with the Department of Health Promotion since 2002 to implement VOICE, a campus-wide initiative to end sexual violence on campus. Goals included developing a men's program and continuing training for peers to help fellow students who have experienced violence.
WRC Program Coordinator Colleen Riggle was hired in June 2006 to focus on these efforts. She works one-on-one with victims and conducts Ally, Safe Sisters and Advocate trainings on campus. The Safe Sisters program trains sorority members to help sorority sisters who are victims of assault.
"More than 1,600 students, faculty and staff have been through our various training sessions," Riggle said. "Sexual violence advocacy and education is such an important issue on any college campus. We will continue to work on these initiatives until sexual violence is eradicated on campus. We are grateful for the many men and women who have been allies to our office and supportive of this work." Riggle also advises the Women's Awareness Month committee.
"When you're doing this kind of work-significant societal change-it's difficult," Upton said. "You want to see immediate results, but it just doesn't work that way. We've had students who have experienced something so negative that they chose to leave. Those are really bad situations. But, when you look back over the last 10 or 15 years, you see there has been change."
And she has seen that change first-hand. "I consistently have students come back after or as they are graduating, and they tell me they stayed at Tech because of something we did to support them," Upton said. "It makes it much easier to do this job."
"I think all of us on campus are making an impact, but few of us get confirmation," she said.
]]>"The Georgia Tech Police Department continues to pursue the best practices available to serve and protect the campus," says Chief Teresa Crocker. "Routing emergency calls made from the campus directly to our dispatchers will save the minutes and seconds that can make a crucial difference in a life-safety situation."
Previously, all 911 calls made from campus telephones were routed to the city of Atlanta, and then transferred back to the Georgia Tech Police. The Telecommunications group, working closely with AT&T and GTPD, installed a state-of-the-art emergency call and dispatch system that allows GTPD to see the phone number and location of the caller and rapidly dispatch assistance.
Emergency calls originating from mobile phones are routed to the city of Atlanta, so it is recommended that such calls be placed from campus or emergency phones whenever possible. The campus system is integrated with both the city and regional Enhanced 911 systems to provide backup in case of system failure, as well as one-touch routing to the appropriate emergency response agency.
"Implementing our own telecommunications infrastructure on Georgia Tech's Atlanta campus continues to provide benefits in a variety of ways," says John Mullin, OIT's chief information officer. "Being able to provide more accurate location information to the Georgia Tech Police and enabling them to respond to emergency calls more quickly can improve student safety. It is one of the ways OIT adds value to the campus that we are truly proud of."
]]>"NRC's award winners are a diverse group, from small nonprofits to global corporations, that have demonstrated exceptional leadership and have created innovative solutions that benefit society in many ways," said David Refkin, President, NRC Board of Directors.
Cindy Jackson, manager of Georgia Tech's Office of Waste Management and Recycling, received the award on behalf of the Institute. Georgia Tech was cited for operating a comprehensive recycling program that provides collection opportunities for a variety of materials including: mixed office paper, cardboard, aluminum, glass, mixed metal, pallets, plastic and tires at established collection sites and regular pick-ups for campus wide recycling. Through recycling and other recovery programs, the Waste Management and Recycling Office was credited with helping to make Georgia Tech a sustainable campus.
]]>Chris Bosh won a gold medal as a member of the U.S. men's basketball team. Bosh played his freshman season at Georgia Tech before entering the NBA draft in 2003 and signing with the Toronto Raptors.
Former Georgia Tech track star, Angelo Taylor, won two gold medals in Beijing -- one for the men's 400 meter hurdles and the second for being a member of the first-place 1,600 relay team. Angelo attended Georgia Tech from 1997-98 where he won the NCAA title in 1998 and placed second in 1997.
]]>Alumni Eric A. Boe, 44, Robert Shane Kimbrough, 42 and Sandra H. Magnus, 44 are among the seven astronauts scheduled for the 15-day mission to the International Space Station.
All three astronauts earned their post-graduate degrees at Georgia Tech during the 1990s. Boe earned a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1997, Kimbrough a master of science degree in operations research in 1998 and Magnus a doctorate from the School of Material Science and Engineering in 1996.
The mission focuses on delivering equipment and supplies designed to double the crew size of the station from three to six in May 2009. The station's two Solar Alpha Rotary Joints will also be serviced by the crew.
]]>Members of the community will have another opportunity to donate on September 3 in the College of Management. Walk-ins are welcome, but those who schedule appointments are attended to promptly.
]]>The vigil will include remarks from Georgia Tech's Interim President Gary B. Schuster as well as a performance by Taal Tadka, Georgia Tech's India Club a capella group.
All members of the campus community are invited to attend the memorial vigil and wear white. India Club member Anu Parvatiyar indicated, "white is the color of mourning in India and we want to show Georgia Tech's unity with victims of the attacks in Mumbai."
]]>"Georgia Tech has been a leader in sustainability for over a decade," said Georgia Tech's Director of Environmental Stewardship, Marcia Kinstler. "As advocates for a sustainable campus, we fully support initiatives involving local and organic food supplies."
Georgia Tech students also support the ALFI initiative. Georgia Tech Students Organizing for Sustainability (GT S.O.S.) member Liam Rattray worked to bring local organic foods to campus through a community supported agriculture program. The program allows students, faculty, and staff to purchase fresh, organic produce on a weekly basis. The GT S.O.S also works to engage the Georgia Tech and Atlanta communities through discussions about buying organics, composting, and creating community gardens.
]]>Georgia Tech Event:The Georgia Tech Women in Chemistry will host students from four local high schools for a National Chemistry Week outreach event on Wednesday, October 22. High school students will interact with GT faculty and students in lectures, demonstrations, hands-on labs and a student panel. The high school students will also display posters they created for the National Chemistry Week theme at noon in the atrium of the MSE building.
Community Event: The Georgia Local Section of the American Chemical Society is sponsoring a Science Cafe on the topic "The Ethics of Sports Enhancement" on Thursday, October 23rd at 6:30 p.m at Java Vino, 579 N Highland Ave, Atlanta, GA.
]]>Finalists for the award were interviewed the weekend of November 22-23 in Washington, D.C. Shah was chosen from a pool of 300 candidates and is among the 10th anniversary class of Mitchell Scholars
"Having the opportunity to study and research theoretical mathematical
physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and University
College Dublin will allow me to further pursue the fundamental
questions underlying how the universe works," said Shah. "I intend to not only
research theoretical physics academically, but also to learn how to
educate the general public and policymakers about modern ideas and
research in theoretical physics.
Shah continued, "The Mitchell Scholarship is also known for fostering a close-knit community of scholars from a variety of fields of study. Being a member of such a community is a unique opportunity that will allow me to make the personal connections in Ireland and beyond to achieve my goals."
A native of Acworth, Georgia, Shah is a physics and public policy major. Shah says these two fields fit together well for him.
"I have always been interested in understanding how the universe works, but at the same time I have been deeply concerned with the way society functions," said Shah. "My sense of civic duty and helping my fellow human beings has led me to become involved in my community, study policy and politics, and also look for ways that my knowledge of physics can help me to understand public policy."
During his four years at Georgia Tech, Shah has been active in a number of student initiatives geared toward environmental activism and political dialogue, including a campus-wide recycling program, a water conservation campaign and a Yellow Jacket Round Table designed to bring together student leaders to discuss and help resolve campus issues. He has also been a strong advocate in preserving free speech on campus, testifying before the State House Committee on Higher Education and authoring a resolution opposing a bill that would inhibit free speech. Shah is credited for his role in the defeat of the bill.
In addition to Shah's political advocacy, he has conducted research in the field of theoretical neuroscience and developed textual analysis software to help map data. He will study mathematical physics at University College Dublin.
The Mitchell Scholarship is named for former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who spearheaded the historic Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which produced peace in Northern Ireland. The Mitchell Scholarship recognizes outstanding young Americans who exhibit the highest standards of academic excellence, leadership and community service.
Last year, Adam Tart was named Georgia Tech's first Mitchell Scholar. He is now working on mobile and ubiquitous computing at University College Cork.
]]>In Ireland
This summer Georgia Tech biomedical engineering student Brian Srikanchana and aerospace engineering PhD student Jonathan Murphy have enjoyed exploring the town of Athlone, in the rural heart of Ireland while working abroad at Georgia Tech Ireland, the European applied research facility for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Srikanchana has found the villagers quite friendly, reminiscent of the southern hospitality back in Georgia. On jogs down rural roads, local residents would invite him in for tea and one even shared a "welcome to the neighborhood" head of lettuce, fresh from his garden.
One Saturday Srikanchana and Murphy met a local gardener, John Butler, who was planting flowers by a Norman castle from the 1100s AD, along the west bank of the Shannon river in the center of town. It turns out that Butler has been the past mayor of Athlone four times and his family has been in Athlone for generations. Srikanchana suggested that they meet for lunch some time to discuss the rapidly changing industrial landscape of Ireland and Athlone in particular. When he called Butler to set a lunch date, Butler told him to come by St. Mary's square two days later at a quarter till noon, since the Taoiseach (prime minister of Ireland, pronounced "TEA-SHOCK"), Brian Cowen, would be in town raising support for the Lisbon treaty. Butler said he would make an introduction, and he did.
At Georgia Tech Ireland Srikanchana mainly works on sustainable energy efforts. He is writing a literature review on the use of algae as a biofuel for automobiles and the production of hydrogen gas and has received training in two platform technologies, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), which Georgia Tech Ireland uses to address the needs of various academic and industrial groups throughout Ireland.
When asked about the highlight of his summer work abroad experience, Srikanchana says, "The best part, after having lived here for six weeks, is a certain feeling of interconnectedness with the world. To feel like you're a part of something beyond the boundaries of your town is quite fulfilling. Better yet, is the feeling you get from being engaged with a completely foreign environment, which prior to this point you had only read about in books and newspapers. Many call Ireland Europe's "Celtic Tiger" and you can see how rapidly the growing economy of Ireland is affecting the way of life of its citizens. Though I work in a business park, when I step outside from my office building, I can look across the street and see cows and sheep and horses in the fields. It's somewhat strange to think how the connections made now between America and Ireland through Georgia Tech, could affect the future landscape of the country, by affecting how technologies spread and how industry develops within Ireland."
Aerospace engineering PhD student Jonathan Murphy also met the Taoiseach, while working at Georgia Tech Ireland this summer to find funding to extend the energy system design and decision making work he has been doing at GTRI in Atlanta. He has enjoyed hanging out with new friends in local pubs, clubs and homes.
In France
After studying abroad for a year in Paris, Georgia Tech senior Stephanie Provow began an internship in June with the U.S. Embassy in Paris' economic section. Provow, majoring in economics and international affairs with a minor in French, says, "This internship is perfect for my major, especially with the President of France, Mr. Sarkozy, as the President of the European Union.
I know that my skills have been greatly enhanced through my study abroad, making me all the more prepared for my internship."
Provow has met a number of high-level leaders during her internship at the Embassy.
"My internship has taught me a lot about the U.S. Foreign Service, the economic relationship between France and the U.S., and the way the United States influences economic issues in France through outreach and public diplomacy including speeches and conferences," says Provow. "The most interesting part of my job is meeting the VIPs that come through Paris, such as the President and First Lady Bush and Secretary of State Rice. I have also been to conferences with many important French politicians, such as the Prime Minister."
When asked about meeting President Bush, Provow recalls how he took the time to get to know each individual at a special event for employees of the Embassy, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
"I got to shake Mr. Bush's hand three times and had a nice conversation with him. I remember living in Texas when he was Governor so I always knew I would have something to talk about if I actually did get to meet him," says Provow. "I held my hand out and he looked me in the eye and said, 'Hi. It's nice to meet you.' I said, 'It's great to meet you, too. You know, I was born in Granbury [a small town in Texas].' He smiled and said, 'Atta girl! So did you grow up in Texas?' I replied, "Yes sir, I did. In Colleyville.' He said, 'Oh, Colleyville. I know it. Well, did you stay to go to school or did you move away?' I said, 'Sadly, I moved away.' He said, 'Well, it's good to know there's another Texan in the crowd.' Then he signed a piece of paper I had out for an autograph, took a few pictures, and moved on to the next person."
Georgia Tech Work Abroad Program
The Georgia Tech Work Abroad Program in the Division of Professional Practice is an immersive academic program designed to complement a student's formal education with paid practical international work experience directly related to the student's major. The Work Abroad Program includes co-op, internship, graduate, and undergraduate work experiences. These international work assignments are designed to provide the ultimate work experience to include practical training, cross-cultural exposure and learning, and acquisition of the skills that will set apart the participating students from their peers. Opportunities are available during summer, fall, and spring semesters. The Work Abroad program may also be used to satisfy requirements for the International Plan, a Georgia Tech initiative that was launched in 2005 to offer a challenging academic program that develops global competence within the context of a student's major.
Schools were selected from a pool of more than 500 public universities. The ranking reflects a variety of criteria including student-faculty ratios, four and six-year graduation rates, retention rates, tuition costs and need-based financial aid.
Kiplinger's top three schools are University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Florida and the University of Virginia.
]]>Though the campus mail code for Economics (0615) will remain the same, the code for HTS will change from 0345, which it currently shares with the School of Public Policy, to 0225.
For complete updated contact information, visit http://www.hts.gatech.edu/moving/
]]>The first meeting of ISO's new project committee PC 242 was held on 8-10 September in Washington, DC, USA.
The future ISO 50001 will establish a framework for industrial plants, commercial facilities or entire organizations to manage energy. Targeting broad applicability across national economic sectors, the standard could influence up to 60 % of the world's energy use.
The meeting was attended by delegates from the ISO national member bodies of 25 countries from all regions of the world, as well as representation from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), which has liaison status with PC 242. All the participating countries have existing activities on energy management and have a strong interest in also developing a harmonized solution at the international level.
As part of the proceedings, delegates described their various initiatives in detail. For example, a presentation was given by UNIDO on the preparatory work the organization has carried out to support the ISO process by researching energy management needs in developing countries.
This gave PC 242 an insight into the different policies and situations around the world which need to be taken into account in the development of a globally relevant International Standard for energy management.
Excellent progress was made in the technical discussions and a first working draft has already been created. A major point of discussion is the need to ensure compatibility with the existing suite of ISO management system standards. The committee therefore took the key decision to base the draft on the common elements found in all of ISO's management system standards.
This will ensure maximum compatibility with key standards such as ISO 9001 for quality management and ISO 14001 for environmental management.
The project committee is fully committed to an ambitious schedule and aims to have ISO 50001 ready for publication by the end of 2010.
ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden commented: "This first meeting of PC 242 marks the launch of a new global approach to systematically address energy performance in organizations - pragmatically addressing energy efficiency and related climate change impacts. It is fully in line with and supportive of the global mobilization on these major challenges, and with the IEA-ISO position paper on the contribution of International Standards."
]]>Georgia Tech will co-chair a workshop, participate in panel discussions, present technical papers and host 16 booth presentations and video interviews on emerging high-performance computing projects and application areas. A highlight of Tech's interactive booth display will be a virtual field trip to the Georgia Aquarium. Utilizing a high bandwidth (1Gbps) channel connecting the Aquarium to the SC08 show floor, visitors to the Georgia Tech booth will be able to interact with researchers, fish and other marine creatures live.
"At Georgia Tech, we believe a strong and expansive high-performance computing research community drives the bigger scientific discoveries and better engineering capabilities at the heart of human progress," said Dr. Mark Allen, senior vice provost for Research and Innovation at Georgia Tech. "Through this premier industry event, researchers, academics and industry professionals have the opportunity to discuss and demonstrate new innovations and breakthroughs in high-impact areas such as biomedicine, nanoscience, astrophysics and exascale computing.
]]>Georgia Tech is listed 29th (10th among public universities) in the BusinessWeek survey, which only gives numerical rankings to the first tier of 30 schools. Tech is also ranked 23rd for return on investment, and it's the only school besides Harvard with 100 percent of graduate receiving job offers.
Published every other year since 1988, the magazine's MBA rankings are determined by a survey of newly minted MBAs, a poll of corporate recruiters, and an evaluation of faculty research output.
In an online forum announcing the rankings, BusinessWeek associate editor Louise Lavelle explained Georgia Tech's ascension: "One big reason was the student survey. Georgia Tech did better than four other top-ranked schools. The consulting and operations programs are strong. And it doesn't hurt to be located in Atlanta for recruiting purposes."
College of Management Dean Steve Salbu says: "This leap reflects numerous things we have been able to achieve over the past two years: truly remarkable faculty hiring that has attracted top students, an MBA experience that our students rate higher than at many of the world's best b-schools, and our students' very impressive performance in the job market as we focus heightened attention on innovative, first-rate education."
"The Best B-Schools" is featured in the November 24 issue of BusinessWeek, on newsstands November 17.
Georgia Tech College of Management is also ranked 29th (11th among public universities) in U.S. News & World Report's most recent rankings of the nation's top full-time MBA programs.
]]>Dr. Van Cappellen is the Georgia Power GRA Eminent Scholar in Global Climate Studies in Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. In this position, he is investigating the connection between human activity, including power generation, and global environmental change. In particular, Van Cappellen is studying how the key nutrient elements nitrogen, phosphorus, silicon and iron, affect the global carbon cycle on the continents, in coastal areas and in the oceans.
"Energy is and will continue to be a central research topic in our nation and the world," said GRA president and CEO C. Michael Cassidy. "Dr. Van Cappellen will greatly contribute to an already outstanding team of energy and climate investigators at Georgia Tech and help make our state a leader in these matters."
"We are thrilled to have Dr. Van Cappellen at Georgia Tech," said Dr. Paul Houston, Dean, College of Sciences. "He was an assistant professor and an associate professor at Tech between 1991 and 1999, so we welcome him back to Atlanta. I am confident that he will be highly successful as the Georgia Power GRA Eminent Scholar in Global Climate Studies."
Prior to his appointment, Van Cappellen served as the chair of geochemistry at Utrecht University in The Netherlands for nine years. While there, he earned numerous accolades, including the Pioneer Award from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the Andr' Dumont Medal from the Belgian Geological Society. He was also the founding director of Utrecht University"s Center for Soil, Water and Coastal Resources. Additionally, Van Cappellen served as associate editor for the American Journal of Science from 1999 to 2003, as co-editor-in-chief for the Journal of Hydrology from 1996 to 2004 and is currently associate editor of Geomicrobiology Journal.
"I am excited to return to Georgia Tech as the Georgia Power GRA Eminent Scholar in Global Climate Studies," said Van Cappellen. "A better understanding of what affects the global climate is essential for effective environmental stewardship and energy policy."
Van Cappellen received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Geology and Mineralogy from the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Geochemistry from Yale University.
]]>"I am thrilled to be named the Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation," said Bowman. "It validates my belief that research and teaching can be mutually reinforcing and positive sum."
Bowman is a faculty member in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. He is also the program director for study abroad for Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Cuba.
"Dr. Bowman excites and inspires students to understand the politics, economics and cultures of other countries," said Sue V. Rosser, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. "We are very pleased that his work has been recognized. He is an asset to his students, a credit to our profession, to the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and to the Ivan Allen College."
An expert in the politics of Latin America, Bowman is also a member of an interdisciplinary team researching conservation, economic development and drug discovery in Fiji.
He is the author of Militarization, Development and Democracy: The Perils of Praetorianism in Latin America. He is currently working on his next book, which explores national tourism policy in Latin America.
CASE and the Carnegie Foundation have been partners in offering Professor of the Year awards since 1981. TIAA-CREF, one of America's leading financial services organizations and higher education's premier retirement system, became the primary sponsor for the awards ceremony in 2000. Additional support for the program is provided by a number of higher education associations, including Phi Beta Kappa.
This year, there are winners in 44 states, the District of Columbia and Guam. CASE assembled two preliminary panels of judges to select finalists. The Carnegie Foundation then convened the third and final panel, which selected four national winners. CASE and Carnegie select state winners from top entries resulting from the judging process. Recipients were selected from faculty members nominated by colleges and universities throughout the country.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was founded in 1905 by Andrew Carnegie "to do all things necessary to encourage, uphold and dignify the profession of teaching." The Foundation is the only advanced-study center for teachers in the world and the third-oldest foundation in the nation. Its nonprofit research activities are conducted by a small group of distinguished scholars.
The Council for Advancement and Support of Education is the largest international association of education institutions, serving more than 3,400 universities, colleges, schools and related organizations in 61 countries. CASE is the leading resource for professional development, information and standards in the fields of educational fundraising, communications, marketing and alumni relations.
]]>"Our results show that the patient's behavior may be critical to get the brain to reorganize in response to disease," said Eric Schumacher, assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Psychology. "It's not enough to lose input to a brain region for that region to reorganize; the change in the patient's behavior also matters."
In this case, that change of behavior comes when patients with macular degeneration, a disease in which damage to the retina causes patients to lose their vision in the center of their visual field, make up for this loss by focusing with other parts of their visual field.
Previous research in this area showed conflicting results. Some studies suggested that the primary visual cortex, the first part of the cortex to receive visual information from the eyes, reorganizes itself, but other studies suggested that this didn't occur. Schumacher and his graduate student, Keith Main, worked with researchers from the Georgia Tech/Emory Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Emory Eye Center. They tested whether the patients' use of other areas outside their central visual field, known as preferred retinal locations, to compensate for their damaged retinas drives, or is related to, this reorganization in the visual cortex.
The researchers presented 13 volunteers with a series of tests designed to visually stimulate their peripheral regions and measure brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging. They found that when patients visually stimulated the preferred retinal locations, they increased brain activity in the same parts of the visual cortex that are normally activated when healthy patients focused on objects in their central visual field. They concluded that the brain had reorganized itself.
The parts of the visual cortex that process information from the central visual field in patients with normal vision were reprogrammed to process information from other parts of the eye, parts that macular degeneration patients use instead of their central visual areas.
While there is evidence with other tasks that suggests that the brain can reorganize itself, this is the first study to directly show that this reorganization in patients with retinal disease is related to patient behavior.
The research group is currently studying how long this reorganization takes and whether it can be fostered through low-vision training.
The research was funded in part by a seed grant from the Georgia Tech/Emory Health Systems Institute.
]]>A new program initiated by Georgia Tech's Communications and Marketing Department is working to change that experience. 'I Want My GT' is a consumer activation program designed to empower fans to encourage retailers to carry more Georgia Tech merchandise.
Retailers often say that they don't stock Georgia Tech merchandise because there is no demand. The new program outfits Yellow Jacket fans with 'I Want My GT' cards to put in the hands of retailers, encouraging them to sell Georgia Tech products. Specifically, the message on the card states, "Dear Retailer, I'm one of thousands of Yellow Jacket fans, and I want my GT! You can help us show our school pride by carrying Georgia Tech merchandise and we'll help you become an official Buzz Stop."
A Web site, www.iwantmygt.com, will support the program listing official Buzz Stops and other information to support merchandisers and fans.
"Georgia Tech not only has a smaller alumni base than other universities, we must also compete with shelf space from a host of other colleges as well as professional teams based in Atlanta," says Aimee Anderson, manager of Tech's licensing program. "Although we may be outnumbered, we want to make sure that our dedicated fans' voices are heard and that they have access to Yellow Jacket gear."
'I Want My GT' is a winning proposition for both the Institute and Georgia Tech students. Proceeds from licensing fees are designated for scholarship programs. The more licensed products that are sold, the more funds that can be provided to fund scholarships.
"Having more Georgia Tech products in the marketplace helps showcase our brand," says Katherine Bows, Georgia Tech's director of marketing communications.
Currently, Georgia Tech has more than 400 licensees with revenues from royalties totaling $787,754 in FY 2007-08. While some programs have seen a decline in licensing revenues, Georgia Tech continues to buck these trends with revenues increasing approximately 2.3 percent during the past year.
The program was officially launched during the Georgia Tech-Miami game, where each fan received an 'I Want My GT' card and promos of the program showcased throughout the game. For more information on the initiative, visit the 'I Want My GT' Web site.
]]>The parade will be broadcast live Thursday, November 27, 2008, on NBC from 9:00 a.m. until noon (EST). The Yellow Jacket Marching Band has been informed that they will be marching by the camera at approximately 10:07 a.m.
"With 2008 representing the band's 100th anniversary, we cannot think of a better way to celebrate than taking part in this traditional holiday event," says Band Director Chris Moore.
Transporting 360 members plus their instruments is no small task. The group will be transported via eight buses along with one truck loaded with instruments ranging from 30 tubas to 31drums. The band is set leave on Sunday, November 23 for the 800-plus-mile trek.
Established in 1908, the Yellow Jacket Marching Band is one of the oldest such programs in the country. Members of the band are part of a group of more than 1,100 Georgia Tech students who sing, play or study music each semester at a university that offers no undergraduate degrees in music. Band members represent every major and many nations around the world.
The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is not the first time the band has been in the limelight. Band members appeared at the Kenny Chesney and Sugarland concert during their 2007 summer tour in Atlanta. They also were asked to perform with Keith Urban during his spring concert at Gwinnett Arena earlier this year.
For more information on the Yellow Jacket Marching Band's major milestones, visit their Web site at http://www.gatech.edu/band/.
]]>This year, the conference will focus on 'Interplay,' networked online play as well as multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Panelists include: Richard Bartle, writer of the first multi-user domain; online game developer Brian Green; Chip Morningstar, chief technology officer for WeMade Entertainment USA and platform developer for Yahoo!; Randy Farmer, online gaming innovator and author; and Pavel Curtis, creator of LambdaMoo.
The symposium, which will be accessible via Second Life stream, will explore various aspects of networked play from an historical, cultural, technological and design perspective, as well as looking at current and future trends such as user-created content and use of virtual worlds in the workplace.
Themes to be explored include: historical and international perspectives, productive play (including use of games in the workplace), learning communities
infrastructures, architectures and experience, augmented and alternative reality games, new directions and game creation environments.
Living Game Worlds is an annual symposium presented by Georgia Tech's Experimental Game Lab (EGL) in the Digital Media Program of the School of Literature, Communication and Culture and the GVU Center. Each year, Living Game Worlds brings together experts from academia, industry and the arts to explore topics related to research, design and cultural practices of digital games.
For more information and to register for the conference, visit http://gameworlds.gatech.edu/
]]>
"This ambitious plan will tame traffic, pump new money into the region's transit services and redefine the way people use I-85," said Secretary Peters. "The goal is simple, make commutes reliable, not ridiculous."
Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering has helped shepherd the project for two years, from honing the technology to be utilized to analyzing the impact this project will have on metro Atlanta gridlock.
The result should be a smoother - and swifter - ride for road-weary commuters.
"It increases the ability of facilities to carry vehicles without making a new right of way," said Dr. Randall Guensler, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "If you look at the I-85 corridor, there's no room to expand. People have the option of buying into faster travel and our focus groups said that was valued by all income groups."
Similar programs have been initiated in Denver, Houston, Orange County, Calif., San Diego and Minneapolis, with the latter system most closely resembling the plan destined for Gwinnett, Guensler said.
According to the Texas Transportation Institute's 2007 Urban Mobility Report, the Atlanta metro area is tied for the second-highest level of traffic congestion as measured in terms of hours of delay per rush hour driver.
Georgia Tech's involvement in this effort to break the bottleneck is just beginning. Guensler is overseeing a vehicle monitoring program for drivers who elect to cruise through the new lanes. Measurements will include household traffic behavior, emissions and potential equity impacts.
The focus group will include 700 households comprising 1,500 vehicles, which include express buses.
Guensler calls it 'the most comprehensive travel behavior study that's ever been done'
The first phase of the project will institute a network consisting of dynamically-priced high occupancy toll lanes on I-85, stretching from I-285 to Old Peachtree Road by January 2011. Future phases of Atlanta's congestion plan will include a 49-mile network of additional HOV-to-HOT lane conversions along I-85, I-75 and I-20. Similar HOT lane projects have been implemented in Minneapolis and Southern California, and these areas have already seen a reduction in the amount of congestion during peak travel times.
Also included in the grant is $30 million for transit service enhancement that will operate on the newly converted expressways. The funding will go towards the purchase of new buses and the construction and expansion of park-and-ride facilities.
Atlanta is the most recent city to receive federal funding from the Department of Transportation for its efforts to establish a more permanent Federal program focused on innovative solutions to improve mobility and fight increasing congestion in metropolitan areas. Details on Secretary Peters' innovative Reform Proposal can be found at www.FightGridlockNow.gov.
"The money we are providing today will make commuting faster, transit better and small businesses more competitive," said Secretary Peters. "Together, we'll make traffic in Atlanta go with the wind."
]]>The study, which used the yellow fever vaccine (YF-17D) as a model, is available in the online edition of Nature Immunology and represents a long awaited step forward in vaccine immunology and predictive health.
YF-17D is one of the most successful vaccines ever developed and has been administered to nearly half a billion people over the last 70 years.
"A single shot of the vaccine induces immunity in many people for nearly 30 years," says Bali Pulendran, PhD, lead Yerkes researcher of the study and professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. "Despite the great success of the yellow fever vaccine, little has been known about the immunological mechanisms that make it effective," he continues.
Pulendran's team, including graduate student Troy Querec, PhD, in collaboration with Rafi Ahmed, PhD, director of the Emory Vaccine Center, Eva Lee, PhD, director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare at Georgia Institute of Technology and Alan Aderem, PhD, Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, sought to determine what makes such a vaccine effective so researchers can design new vaccines against global pandemics and emerging infections that repeat the success of this model vaccine.
The researchers used YF-17D to predict the body's ability shortly after immunization to stimulate a strong and enduring immunity. Researchers vaccinated 15 healthy individuals with YF-17D and studied the T cell and antibody responses in their blood. There was a striking variation in these responses between individuals. Analysis of gene expression patterns in white blood cells revealed in the majority of the individuals the vaccine induced a network of genes involved in the early innate immune response against viruses.
A major challenge in the study involved the identification of discriminatory gene signatures -- among over 50,000 signatures per individual -- that can predict the responses of T cells and antibodies. Lee has developed powerful modeling, computational feature selection and predictive tools that overcome shortcomings of existing techniques, which often have limited ability to handle data sets involving heterogeneous, large-scale, ill-separated and mixed biological and medical data. Her approach offers a very robust classification framework that effectively handles such data sets and derives a classifier that often provides higher prediction accuracy and lower misclassification errors than classifiers derived from other methods.
"Using such a bioinformatics approach, we were able to identify distinct gene signatures that correlated with the T cell response and the antibody response induced by the vaccine," says Pulendran. "To determine whether these gene signatures could predict immune response, we vaccinated a second group of individuals and were able to predict with up to 90 percent accuracy which of the vaccinated individuals would develop a strong T or B cell immunity to yellow fever," continues Pulendran.
Pulendran and his colleagues are now working to determine whether this approach can be used to predict the effectiveness of other vaccines, including flu vaccines. The ability to successfully predict the immunity and effectiveness of vaccines would facilitate the rapid evaluation of new and emerging vaccines, and the identification of individuals who are unlikely to be protected by a vaccine.
"This type of research is essential to answer fundamental questions that can lead to better vaccinations and prevention of disease. Yerkes, as one of only eight National Institutes of Health-designated national primate research centers, is uniquely positioned to carry out such diverse research," says Stuart Zola, PhD, director, Yerkes Research Center.
###
Funding for this study was provided in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as part of the U19 Cooperative Centers for Translational Research on Human Immunology and Biodefense. Dr. Lee's research is supported partially by the National Science Foundation, and the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health, as part of the U54 Clinical and Translational Science Awards.
Reference: Systems biology approach predicts immunogenicity of the yellow fever vaccine in humans. Nature Immunology, early online publication. Troy D. Querec, Rama S. Akondy, Eva K. Lee, Weiping Cao, Helder I. Nakaya, Dirk Teuwen, Ali Pirani, Kim Gernert, Jiusheng Deng, Bruz Marzolf, Kathleen Kennedy, Haiyan Wu, Soumaya Bennouna, Herold Oluoch, Joseph Miller, Ricardo Z. Vencio, Mark Mulligan, Alan Aderem, Rafi Ahmed and Bali Pulendran.
The Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare, founded in 1999 with partial support from the National Science Foundation and the Whitaker Foundation, is a collaborative education and research center established between the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and medical and healthcare researchers in different disciplines. The Center's mission is to foster interdisciplinary education and research efforts involving the development and application of sophisticated techniques from the field of operations research to problems in medicine and healthcare.
Focusing on biomedicine and health systems, researchers in the center perform systems modeling, design and develop algorithms and software, and utilize decision theory analysis to advance various domains within medicine. Specific research areas include computational genomics, health risk prediction, disease diagnosis and early detection, optimal treatment strategies and drug delivery, healthcare outcome analysis and treatment prediction, public health and medical preparedness, large-scale medical decision analysis, quality improvement and clinical operations management.
*Although 90 percent of participants who are blind or have low vision found the alert attention signal to be loud enough and long enough to get their attention, only 70 percent of deaf and hard of hearing participants indicated the same regarding the vibrating cadence. Comments regarding the vibrating cadence suggested that it would only be effective if the individual were holding the phone in their hand, but easily missed if in a purse or even in one's pocket.
*All hearing participants expressed concern that the early part of the message was missed because the tone went too quickly into the 90-character spoken alert, causing the first few words of the message to be missed. The required Commercial Mobile Alert System message format places the event type first (i.e., tornado, flood, etc.) so crucial information may not be heard by blind consumers using text-to-speech software on their mobile phones to access the alerts. Many suggested the need for a header such as "This is a ..." to allow for more clarity. Such a header is currently employed by the Emergency Alert System (EAS) messages broadcast on television, radio and cable systems.
*Deaf and hard of hearing participants commented that they would like to see enhancements such as strobe lights, screen flashes and stronger vibrating cadences. While these enhancements can be addressed by cell phone manufacturers, they aren't required to do so by the FCC.
The tests were conducted on November 12, 2008, with 30 subjects. The results will be presented to the FCC and others during the State of Technology conference in September.
The FCC established the Commercial Mobile Alert System in 2008 to provide a framework for commercial mobile service providers to voluntarily transmit emergency alerts to their subscribers. The Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies- Wireless Emergency Communications project has been developing software and conducting field tests on how to make the emergency alert system accessible for people with sensory disabilities who use mobile devices.
Tech's Wireless Emergency Communications project received additional federal funding to field test the provisions of Commercial Mobile Alert System that affect accessibility, such as the limitation of 90 characters, not permitting URLs, and volume limits including specific vibrating cadences and alert tones. By conducting this field test, they will provide the FCC and the wireless industry with concrete evidence from the perspective of end-users on how the Commercial Mobile Alert System would be better able to serve the specific needs of people with sensory disabilities. Most recommendations, however, would render the system more effective for all consumers. For example, participants suggested repeating the attention signal and vibrating cadences in intervals until they are shut off by the user to ensure the receipt of the alert by an individual who is away from their phone, asleep, driving or unable to hear or see.
The field test recruited participants from the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf, Atlanta Public School System, the Wireless Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center Consumer Advisory Network and the Georgia Radio Reading Service (GaRRS). Subjects were as diverse in their sensory limitations as they were in their technical skill level, ranging from those who were fully deaf or fully blind to those with enhanced hearing (hearing aid/cochlear implants) or enhanced vision (glasses/contacts).
Though field test participant's names are usually held in the strictest confidence, one participant agreed to go on the record.
"I applaud PBA and Georgia Tech for their effort in bringing this very important issue to the public," said Georgia State Representative Bob Smith. "We must continue to make this a priority, to seek innovative and creative ways to notify people with disabilities and tirelessly work to improve and perfect the notification system. It is paramount that Georgians are aware that people with various disabilities, more than any time in our history, need to be informed of catastrophic events."
This is the second field test hosted by project partner Public Broadcasting Atlanta. PBA recognized the importance of this community project and how it aligned with its vision of implementing a Local Education Network System (LENS) capable of convening individuals, organizations and communities. MetroCast Atlanta, a component of LENS, would serve as an emergency information network for schools, city officials and citizens in the event of natural or terrorist disaster.
The mobile devices and cellular service used in this field test were the result of a generous donation from WEC industry partner AT&T. For more information on WEC, go to www.wirelessrerc.org. Funding for the CMAS parameter field test was made possible by the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, grant # H133E060061.
]]>The Arbor Day Foundation designated Tech a Tree Campus USA on Nov. 18. Tech is the 10th institution awarded this distinction for best practices in campus forestry, and is the first in the state of Georgia.
Hyacinth Ide, landscape manager with Facilities, received the award Nov. 18 in Atlanta at the Partners in Community Forestry Conference. Ide's staff works to not only maintain and replace, but also increase the roughly 6,000 trees across Tech's campus.
The criteria requires five core standards for institutions seeking award consideration: a campus tree advisory committee, a campus tree-care plan, dedicated annual expenditures on the plan, involvement in an Arbor Day observance and institution of a service-learning project to engage students.
To achieve the goals set in the 2006 Campus Landscape Master Plan, Facilities established the Institute's Campus Tree Care Plan in September. These goals include a 55 percent tree canopy, 22 percent woodlands coverage area, managing the impact of development and construction on campus trees, and ensuring proper removal and adequate replacement of trees.
"The reason our [designation] went so fast is that we were already doing most of this," Ide said. He applied for the designation in October.
The committee membership overseeing this plan is comprised of students, area neighborhood representatives and members across several Institute departments:Facilities, Housing, Capital Planning and Space Management, Parking and Transportation, the Center for Geographical Information Systems and the School of Biology.
Tech must reapply annually to retain the Tree Campus USA designation.
]]>The briefing, "Tomorrow's Infrastructure: Researching Sustainable Solutions," will be moderated by Reginald DesRoches, associate chair and professor in Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and feature a panel of experts including Michael D. Meyer, also a Georgia Tech Civil and Environmental Engineering professor. They will be joined by Douglas R. Rose, deputy administrator and chief engineer for operations with the Maryland State Highway Administration, and S. Massoud Amin, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
"Improving our nation's civil infrastructure is the key to economic growth, national security, and quality of life," said DesRoches. "We have an opportunity, through research and innovation, to define what the next generation of infrastructure can look like."
Georgia Tech is uniquely positioned to address the nation's infrastructure crisis based on its breadth of interdisciplinary and strategic research initiatives, according to DesRoches. Recent advances in materials science, nanotechnology, information technology, robotics and systems engineering provide unique opportunities for faculty to work on critical issues ranging from disaster resilient infrastructure to intelligent and adaptable infrastructure systems.
]]>Stamatiou created Skribit (rhymes with ribbet) out of necessity to help him as he worked on his own blog, www.PaulStamatiou.com. He had been running his blog since 2005, but was having a bit of trouble coming up with the next thing to write. So he pitched the idea at Startup Weekend Atlanta, a conference that brings together entrepreneurs, computer programmers and marketing types to create companies and products -they built it that weekend.
"After three days, people start to ask, 'why haven't you blogged in a while?'," said Stamatiou. "With Skribit, readers can vote on topics and post ideas on what to write about and the widget will sort them out by how hot they are. If you suggest something, you will get notified when they use your suggestion."
Skribit's user base is vast, according to Stamatiou. Everyone from English-speaking bloggers to Japanese, Spanish and Korean bloggers are using it. He even has a police department in Maryland using it to get feedback from the community.
What makes Skribit successful, said Stamatiou, is that it provides a place for bloggers to get new ideas, rather than simply write about what everyone else is already talking about.
"Someone might use Skribit if they want their site to be up-to-date, but don't want to go to the echo chamber to mimic everyone else," said Stamatiou.
Skribit works in two ways. Users can post suggestions on topics to write about on the site either anonymously or with a user account. Bloggers can either read the site or post a widget on their blog. The benefit, said Stamatiou, of having the widget is that readers can post their suggestions directly to the blog they read. Readers can vote on their favorite topics, and the blog displays the suggestions based on factors such as how many votes they've received and how recently they were suggested.
Stamatiou created the site while he was a Computational Media student in both the College of Computing and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech. And although it came out of his initial idea, Stamatiou continues to develop the site with co-founder Calvin Yu. When he graduates later this month, he plans to work full time on making Skribit profitable with help from the Georgia Tech Edison Fund.
The Georgia Tech Edison Fund helps provide initial funding for early-stage technology companies that have a close association with Georgia Tech. Chief Commercialization Officer Stephen Fleming said that keeping young talent from having to look outside of Atlanta for initial funding is one of his most important missions.
"At one time, I know that Paul was looking to move out to California to try to get funding for Skribit," said Fleming. "I'm glad that we were able to provide him with the initial funding to keep young talent like him here in Atlanta."
So, does Stamatiou ever use Skribit to help out when he gets blogger's block? Of course he does.
"For me it is a backup plan when I really can't think of something to write. If I notice something that has received a lot of votes in a very short amount of time, I'll take that as a note that my readers really want to read about it and I'll change my plans and blog about it," he said. "Then there are the times that, for a few weeks, I won't have any clue about what to write, so I'll just rely on it."
]]>The tool, which is accessed through a standard Web browser, tracks about 80 blood safety indicators continuously at the hospital and provincial levels. A pilot test in Zambia showed that the tool could improve the timeliness and accuracy of data collection efforts, allowing blood safety officials to better forecast or predict regional and seasonal blood usage patterns.
"A simple, scalable, Web-based tool like this can make a tremendous difference in public health around the world," said Santosh Vempala, distinguished professor in the College of Computing's School of Computer Science and faculty leader for the project. "The Zambian health officials immediately saw the benefits of real-time data collection and the ability to compare different regions' needs and see trends over time."
The project started when John Pitman, public health advisor in CDC's Global AIDS Program, met Vempala and explained the challenges involved in ensuring global blood safety. Their vision of a web-based tracking system was taken up in 2008 by students in the College of Computing's Computing for Good class, co-taught by Vempala. Using information about current conditions and future demands within the target countries, the Georgia Tech team, computer science Ph.D. students Adebola Osuntogun and Stephen Thomas, built a Web-based system that resource-limited countries of any size could use to report data to national authorities. The system could also be used by a global organization, like CDC, to monitor multiple projects.
The Georgia Tech team developed the new Web-based tool from a Microsoft Excel version created by CDC. The team field-tested the Web-based tool in Zambia in July-August 2008 to obtain feedback from blood safety program staff.
"I was impressed by the team's ability to adapt to the computing environment in Zambia, and to make the changes necessary to ensure this would be an appropriate solution for developing countries," Pitman said. "Including staff from the Zambian national blood transfusion service in the development process was essential to be sure it fit their needs."
Ministries of health in Botswana, Cote d-Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia will begin using the new tracking system on January 1, 2009. All 14 countries are recipients of U.S. financial support through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Georgia Tech's Computing for Good class gives students the opportunity to understand how computing can be used to improve the human condition, according to Vempala. "Projects such as this collaboration with the CDC present computer science as a cutting-edge technological discipline that empowers our students to solve problems and make a positive impact on society."
For more information about Georgia Tech's Computing for Good initiative and classes, please visit http://www.cc.gatech.edu/news/features/technology-activism-computing-for....
CDC is recognized as a leading U.S. governmental agency for protecting the health and safety of people, both within the United States and internationally. CDC's mission is to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling diseases, injuries, and disabilities. For more information: www.cdc.gov.
]]>There are approximately 1,900 undergraduate and graduate students taking part in three ceremonies. The doctoral and master's commencement will be held on Friday, December 12 at 7 p.m. in Alexander Memorial Coliseum. Two undergraduate ceremonies will be held on Saturday, December 13 (9 a.m.) for the Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Management, Sciences and Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and 2 p.m. for the College of Engineering.
Johnson was named to his current post in July and is responsible for all aspects of the NBA's officiating program, including recruiting, training, development, scheduling, data management and analysis, and work rules enforcement.
Prior to working for the NBA, Johnson served as deputy commanding general and deputy chief of engineers, the second highest-ranking senior engineer staff officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He retired in April 2008 after 32 years of military service.
Johnson's awards and decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Army Commendation Medal, Combat Action Badge, Parachutist Badge, Air Assault Badge, Army Staff Identification Badge and the Recruiter Badge. He is also the recipient of the 2003 Black Engineer of the Year Award for Professional Achievement in Government Service, a member of Georgia Tech's Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni, and the recipient of the 2008 Black Engineer Lifetime Achievement Award.
After earning a bachelor's degree from the U.S. Military Academy in 1976, Johnson received a Master of Science in Operations Research from Georgia Tech in 1985. A native of Chicago, he currently resides in Manhattan and is the father of 19-year-old son Ian.
William W. George, a renowned member of the Harvard Business School faculty for the past five years and also widely recognized as a corporate leader and a prolific author, will address the Ph.D. and master's ceremony.
George, a 1964 Industrial and Systems Engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, teaches leadership and leadership development along with several executive education programs as a professor of management practice at Harvard University. His research activities have focused on leadership development, and he has worked to develop innovative course offerings on leadership and corporate accountability, authentic leadership development, leading modern corporations, and leadership dilemmas.
During 2002-03, George was professor of leadership and governance at IMD International in Lausanne, Switzerland, and executive-in-residence at Yale University's School of Management.
The author of a new best-selling book on leadership, Finding Your True North: A Personal Guide, George's previous two books-True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership and Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value-were also best-sellers.
Inducted into the Georgia Tech Engineering Hall of Fame in 2005, George was named a distinguished alumnus of both the College of Engineering and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 1996. He is a former member of the Georgia Tech Advisory Board.
In addition to his bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, George also earned an MBA with high distinction from Harvard University, where he was a Baker Scholar. He has received an honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from Bryant University. George and his wife, Penny, have two sons, Jeffrey and Jonathan.
]]>Thatcher, a designer, has created everything from modulators to synthesizers to sequencers, to use in his own performances. Although he has never had the time to perfect a design to take it to market, Driscoll, a fellow music technology classmate, had just the entrepreneurial spirit necessary to take Thatcher's creations to the marketplace.
"Basically I've created a business to help designers like Travis develop their devices, finish them and sell them," said Driscoll. "Today's technology has made everything more accessible to everyone. All of our designs are completely open source. Some customers may only want the raw materials so they can put the devices together themselves, while others will want the completed piece assembled for them."
"This works out for both of us because I wouldn't have the time to enhance the instruments that I've created," said Thatcher. "I am able to put the finishing touches on many devices that I may never have the time to complete otherwise."
The two music technology alumni say the Georgia Tech Music Technology program is a big reason for their success and continued interest in the field.
"We were exposed to a whole new direction that you could take with music and technology," said Driscoll. "The fact that you could combine these two in an artistic path. For me it was like, oh, I get to be a creative engineer."
Driscoll and Thatcher say business is good right now and they plan on releasing new devices down the road. You can find more information about their musical creation at http://curiousinventor.com.
]]>The luncheon was hosted by the American Chemical Society's Science and the Congress Project and was co-hosted by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX). Julia Hamm of the Solar Electric Power Association and Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology also spoke to the gathering.
Brown is one of Georgia Tech's most sought after experts on energy policy. In addition to informing national leaders about energy policy, she is also the author of Georgia Tech's quarterly energy sustainability index, the EnergyBuzz (www.gatech.edu/energybuzz).
She joined Georgia Tech in 2006 after a distinguished career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There she held various leadership positions and led several major energy technology and policy scenario studies. Recognizing her stature as a national leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States, Brown remains affiliated with ORNL as a Visiting Distinguished Scientist.
]]>Built on the premise that science, technology and engineering programs (STE) are integral to the foundations of modern society, the fellowship was established to foster partnerships between tenured scientists and engineers from U.S. academic institutions and offices within the State Department and USAID.
During his initial two-week visit to Washington, Butera said he and other Fellows were provided 21 two- to three-page project descriptions. After visiting the various offices sponsoring the projects, the Fellows decided amongst themselves their project selections.
"The projects were diverse, ranging from bureaus who wanted a technical person to be involved in science outreach, partnerships and/or serve as a 'science officer' for an entire region, to functional bureaus that serve specific tasks, such as international ocean agreements and climate change treaties." Butera elected to work within the Office of Chemical and Biological Weapons Threat Reduction in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, which is the lead policy office within the U.S. government for foreign policy issues related to chemical and biological agents.
A week of American Association for the Advancement of Science workshops helped to acclimate the Fellows to the interaction of various government offices from a science and policy perspective. "Another topic of emphasis was contrasting the thinking and decision-making priorities [between] scientists and engineers and policy-makers, and how to bridge that gap," he said.
But Butera's work will not just provide him with more experience working on treaties and negotiations regarding the destruction and non-proliferation of weapons. His two 'dual-use' projects will aid both his research and the Institute. "I chose the office and the projects because they directly relate to ongoing programs that exist at Georgia Tech."
"One [project] involves collaborating with foreign counterparts to develop educational tools and professional awareness strategies related to defining, recognizing and solving dual-use issues that may arise in the course of biological research," Butera said. "A second project involves working with other federal agencies to develop strategies for dealing with the dual-use issues that may arise from the de novo synthesis of gene sequences."
With his past experience as graduate program director, Butera had to deal with export control rules impacting student visas. "My experience this year is directly relevant to all of these areas," Butera said. "While I am officially representing the State Department in my position for the next year, I hope that my time can both provide input to these processes from an academic perspective, as well as serve as a resource to the relevant offices when I return to Tech."
He also refers to his dealing with the Institute's Office of Research Compliance as a bioengineering researcher. "I hope that my participation and my specific activities regarding dual-use biological research can help improve our campus-wide research ethics training, as well as contribute to the ongoing activities of the Sam Nunn Security Program and the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy."
Butera's research is primarily in the fields of neuroengineering, physiological modeling and real-time instrumentation. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Tech in 1991, and received his master's (1994) and doctorate (1996) from Rice University in Houston. He has been a member of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty since 1999 after conducting postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. He also is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and the associate editor of the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Originally funded by the Carnegie Corp. of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jefferson Science Fellows has been funded by the State Department since 2008. The program is administered by the Fellowships Office of the National Academies.
Jefferson Science fellowships are awarded by panelists selected from the National Academies. Nominations are limited to scientists, technologists and engineers with tenured faculty appointments at U.S. colleges or universities.
Nominees and applicants were chosen based upon the abilities to articulate science and technology issues to the general public; to quickly understand and discuss work and advancements outside their discipline areas; to maintain an open mind regarding public policy discussions at the State Department or USAID; and their 'stature, recognition and experience' in the scientific or engineering community both in the United States and abroad.
The nomination process for 2009 Jefferson Science Fellows is under way. Entries are due prior to Jan. 15, 2009.
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The PECASE program recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge. This Presidential Award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their careers.
"I'm delighted that the achievements and extraordinary potential of these two exceptional faculty members are being recognized by the National Science Foundation and by the President of the United States," said Gary Schuster, interim president of the Georgia Tech. "This is outstanding news for them - a PECASE award and the accompanying support can have a lasting positive effect on a research career. And this is yet another indicator that Georgia Tech's reputation is strong as a leading research institution. I am proud to serve at a university that has such dedicated and committed faculty members."
Kim Cobb
Cobb's research focuses on understanding climate change using geological archives such as corals and cave stalagmites. By reconstructing the climate from the past few decades to the last several millennia, Cobb aims to inform current climate models that help predict how changes might occur in the future.
"I'm happy that my climate change research seems to be a focus on the national stage," said Cobb. "I hope that it serves to emphasize the importance of paleo-climate research in this field."
She joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2004 after earning her Ph.D. in oceanography in 2002 from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and spending two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech.
"Models can only take you so far in seeing how the climate may change over the next few decades," said Cobb. "In many cases, the data is too short, so the paleo-climate data is added to make a more complete record, so we can see how temperature and precipitation patterns respond to climate forcing."
Cobb has spent time in the caves of Borneo, analyzing stalagmites in search of clues about the climate of the earth's past. This month, she's traveling to the Bahamas to take high-definition footage of coral reefs so they can be rendered in a 3D virtual environment.
The multidisciplinary research team, which also includes Frank Dellaert from Tech's College of Computing and Brian Magerko from Tech's Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, will also be using the hi-def images they take of the reef to create a virtual ecosystem that scientists can use to collaborate and share data.
"This current research has educational uses for schools and museums, but we can also use the technology to capture large tracts of the reef in detail so other scientists can see species diversity and coral health without having to spend the money to go there," she said.
Nick Feamster
Feamster received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2005, and his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in January 2006.
He is developing techniques, tools and systems to make it easier to manage and protect network operations. Networks, particularly communications networks, have become larger, more complex and virtually ubiquitous. This makes them more valuable to users, but also more vulnerable to problems and attacks.
"A lot of people have figured out that you can make a quick buck with spam or phishing attacks, and securing networks has become a really big problem," Feamster said. "You have people out there who are not just trying to do damage or inflict harm to the network, but to make money."
Much of Feamster's current research focuses on making it easier for network operators and managers to do their jobs well. Network operators have to make the network highly available and secure at the same time, and that means monitoring network conditions, detecting problems that can be fixed and quickly taking steps to fix them. But when networks go down or suffer outside attacks, he says, operators often don't have a complete picture of what happened and have to rely on anecdotal data gathered from individual users who have called a help line or reported a problem.
"If we could automate some of that and gather data from the edge of the network where the individual machines and users are and somehow push that information back into the network, it would help network operators figure out the problem and fix it faster," he said.
Feamster also is working on solutions to unwanted network traffic/spam and phishing attacks. He says current fixes, such as applying spam filters based on words in an e-mail or the IP address of the sender's computer, are too specific, and spammers have quickly figured out how to get around them. In his research, Feamster focuses on identifying some key and unchanging characteristics of spam so computer scientists can develop broader protections against it.
"The number of recipients is a good example," he said. "If an e-mail has hundreds of recipients, there's a good chance it's spam. Also legitimate users of e-mail send messages that vary greatly in length, from one-liners to maybe several pages. The length of spam is almost always within a certain, limited range."
Cobb and Feamster were nominated for the PECASE by the National Science Foundation. Eight federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers at the start of their careers whose work shows exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the twenty-first century. Participating agencies award recipients up to five years of funding to further their research in support of critical government missions.
]]>Landman received the Humboldt Award in recognition of his past accomplishments in research and teaching. Humboldt Awards are given to researchers whose fundamental discoveries have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing significant achievements in the future. Landman's award was sponsored by the Technical University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute.
"I am most grateful to my colleagues who nominated me and supported my candidacy for this prestigious award. It is a happy moment when one's work is acknowledged and recognized by his peers, and I trust that this will encourage us to continue our joint endeavors of research and discovery" said Landman.
In addition to the monetary prize, Landman will also have the opportunity to conduct research with colleagues in Germany. He plans to continue his research into nanocatalysis with Ueli Heiz, professor of chemistry at the Technical University of Munich, and to develop joint research projects with Professor Klaus Kern at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart on surface-supported nanostructures, quantum dots and self-assembly.
"I was extraordinarily pleased to learn that Professor Uzi Landman has been selected to receive a Humboldt Research Award," said Gary Schuster, interim president of Georgia Tech. "This award is given only to those researchers who are in leading positions and at the peak of their careers. The competition for the Humboldt Award is intensive and essentially worldwide. This much-deserved honor is a testament to Professor Landman's leading contributions to unraveling the physics of microscopic-level interactions of materials. His work is recognized around the world for pioneering the analytical models and computer-based simulations that reveal physical phenomena underlying the properties of matter. Georgia Tech is fortunate to have a scientist of the caliber of Uzi Landman."
Landman is a pioneer of using computer simulations to discover new phenomena on the nanoscale. His main areas of scientific interest are in condensed matter physics, clusters, quantum dots, correlated states and sponataneous symmetry breaking in confined fermionic and bosonic systems, nanowires, nanotribology, nanocatalysis, nanojets, stochastic hydrodynamics, self-assembly, the electronic and transport properties of DNA, and the properties of biomembranes and trans membrane transport, with an emphasis on the development and use of advanced computational methodologies.
In 1999 his team, in collaboration with Heiz, discovered that gold is a very effective catalyst when it is aggregated in clusters of eight to two dozen atoms. They also found that electrical charging of gold is crucial to its catalytic capabilities. These theoretical predictions have been verified experimentally, and the research team stands ready to further explore finding ways for control of nanocatalytic activity through the design and modification of the substrates supporting the catalytic clusters, as well as through the use of external fields.
"This collaboration, where theory and experiment complement and challenge each other, had already resulted in several key discoveries," said Landman. "We expect that the continuation and strengthening of the interaction between our research groups, enabled by the Humboldt Award, would open new research directions in nanocatalysis, including in areas related to energy research and environmental issues."
Throughout the past decade, Landman and his coworkers have been investigating the properties of electrons confined in quantum dots fabricated at the interfaces of semiconductor heterostructures, and studied as potential logic gates in quantum computers. As early as 1999, Landman, in collaboration with Senior Research Scientist Dr. Constantine Yannouleas, discovered formation of crystalline patterns of the confined electrons, called "electron molecules," which were experimentally verified in a joint project with a group at the ETH in Switzerland and published in 2006. This research has been extended recently to investigations addressing formation of "boson molecules" in ultra-cold trapped atomic systems. Landman said that he is looking forward to develop joint research projects on these topics with German, and other, colleagues.
"Small is different," said Landman. "We cannot use the way physical systems behave on the large scale to predict what will happen when we go to levels only a few atoms in size. But we know the rules of physics, and we can use them to create model environments in which we can discover new phenomena through high-level computer-based simulations which serve as a 'computational microscopy', supplementing, complementing, challenging and motivating laboratory experiments. In this way we employ computers and novel computational methodologies as tools of discovery"
Landman joined the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1977. He is currently a Regents' and Institute Professor, holding the Callaway Endowed Chair in Computational Materials Science, and serving as the director of the Georgia Tech Center for Computational Materials Science. Landman has published over 350 articles and co-authored a book titled "Nanocatalysis." He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society and the British Institute of Physics, and he received several honors and awards, with the most recent ones being an invited lecture at the 2000 Nobel symposium on clusters, the 2000 Feynman Prize in Nanothechnology, the 2002 American Material Research Society (MRS) medal for his pioneering molecular dynamics simulations which led to elucidation of the microscopic mechanisms of tribological processes, and the 2005 American Physical Society Rahman Prize in computational physics. He received the Georgia Tech distinguished professor award in 1992.
]]>Upon arrival, Dr. Crittenden will serve as director of Georgia Tech's Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.
"It's an honor to welcome Dr. Crittenden to Georgia Tech where he joins a leading group of students and faculty members," said Georgia Tech's Interim President Gary Schuster. "He is a world-renowned teacher and leader at the forefront of sustainability research. His reputation and leadership in this area will reinforce and enrich our efforts in sustainability, an area of critical importance to the Institute and the state."
Dr. Crittenden has received multiple awards for his research in the treatment and removal of hazardous materials from drinking and groundwater. He also has designed and received copyrights on computer software programs that analyze various pollution and absorption methods.
The American Institute of Chemical Engineers' (AIChE) Centennial Celebration Committee recently named Crittenden as one of the leading 100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era.
Crittenden joins Georgia Tech as a professor holding an appointment in Civil and Environmental Engineering. In this position, he will lead the creation of an integrated initiative in Sustainable Urban Systems and conduct research in related nanotechnology and computational science.
Currently, Crittenden is working with a group of academic institutions on developing an assessment tool for educational programs outlining the interconnected nature of social decision making, regional development, material flows, energy use and local, regional and global environmental impacts.
"Urban sustainability is a vital component of the future, especially in Georgia," said C. Michael Cassidy, president and CEO of the Georgia Research Alliance. "As our state's capital continues its evolution into a global metropolis, we are lucky to have Dr. Crittenden, an internationally recognized expert in this field, as a GRA Eminent Scholar."
In the private sector, Crittenden has served as a consultant to companies, universities and cities in Germany, Japan and across the United States. He is also part owner of Superior Engineering Technologies, a company which he expects to continue growing in Georgia.
"As director of the Brooks Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, I will build on the enormous momentum that Georgia Tech has developed in this area," Crittenden said. "I have a long-term goal to engineer the anthrosphere [the part of the environment that is made or modified by humans for use in human activities] to exist within the means of nature. That is, humans should only use resources that nature can provide and generate wastes that nature can assimilate. With the tremendous intellectual capital that Georgia Tech can use to tackle this problem, we can make substantial progress toward realizing this goal. We will be only limited by our imagination."
Crittenden is active in an array of national organizations. He serves on the Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education as well as the Engineering Advisory Board for the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Engineering Committee for the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology. Crittenden is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received the AEESP Landmark Achievement Award and the ASCE Huber Research Prize. He also has authored more than 100 research papers garnering more than 2,300 citations.
Prior to coming to Georgia Tech, Crittenden was the Richard Snell Presidential Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Arizona State University.
He received his Bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
About GRA
A model public-private partnership between Georgia universities, business and state government, the Georgia Research Alliance helps build Georgia's technology-rich economy in three major ways: through attracting Eminent Scholars to Georgia's research universities; through helping create centers of research excellence and through converting research into products, services and jobs that drive the economy. To learn more about GRA, visit www.gra.org.
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premiere 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. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and minority engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
The Georgia Board of Regents announced today that three times as many USG students study abroad as in 1998. Georgia Tech has almost doubled its student participation since the 1999-2000 academic school year.
During the 1999-2000 school year Tech had more than 570 students participating in study abroad programs. That compares to more than 1,100 students participating in the fall of 2007-2008 academic school year. The university is also home to the largest international student and scholar population in the USG and continues to increase the number of foreign language classes it offers.
"Our goal is to have 50 percent of our undergraduates participate in an international experience by the time they graduate," said Amy Henry, executive director for International Education. "Georgia Tech has an award-winning program, the International Plan, that also integrates international experience into 24 of Tech's 32 majors. So we've gone well beyond traditional study abroad programs to think of the students' preparation for a global economy in deeper and more comprehensive ways."
Georgia Tech has been successful in integrating international studies despite the difficulties that come with managing this experience in majors like engineering and the sciences.
There are about 550 students enrolled in the International Plan. The program has won the Heiskell Award from the Institute of International Education (honorable mention) and the Paul Simon Award from NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
]]>Shelby Highsmith, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, is reporting for MTV's Chose or Lose '08 campaign, and the opportunity has given him a unique perspective covering the election as a member of the press.
The opportunity has presented some memorable moments for Highsmith, who says one of those moments came early in the campaign season.
"Super Tuesday, as long ago as it was, still stands out as the most exciting part of Choose or Lose '08 so far," said Highsmith. "The energy around Super Tuesday itself was really high for the whole nation, and MTV was trying something really groundbreaking for our coverage."
According to Highsmith, MTV partnered with an Internet startup called Flixwagon, a Web site paired with mobile phone software that enables some high-end camera-phones to broadcast live video to the Internet over the cellular connection. Twenty-three Street Teamers were sent these Nokia phones with the software installed and spent the whole day covering the election in their hometowns and states, and when MTV started broadcasting, the video feeds were immediately available on the MTV News and Choose or Lose Web sites.
After each broadcast, the producers in New York downloaded the archived footage and repackaged it into on-air news updates that played on MTV throughout the day.
"All over town, the people I talked to were really charged up about the election, from street corners to campaign parties, and the addition of being a mobile, one-man remote TV studio was just the icing on the cake," said Highsmith. "Little did we know Super Tuesday would fade so far into memory in this long election season!"
Highsmith believes that technology is changing journalism and no one is sure where the media industry will go next.
"I don't know the answer, but it's getting faster and more mobile in both acquisition and delivery," said Highsmith. "The cellphone software we used for MTV during our Super Tuesday coverage can make anyone at the scene of breaking news a reporter, and then that same content is being consumed on mobile handsets by young people who rely more and more heavily on the mobile Web. While there will always be a place for classically trained journalists to do in-depth research and reporting, I think the new field is in classifying, sorting, collating, and redistributing all of this user-generated content, as quickly as possible."
Highsmith says this journalism opportunity fit his long-term career plans even though he's a Ph. D. in mechanical engineering.
"After seven years of pure technical research, I have realized that more pure technical research is not the career path for me," said Highsmith. " I received a BA in philosophy in my dual-degree undergraduate program, and I am minoring in international affairs right now. I also participated in the Sam Nunn Security Studies pre-doctoral fellowship program here at Tech. So after I leave Georgia Tech, I hope to pursue a career in the policy sector, but still relating to engineering, science and technology."
Highsmith says that he wants the U.S. government to make informed decisions regarding investment in technology for the national benefit.
"Wherever I can find work explaining the pros and cons of technology to legislators and policy makers, I hope I can make a difference. I look at this 'citizen journalism' experience as training for doing less technical research and then framing a story in a concise, clear manner for the lay observer."
]]>Nerem is an NAE member and professor and director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He will receive the Founders Award for 'seminal research on fluid mechanics and atherogenesis, being a pioneer in the field of tissue engineering, founder of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and his leadership in engineering nationally and internationally.' The award recognizes outstanding professional, educational, and personal achievement to the benefit of society, and it includes $2,500 and a gold medallion.
Nerem began his career in the 1960s and 1970s making important contributions to aeronautical engineering while he worked as professor of aeronautical and astronautical engineering and associate dean of the graduate school at the Ohio State University. During this time, he became a leader in the developing field of bioengineering, using his background in fluid dynamics to advance heart and blood vessel research. Nerem discovered how fluid dynamics can be used to understand the location in blood vessels of lesions that are associated with atherosclerosis, a major component of heart disease.
From 1979 to 1986, Nerem was professor and chair of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston-University Park. In 1987, he took his expertise to the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he continues to serve in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Here Nerem's research focused on tissue engineering - the use of a combination of cells, engineering, and materials to produce implants with biological function - and he was among the first researchers to produce engineered blood vessels in the laboratory with the ultimate goal being to replace damaged arteries. He also has been instrumental in studying the role of stem cells in vascular tissue regeneration.
Nerem provided the leadership that allowed bioengineering to develop in concert with other engineering disciplines, and this led to the formation of the joint Department of Biomedical Engineering between Georgia Tech and Emory University. He has been the director of the Georgia Tech-Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues since its inception in 1998. The center is an Engineering Research Center sponsored by the National Science Foundation and was the first federally-funded center for tissue engineering. It has since evolved to focus on regenerative medicine and stem cell technology.
Nerem was the primary influence in the formation of AIMBE, the public policy voice for the bioengineering discipline, and served as founding president from 1992 to 1994. AIMBE holds workshops and stakeholder meetings to gather information and provide recommendations on important legislation -- such as the Biomaterials Access Assurance Act of 1998 -- and for creation of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health.
In addition to being a member of the NAE (1988), Nerem was also elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1992. He has served on dozens of advisory boards in the service of academia and government and has contributed services to many government and private research funding agencies. He is the author of more than 200 publications and has been awarded numerous honors in recognition of his achievements. He received a Ph.D. in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from the Ohio State University in 1964.
G. Wayne Clough, a member of the NAE and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, will be presented the Arthur M. Bueche Award for 'outstanding accomplishments advancing civil engineering and higher education, and for leadership at the local, state, and national level in policy analysis and advisory roles.' He will receive $2,500 and a gold medallion in recognition of his statesmanship in U.S. public policy on technology, and for promoting ties among academia, industry, and government.
Clough's early career was marked by successes in research and teaching. He held posts at Duke and Stanford Universities; served as head of the civil engineering department and dean of the college of engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; and was provost for academic affairs at the University of Washington. He has received nine awards for his work in research and teaching from the American Society of Civil Engineers, including the 2004 Outstanding Projects and Leaders Award for lifetime contributions to higher education.
In 1994, Clough was named president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, his alma mater. During his tenure at Georgia Tech, he transformed the university from a good regional engineering school to an internationally preeminent science, engineering, and technology institute. The undergraduate engineering program grew to have the largest enrollment in the country and he increased research expenditures and private gifts to the university as a whole. Georgia Tech is consistently ranked among the top 10 on US News and World Report's annual list of the best colleges and universities.
Clough is widely recognized for his ability to turn engineering expertise into policy recommendations. In 2001, Clough was appointed by President George W. Bush to the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST). In addition, Clough was appointed by President Bush in 2004 to the National Science Board, becoming the only individual to have ever served simultaneously on both bodies.
Since 1997, Clough has served on the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, and while on its executive committee, co-chaired the Council's National Innovation Initiative (NII). Many recommendations from PCAST and NII during his time of service were reflected in the National Academies' report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which contributed to President Bush's decision to create the American Competitiveness Initiative in an effort to increase research and development investments.
At the local level, he has been appointed by two governors to chair two separate task forces that provide technical advice to the state of Georgia, and was appointed by the mayor of Atlanta to form a panel advising the city on water issues. He was instrumental in preparing Atlanta for the 1996 Olympics and readying the Georgia Tech campus to serve as the Olympic Village.
Clough has served on several advisory committees and has served as a consulting board member for 18 major civil engineering projects. He has authored more than 130 papers and reports. He received a Ph.D. in civil engineering in 1969 from the University of California, Berkeley.
The National Academy of Engineering is a private, nonprofit institution that provides technology advice under a congressional charter. NAE also salutes leaders in engineering for their lifetime dedication to the field, and their commitment to advancing the society through great achievements. NAE dedicates more than $1 million annually to recognize these leaders, and to bring better understanding of engineering's importance to society. In addition to the Founders and Bueche awards, NAE presents the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Frit J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, and the Bernard M. Gordon Prize. For more information about these awards, please contact Deborah Young, NAE awards administrator, at 202-334-1266, or visit the NAE Web site at http://www.nae.edu/awards.
]]>"Georgia Tech undergraduate programs continue to excel, and I'm pleased that we've been able to maintain this measure of excellence for so long," said Interim President and Provost Gary Schuster. "Our engineering college continues to be a strength, while other programs around campus continue their national climb."
The College of Engineering, which is the nation's largest, moved up in the rankings to fourth compared to fifth last year. Six College of Engineering programs ranked in the top five among specialty areas. Industrial Engineering ranked first, Aerospace ranked second, Biomedical ranked third, Mechanical ranked fourth (not ranked in top 5 last year), Civil ranked fifth and Electrical ranked fifth (not ranked in top 5 last year).
The College of Management ranked 35th nationally among Best Business Programs. Georgia Tech's internship and cooperative education program as well as the senior capstone programs were cited as 'Programs to Look For.' Tech also ranked 47th on the 'Great Schools, Great Prices' list.
]]>"This competition includes one of the most difficult missions of any engineering competition," said Eric Johnson. "To attempt it, we came with a system that combined proven components developed over the past six years with some new components that were put together over the past year in a challenging system integration effort."
The GTMax-helicopter is based on the Yamaha RMAX helicopter. It was equipped with two general purpose computers, differential GPS, inertial navigation and two cameras. The slung-load system consisted of redundant release mechanisms, a bump-switch to detect hitting a wall to enable retries, a data-link relay and a magnetometer to measure its twist. The rover system included a high-resolution camera, a general-purpose computer to control driving and manage images, and infrared sensors to enable it to effectively move around rooms indoors.
Software was developed by the team for helicopter navigation and flight control, three different image processing and tracking systems (locating correct building based on sign, locating openings and tracking the opening during approach to the window), automated mission management and simulation tools.
"We were delighted that all parts of the system were demonstrated multiple times during our mission attempts," said Johnson. "My worst fear was that the initial part of the mission would fail and all the work that went into later phases would be for naught - like a rover designed to drive on Mars that fails to get off the launch pad."
The Georgia Tech team made four attempts at the complete mission. On all four of these attempts, the GTAR research UAV system (referred to as the GTMax, a small helicopter) automatically flew a three-kilometer flight to a small village and flew a search pattern, looking at the exterior walls of the buildings within. It automatically located a pre-specified sign on one of the buildings, identifying the correct "building of interest" on all but one of the attempts.
The vehicle then automatically flew a search pattern looking for openings into the building. Having selected a suitable opening, it then dropped a 12-foot-long boom on a 90-foot two-wire slung load, allowed to gently descend by use of a spool/damper system. A camera on the boom was then used to steer the boom to the opening on the building. The boom missed the opening in all three attempts, coming within feet of an open door on one attempt.
The plan was to have a small ground robot drop from the boom inside the opening. This rover would then drive within the building and take a picture of a specific item to complete the mission. Due to missing the openings, the rover was dropped outside the building on these attempts, and so it drove around outside the building transmitting images relayed by the 'mother ship' helicopter back to the launch point.
"To finish the mission completely in the required time would have been great, but we are completely happy with the first place finish," said Johnson. "The mission itself can now retire undefeated, for it will be something different next year."
This is the final year for this contest mission, one that teams have attempted since 2001. Since no team completed the entire mission, $80,000 in prize money was distributed among the teams according to how far their system progressed in the mission in 2008. Having come the closest, the Georgia Tech team, getting the closest, will receive a $27,200 prize for its performance.
The competition was sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. The team consists of graduate and undergraduate students from Aerospace and Electrical & Computer Engineering. The team wishes to thank other sponsors of GTAR 2008: Lockheed Martin, Adaptive Flight Inc., and NovAtel.
]]>A professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a research faculty member of the Institute of Paper Science and Technology at Georgia Tech, Ragauskas has researched lignocellulosics since 1989 when his studies were primarily concerned with the conversion of woody material to pulp and paper. Events of recent years, however, have evolved the field to include alternative energy applications.
"Starting in 2003, when the IPST merged into Georgia Tech, we dramatically broadened our research to include the conversion of woody materials to biomaterials, bioenergy, biofuels and biochemicals," Ragauskas said. Through partnerships with Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Imperial College London and other Scandinavian institutions, Ragauskas, his colleagues and students have made significant strides. (He served as a visiting professor at Chalmers in 2001, and from 1997 to 1998 he taught at the Royal Institute of Technology/STFi in Stockholm in 1998.)
The professor's research efforts at Chalmers will center largely upon characterizing the changes in woody biomass structure during both the biological conversion of wood to ethanol and the gasification of wood and related materials to biofuels. The award provides a stipend of $125,000, one of the largest in the international exchange program's history. As Fulbright Chair, Ragauskas will address three key challenges:
- Development of new breakthroughs in green science and technologies, working to provide economically sustainable biofuels and bioenergy;
- Education of future leaders and society in general on the opportunities, challenges and benefits of sustainable biofuels and energy;
- Creating international partnerships that foster academic, economic and public policy development in the field of sustainable biofuels and energy development.
In addition to sharing his lignocellulosic biofuels and biorefinery expertise with faculty, students and researchers in Sweden, the chair will aid Ragauskas in developing a new partnership in communicating the need for an international push in developing sustainable cellulosic biofuels. Conventional tools, including classroom instruction and industry workshops, along with podcasts and other Web-based resources, will be used to further entrench this collaborative effort.
"The conversion of wood to biofuels is entering a very exciting phase," he said, adding that several demonstration plants are currently under construction, and more efficient technologies are rapidly mitigating costs. "Our research team and others on the Tech campus are helping to bring about this 'green industrial revolution.'"
Citing a kinship in how citizens of both the United States and Sweden relate to their natural forest resources, Ragauskas said positioning the Fulbright chair at Chalmers is a logical step, as it plays a significant role in the U.S. Embassy's initiative to foster collaborative alternative energy research between the United States and Sweden. "Georgia has a large forest products industry, and so does Scandinavia," he said. "Many countries around the globe have established sustainable forestry practices and there is every reason to believe these practices will apply to cellulosic ethanol from wood. The solutions to sustainable biofuels are international solutions."
Beginning Aug. 1, Ragauskas will conduct his research from the Forest Products and Chemical Engineering department at Chalmers for a period of nine months over the next year. While at Chalmers he will continue to manage his group at Tech.
]]>"My goodness. I am very fortunate and lucky to be doing science in America. There are so many excellent people doing science all over this country," said El-Sayed, who holds the Julius Brown Chair and is also the director of the Laser Dynamics Laboratory.
"I want to thank my past and present graduate students and postdotoral fellows , my colleagues, the administration and staff at Georgia Tech and UCLA who all helped me to do my science and get this honor. There was no limit to the support I received,' he added.
El-Sayed's citation reads: "For his seminal and creative contributions to our understanding of the electronic and optical properties of nano-materials and to their applications in nano-catalysis and nano-medicine, for his humanitarian efforts of exchange among countries and for his role in developing the scientific leadership of tomorrow."
He will receive the medal at a White House ceremony on September 29.
Currently, El-Sayed is working with his son Ivan, of the University of California, San Francisco, to develop cylindrical gold nanorods that can bind to cancer cells. Once the cells are bound to the gold, they scatter light ,which makes them easy to detect. Using a laser, they can selectively destroy the cancer cells without harming the healthy cells. The nanorods are tuned to a frequency that allows them to use lasers that can delve under the skin to kill cancer cells without harming the skin.
The National Medal of Science honors individuals for pioneering scientific research in a range of fields, including physical, biological, mathematical, social, behavioral and engineering sciences, that enhances understanding of the world and leads to innovations and technologies that give the United States its global economic edge. The National Science Foundation administers the award, which was established by Congress in 1959.
]]>The Laboratory will focus its efforts on the development of new materials to serve as the successors to silicon in the semiconductor industry. Specifically, the development of graphene - which holds tremendous promise as an electronic material - will be the initial core of research and development at the Center.
NSF funding will be $8.1 million for six years of research and development. The MRSEC office suite will be housed in the Georgia Tech's new Marcus Nanotechnology Research Center Building.
"This is an exciting time for graphene research," said Dennis Hess, director of the Georgia Tech MRSEC. "Our studies may allow the manufacture of microelectronic devices and integrated circuits based on graphene. The Georgia Tech team, in conjunction with external partners, has already pioneered the use of epitaxial graphene to achieve such goals. Georgia Tech Physics Professors Walt de Heer, Phil First and Ed Conrad are worldwide leaders in the growth and characterization of epitaxial graphene. We look forward to additional innovative discoveries from our Center over the next few years."
The Laboratory will be a cross-disciplinary effort utilizing the talent and resources of Georgia Tech and four additional institutions: University of California Berkeley, University of California Riverside, Alabama A & M and the University of Michigan. Georgia Tech will initially have 13 faculty members involved in the Laboratory's efforts, with five additional members representing the partner schools. Collaborations are already in place with several companies and national laboratories within the U.S. and abroad.
Graphene, a sheet of carbon only one-atom thick, holds the potential to become the core material for computer processors in electronics, which continue to become smaller in size. Silicon, comparatively, has fundamental limitations that inhibit operation in ever-shrinking devices used in microelectronics, optics and sensors.
Georgia Tech will develop the fundamental science and technology to maximize graphene's potential as a component in future electronics technologies. In addition, the Center will provide the core curriculum, train a diverse workforce and develop the future academic and industrial leaders needed for this new direction in the semiconductor industry.
An industrial advisory board is being assembled for the Center, which will include representatives from leading electronics companies.
"This new MRSEC complements Georgia Tech's multiple programs and investments in nanotechnology extremely well," said Professor Mark Allen, senior vice provost for Research and Innovation. "Much of the work will take place in our Nanotechnology Research Center, a new facility dedicated to research into both inorganic and organic nanoscience and nanotechnology. We look forward to enabling the next generation of graphene electronics through the efforts of the researchers in this new MRSEC."
]]>"One of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine is to have a graded continuous interface, because anatomically that's how the majority of tissues appear and there are studies that strongly suggest that the graded interface provides better integration and load transfer," said Andres Garcia, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Garcia and former graduate student Jennifer Phillips, along with research technician Kellie Burns and their collaborators Joseph Le Doux and Robert Guldberg, were not only able to create artificial bone that melds into softer tissues, but were also able to implant the technology in vivo for several weeks.
They created the tissue by coating a three-dimensional polymer scaffold with a gene delivery vehicle that encodes a transcription factor known as Runx2. They generated a high concentration of Runx2 at one end of the scaffold and decreased that amount until they ended up with no transcription factor on the other end, resulting in a precisely controlled spatial gradient of Runx2. After that, they seeded skin fibroblasts uniformly onto the scaffold. The skin cells on the parts of the scaffold containing a high concentration of Runx2 turned into bone, while the skin cells on the scaffold end with no Runx2 turned into soft tissue. The result is an artificial bone that gradually turns into soft tissue, such as tendons or ligaments.
If the technology is able to pass further testing, one application could be anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) surgery. Oftentimes, ACL surgery fails at the point where the ligament meets the bone. But if an artificial bone/ligament construct with these types of graded transitions were implanted, it might lead to more successful outcomes for patients.
"Every organ in our body is made up of complex, heterogeneous structures, so the ability to engineer tissues that more closely mimic these natural architectures is a critical challenge for the next wave of tissue engineering," said Phillips, who is now working at Emory University as a postdoctoral research fellow in developmental biology.
Now that they have been able to demonstrate that they can implant the tissue in vivo for several weeks, the team's next step is to show that the tissue can handle weight for an even longer period of time.
]]>"We've been able to use magnetic nanoparticles to capture free-floating cancer cells and then take them out of the body," said John McDonald, chair of the School of Biology at Georgia Tech and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute. "This technology may be of special importance in the treatment of ovarian cancer where the malignancy is typically spread by free-floating cancer cells released from the primary tumor into the abdominal cavity."
The idea came to the research team from the work of Ken Scarberry, a Ph.D. student in Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Scarberry originally conceived of the idea as a means of extracting viruses and virally infected cells when his advisor, Chemistry professor John Zhang, had another idea. He asked if the technology could be applied to cancer. Scarberry suggested it might be an effective means of preventing cancer cells from spreading.
They began by testing the therapy on mice. After giving the cancer cells in the mice a fluorescent green tag and staining the magnetic nanoparticles red, they were able to apply a magnet and move the green cancer cells to the abdominal region.
"If the therapy is able to pass further tests that show it can prevent the cancer from spreading from the original tumor," Scarberry said, "it could be an important tool in cancer treatment."
This technology holds more promise than solely using antibodies to fight cancer because there seems to be less potential for the body to develop an immune response due to the unique peptide-targeting strategy, and the composition of the magnetic nanoparticles.
"If you modify the nanoparticle and target it directly to the tumor cells using a small peptide, you are less likely to generate an undesirable immune response and more accurately target the cells of interest," said Research Scientist Erin Dickerson.
In addition to testing magnetic nanoparticles, the research team is collaborating with other groups at Georgia Tech to determine how peptide-directed gold nanoparticles and nanohydrogels might also be used in fighting cancer.
]]>"We wanted to create a spot that was radically different from our peers and that was a significant departure from the usual university public service announcement," said Jeff Smith, director of online communications and new media. "At the same time, we wanted to incorporate references to the academic rigor, iconic visuals and traditions that have helped define Tech as the unique institution that it is."
The television spot opens with a classroom lecture where Robbins is in the process of learning about the trajectory of a projectile. Robbins begins to daydream about applying the physics equation needed to propel the Wreck 'Evel Knievel' style over a group of cars.
The PSA marries the academic rigor of one of the nation's top technological universities with a slice of the traditional college experience of a well-rounded student.
Robbins exemplifies what being a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket is all about. A successful student-athlete, Robbins was a volleyball standout from North Springs High School in Sandy Springs. She originally joined the volleyball team as a walk-on in 2005 and earned a scholarship for the 2008 season as a result of her hard work and leadership abilities - both on and off the court. Robbins has also made the ACC Honor Roll each of the past three years.
Robbins' family adds an extra connection to Tech's tradition as both of her parents, Rick and Cindy Robbins, as well as her grandfather, Drew Hearn, graduated from Georgia Tech. Her father and uncle, Andy Hearn, were both athletes while they attended Tech. Robbins also has a younger brother, Brian, who swims for Georgia Tech.
Last year, Communications & Marketing won the 2008 Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Circle of Excellence Award Program Gold Medal for Electronic Media: PSA and Commercial Spots with a spot that featured a computer-generated robotic arm that dialed a familiar tune, the Georgia Tech fight song. The creative team is hoping this year's innovative approach is as successful.
The new PSA will air during broadcasts of Tech sports teams this school year.
]]>Although creative ideas occur in the minds of individuals, ways of thinking about and approaching problems can be jointly developed by the team, according to a recent article in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal by Christina Shalley, professor of organizational behavior at Georgia Tech, and Jill Perry-Smith, assistant professor of organization and management at Emory University.
Titled "The emergence of team creative cognition: the role of diverse outside ties, sociocognitive network centrality, and team evolution," their article explores how imagination, insight, and creative ideas develop, evolve, and spread from one team member to another, ultimately increasing the team's ability to think creatively about a range of problems.
In essence, there is a team mindset that is greater than the sum of individual team members. When this synergistic process occurs, teams have the capacity to achieve high levels of creativity.
Shalley and Perry-Smith develop the concept of "team creative cognition," which refers to a shared repertoire of cognitive processes among team members that provides a framework for how the team approaches problems creatively.
"Specifically, we propose that diverse personal ties outside of the team shape and strengthen individual team member's creative muscle, and that this individual creative cognition is infused within the team'ultimately resulting in team creative cognition," write the authors.
]]>Tech Promise is the first program of its kind offered by any public university in Georgia. Picking up where Georgia's HOPE scholarship and other financial aid options leave off, the program is individually tailored for each applicant. Assistance includes scholarships, grants, and job opportunities that allow eligible in-state students to attend Georgia Tech without the burden of student loan debt.
"As Georgia high school students evaluate college options, we do not want financial need to stand in their way of pursuing a degree at Georgia Tech," said Interim President Gary Schuster. "We believe that qualified Georgia students from all economic backgrounds should have the opportunity to attend and graduate from Tech regardless of their family's financial status. It is especially important that Tech Promise be brought to the attention of Georgia students who may be reluctant to apply because of concern about the financial burden attending college would place on their families."
Mary Vaughn, a senior in Science, Technology and Culture from Snellville, Georgia, values the opportunities that the Tech Promise program has allowed her to pursue.
"I attended Tech my first two years without Tech Promise," says Vaughn. "Although I had the HOPE scholarship, I had to work two jobs to make ends meet. Tech Promise has allowed me to work only one job, focus on my education and begin saving money for graduate school."
Vaughn plans to pursue a graduate degree in education after she graduates from Georgia Tech. "My dream job is teaching," says Vaughn. "There have been so many teachers who have been such an inspiration to me and who have been responsible for who I have become. I just want to give back."
Under the terms of the Tech Promise program, student eligibility requirements and criteria include:
* Legal resident of Georgia
* Pursuing a first undergraduate degree
* Eligible applicant for federal student financial aid
* Dependent students whose parents: earn less than $33,300 in total annual income and/or benefits; and are eligible to file an IRS Form 1040A or 1040EZ for the most recent tax year
* Achieve and maintain a minimum 2.0 cumulative grade point average (out of a possible 4.0); be in good standing with the Institute and maintain Satisfactory Academic Progress standards
* Submit a complete financial aid application each academic year by the required deadline
An annual application is required for Tech Promise, and individual evaluations will be conducted to calculate each candidate's specific financial needs. Students may reapply for up to four academic years (eight semesters) of full-time enrollment. Levels of support/award in subsequent years will be based on the student's family's financial situation, and academic standing. The funding made available through Tech Promise will cover the published cost of attendance at Georgia Tech.
More information on Tech Promise may be found at the link below.
]]>Without traditional cues to assess the credibility of reviewers, people evaluate not only the content of opinions, but also the online behavior of posters, according to a recent article in the Journal of Marketing Research titled "Listening to Strangers."
Factors influencing the perceived value of reviews include posters' speed of response to queries, the length of their opinions, back-and-forth dialogue, and a reputation for successfully answering others' queries, found the researchers.
The study was conducted by Nicholas Lurie, assistant professor of marketing at Georgia Tech College of Management, and Allen Weiss and Deborah MacInnis, marketing professors at the University of Southern California.
"Imagine that you send an e-mail to members of your neighborhood association asking for recommendations for painters. How do you decide whose recommendation to trust?," Lurie asks. "Our study suggests that you are likely to give greater weight to those who respond quickly, write a lengthy response, and engage you in a back-and-forth discussion."
In addition to finding that reviewers' current behavior affects value perceptions, the researchers found that previous reviews can help or hurt depending on whether information seekers want to make a decision about buying a particular product/service or just learn more about the options.
If information seekers want to learn more about a particular topic, such as important features to consider when buying a digital camera, they value recommendations from information providers who have made multiple contributions on the same subject. But they tend to discount advice from people whose posting history shows recommendations made across a wide variety of topics.
The reverse is true when information seekers have moved from the learning stage to the decision-making point. When people aim to make a decision, they value posters who've made recommendations across a wide variety of topics.
For example, in an online marketing forum, a CEO with a decision-making orientation who needs help choosing between different sales-force automation software packages might value information from an advisor with a wide range of interests more than the recommendations of someone with highly specialized expertise.
The researchers also found that receiving large amounts of information is more important for individuals with a learning goal than for decision-makers.
"Our results suggest that it is critical for marketers (as providers of information) to discern whether potential customers have a learning or a decision-making goal," write the researchers. "Making strategic choices about how to respond to customer inquiries and from whom such responses should come is particularly relevant to current marketing environments in which communication is customer initiated."
]]>"Contractors will be replacing and repairing brick on the facade of the east side of the complex," said James Fetig, associate vice president of communications and marketing. "The need for maintenance was identified during the original analysis before Georgia Tech assumed ownership last year because the brick veneer is not properly tied to the building."
"This is not a structural issue," said Fetig. "This is veneer brick repair and replacement work that needs to be done to ensure that we increase the life cycle and longevity of the building."
The work is being done section by section to minimize the impact on students. Gilbane Building Company has been contracted for the work, and construction will be completed during a daily shift that will last from 8:00 a.m. am to 8:00 p.m. Students' windows will be blocked off for two to three weeks during the time the construction crews are working on their particular section of the building.
Officials say they are taking extra measures to ensure security and privacy for students.
In addition to the windows being blocked off, other measures are being taken such as restricting workers to certain areas of the building during construction, keeping emergency exits open and adding lighting around work areas.
Contractors do not expect noise to be a problem during construction.
"This process is done by hand, and most of the vibration work will be done before students get back to campus this fall," said Fetig.
Housing will coordinate notification to students of the time table they should expect to have work done on their section of the building.
Gilbane officials say the work is being done with conservation and recycling in mind. Unused brick, which has been removed from the facade, will be crushed and used for landscapes. Brick will also be salvaged for any spot repairs that may be required later.
]]>Yet with a cost averaging $16,000 per dog - not to mention the two years of training required to hone these skills - the demand for these canines' exceeds their availability.
But what if these duties could be accomplished with an electronic companion that provides the same efficiency at a fraction of the cost?
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have engineered a biologically inspired robot that mirrors the actions of sought-after service dogs. Users verbally command the robot to complete a task and the robot responds once a basic laser pointer illuminates the location of the desired action.
For instance, if a person needs an item fetched, that individual would normally command a service dog to do so and then gesture with their hands toward the location. The service robot mimics the process, with the hand gesture replaced by aiming the laser pointer at the desired item.
Employing this technology, users can accomplish basic yet challenging missions such as opening doors, drawers and retrieving medication.
"It's a road to get robots out there helping people sooner," said Professor Charlie Kemp, Georgia Tech Department of Biomedical Engineering. "Service dogs have a great history of helping people, but there's a multi-year waiting list. It's a very expensive thing to have. We think robots will eventually help to meet those needs."
Kemp presented his findings this week at the second IEEE/RAS-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics - BioRob 2008 - in Scottsdale, Ariz.
This technology was achieved with four-legged authenticity.
Kemp and graduate student Hai Nguyen worked closely with the team of trainers at Georgia Canines for Independence (GCI) in Acworth, Ga. to research the command categories and interaction that is core to the relationship between individuals and service dogs.
Betty, a Golden Retriever, was studied to understand her movements and relationship with commands. Key to the success is Betty's ability to work with a towel attached to a drawer or door handle, which allows her to use her mouth for such actions as opening and closing. The robot was then successfully programmed to use the towel in a similar manner.
Her handlers were thrilled at the potential benefits of the technology.
"The waiting list for dogs can be five to seven years," said Ramona Nichols, executive director of Georgia Canines for Independence. "It's neat to see science happening but with a bigger cause; applying the knowledge and experience we have and really making a difference. I'm so impressed. It's going to revolutionize our industry in helping people with disabilities."
In total, the robot was able to replicate 10 tasks and commands taught to service dogs at GCI - including opening drawers and doors - with impressive efficiency. Other successes included opening a microwave oven, delivering an object and placing an item on a table.
"As robotic researchers we shouldn't just be looking at the human as an example," Kemp said. "Dogs are very capable at what they do. They have helped thousands of people throughout the years. I believe we're going to be able to achieve the capabilities of a service dog sooner than those of a human caregiver."
While the robot may not be able to mirror the personality and furry companionship of a canine, it does have other benefits.
"The robot won't require the same care and maintenance," Kemp said. "It also won't be distracted by a steak."
]]>Approximately 2,600 new freshmen are enrolled. This is comprised of 250 who started in the summer and more than 2,350 who started in the fall.
There are another 600 students who are not enrolled in classes this fall, but are participating in a co-op or internship program this semester and are not included in the enrollment figures.
Tech's official occupancy for the fall semester won't be final until mid-October when drops and cancellations have been accounted for.
Georgia Tech also has its largest housing occupancy ever this fall. More than 7,800 single students signed up for housing, and approximately 400 enrolled in family housing.
Hefner residence hall was reopened this fall after completing renovations, but two others (Harrison and Howell) remain closed as they undergo renovations.
]]>In Ireland
This summer Georgia Tech biomedical engineering student Brian Srikanchana and aerospace engineering PhD student Jonathan Murphy have enjoyed exploring the town of Athlone, in the rural heart of Ireland while working abroad at Georgia Tech Ireland, the European applied research facility for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Srikanchana has found the villagers quite friendly, reminiscent of the southern hospitality back in Georgia. On jogs down rural roads, local residents would invite him in for tea and one even shared a 'welcome to the neighborhood' head of lettuce, fresh from his garden.
One Saturday Srikanchana and Murphy met a local gardener, John Butler, who was planting flowers by a Norman castle from the 1100s AD, along the west bank of the Shannon river in the center of town. It turns out that Butler has been the past mayor of Athlone four times and his family has been in Athlone for generations. Srikanchana suggested that they meet for lunch some time to discuss the rapidly changing industrial landscape of Ireland and Athlone in particular. When he called Butler to set a lunch date, Butler told him to come by St. Mary's square two days later at a quarter till noon, since the Taoiseach (prime minister of Ireland, pronounced 'TEA-SHOCK'), Brian Cowen, would be in town raising support for the Lisbon treaty. Butler said he would make an introduction, and he did.
At Georgia Tech Ireland Srikanchana mainly works on sustainable energy efforts. He is writing a literature review on the use of algae as a biofuel for automobiles and the production of hydrogen gas and has received training in two platform technologies, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), which Georgia Tech Ireland uses to address the needs of various academic and industrial groups throughout Ireland.
When asked about the highlight of his summer work abroad experience, Srikanchana says, "The best part, after having lived here for six weeks, is a certain feeling of interconnectedness with the world. To feel like you're a part of something beyond the boundaries of your town is quite fulfilling. Better yet, is the feeling you get from being engaged with a completely foreign environment, which prior to this point you had only read about in books and newspapers. Many call Ireland Europe's 'Celtic Tiger' and you can see how rapidly the growing economy of Ireland is affecting the way of life of its citizens. Though I work in a business park, when I step outside from my office building, I can look across the street and see cows and sheep and horses in the fields. It's somewhat strange to think how the connections made now between America and Ireland through Georgia Tech, could affect the future landscape of the country, by affecting how technologies spread and how industry develops within Ireland."
Aerospace engineering PhD student Jonathan Murphy also met the Taoiseach, while working at Georgia Tech Ireland this summer to find funding to extend the energy system design and decision making work he has been doing at GTRI in Atlanta. He has enjoyed hanging out with new friends in local pubs, clubs and homes.
In France
After studying abroad for a year in Paris, Georgia Tech senior Stephanie Provow began an internship in June with the U.S. Embassy in Paris' economic section. Provow, majoring in economics and international affairs with a minor in French, says, "This internship is perfect for my major, especially with the President of France, Mr. Sarkozy, as the President of the European Union. I know that my skills have been greatly enhanced through my study abroad, making me all the more prepared for my internship."
Provow has met a number of high-level leaders during her internship at the Embassy.
"My internship has taught me a lot about the U.S. Foreign Service, the economic relationship between France and the U.S., and the way the United States influences economic issues in France through outreach and public diplomacy including speeches and conferences," says Provow. "The most interesting part of my job is meeting the VIPs that come through Paris, such as the President and First Lady Bush and Secretary of State Rice. I have also been to conferences with many important French politicians, such as the Prime Minister."
When asked about meeting President Bush, Provow recalls how he took the time to get to know each individual at a special event for employees of the Embassy, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
"I got to shake Mr. Bush's hand three times and had a nice conversation with him. I remember living in Texas when he was Governor so I always knew I would have something to talk about if I actually did get to meet him," says Provow. "I held my hand out and he looked me in the eye and said, "Hi. It's nice to meet you.' I said, "It's great to meet you, too. You know, I was born in Granbury [a small town in Texas]." He smiled and said, "Atta girl! So did you grow up in Texas?" I replied, "Yes sir, I did. In Colleyville." He said, "Oh, Colleyville. I know it. Well, did you stay to go to school or did you move away?" I said, "Sadly, I moved away." He said, "Well, it's good to know there's another Texan in the crowd." Then he signed a piece of paper I had out for an autograph, took a few pictures, and moved on to the next person."
Georgia Tech Work Abroad Program
The Georgia Tech Work Abroad Program in the Division of Professional Practice is an immersive academic program designed to complement a student's formal education with paid practical international work experience directly related to the student's major. The Work Abroad Program includes co-op, internship, graduate, and undergraduate work experiences. These international work assignments are designed to provide the ultimate work experience to include practical training, cross-cultural exposure and learning, and acquisition of the skills that will set apart the participating students from their peers. Opportunities are available during summer, fall, and spring semesters. The Work Abroad program may also be used to satisfy requirements for the International Plan, a Georgia Tech initiative that was launched in 2005 to offer a challenging academic program that develops global competence within the context of a student's major.
Part of Gov. Sonny Perdue's 'Faster. Friendlier. Easier.' initiative across all statewide programs to provide more efficient service, the awards were created in August 2007. Customers in the context of the USG are defined as students, parents, visitors or any entity conducting business with a member institution.
Rosalind R. Meyers, associate vice president of Auxiliary Services, won a silver 2008 Outstanding Customer Service Leadership award. As outlined in her nomination, Meyers worked with the Office of Organizational Development to install an annual customer satisfaction survey eight years ago. Departmental planning and new programs are all a result of the surveys. Highlighting each department, the survey shows customer satisfaction has increased over the eight-year period.
Student Center Operations Manager Loren S. Summerlin won a silver 2008 Excellence of the Year Award in the individual category. Summerlin, who has previous experience in the hospitality industry, was recognized for his friendly and courteous attitude and approach to assisting guests, students or others utilizing the Student Center.
Stingerette Driver Rosser Jones received an honorable mention as an individual in the 2008 Excellence Award of the Year. Rosser's dedication to customer service was exemplified by his providing late-night Stingerette shuttle service to students across campus. He was specifically recognized in his nomination for going above and beyond when there is a driver shortage and being named Auxiliary Services' employee of the month for July 2007.
"All 35 member institutions of the USG submit between 200 and 300 nominations for all categories," said JulieAnne Williamson, acting executive director of the Office of Organizational Development (OOD). For first-year nominations, Williamson said Auxiliary Services was the perfect place to start. "[The] unit is committed to customer service, [and it] touches the lives of faculty, staff and students."
"While the concept and execution of the survey was my idea, its success is in the follow up," Meyers said. "It is the directors in Auxiliary Services who make the changes in operations that are indicated by the survey. We improve every year because of them. They are equally responsible for the survey's success as a customer service tool."
Georgia Tech Training Services, through OOD, offers the 'Defining Customer Service' certificate program, established in March 2007. Classes, tailored for a university environment, are led by Customer Care Institute experts.
Williamson, who handled this year's nomination process, says plans are in the works for Institute units and departments to handle their own nominations. "If departments are interested in nominating their own people, this will help keep the awareness of customer service on campus." She said she hopes the nomination process will be available in spring.
]]>The goal: to accelerate groundbreaking research in cancer.
Since cancer strikes Georgians with greater ferocity than it does the citizens of many other states - both in the number of cases diagnosed and the number of deaths attributed to this terrible disease, the Georgia Cancer Coalition is highlighting several clinicians, scientists and other researchers (also know as the Georgia Cancer Coalition Scholars) sponsored by the organization.
Georgia Tech's Georgia Cancer Coalition Scholars include: Ravi V. Ballamkonda, PhD; Nathan J. Bowen, PhD; Erin B. Dickerson, PhD; Yuhong Fan, PhD; Melissa L. Kemp, PhD; Valeria Tohver Milam, PhD; Shuming Nie, PhD; Marion B. Sewer, PhD; Francesca Storici, PhD; Dongmei Wang, PhD; and Ming Yuan, PhD.
Cancer research at Georgia Tech is conducted across the disciplines among scientists in areas from biology to computing and biomedical engineering to electrical engineering.
Georgia Tech and Emory University operate a joint department in biomedical engineering where faculty at both institutions regularly collaborate on cancer research.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institute of Health selected Georgia Tech and Emory as one of seven National Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE). The center, named Emory-Georgia Tech Nanotechnology Center for Personalized and Predictive Oncology is housed in both the Emory Winship Cancer Institute and on the Georgia Tech campus and functions as a 'discovery accelerator' to integrate nanotechnology into personalized cancer treatments and early detection.
Since its inception in 2001, the Georgia Cancer Coalition has funded more than
$50 million in cancer research in our state. Distinguished Cancer Clinicians and Scholars have generated about $244 million in federal and private funds for cancer research in Georgia and eight out of every ten scholars have written at least one article ranking in the top ten of the most-cited research in their fields of study.
The event is timed for guests to appreciate the striking, new energy-efficient lighting that accentuates the Acuity Brands Plaza's role as a gateway from Midtown Atlanta into the Management building and Technology Square. The event is open to the community.
Atlanta-based Acuity Brands made a seven-figure gift to enable the renovation of the plaza during the spring and summer. "We are excited to have Acuity Brands not only as a key supporter of the College, but also as a neighbor and partner in the dynamic and innovative community that Midtown has become," says College of Management Dean Steve Salbu, who will speak at the dedication.
"Corporate support is becoming increasingly important in our efforts to educate the technological leaders of tomorrow, and this very generous gift embodies the principle of good corporate citizenship that is core to Acuity Brands' identity," Salbu adds.
Also speaking at the dedication will be John Hartman, executive vice president and chief commercial officer of Acuity Brands Lighting; William Astary, senior vice president of sales for Acuity Brands Lighting; and Gary Schuster, provost and interim president of Georgia Tech.
Acuity Brands (NYSE:AYI) employs 7,000 people and has operations throughout North America, as well as in Europe and Asia. Numerous Georgia Tech alumni work at Acuity Brands, whose subsidiaries provide internships for Tech students and continue to recruit the Institute's graduates. Acuity Brands Lighting, a subsidiary of Acuity Brands, is one of the world's leading providers of lighting products and services. The company has previously supported Georgia Tech athletics and the Center for Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems, in addition to working closely with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering on lighting research.
Employing the latest energy-efficient technology, the lighting in the new plaza includes LED twinkle lights that run through the new pavers of the pedestrian-friendly area, creating a dazzling effect under the night sky. The plaza redesign eliminated drive-through traffic and added an expanse of grassy area, trees, and new outdoor furnishings to heighten the appeal of the area to the Technology Square community.
Those interested in attending the dedication event should contact Nina White at 404.894.1221 or rsvp@dev.gatech.edu.
]]>Barabino will serve on the president's cabinet, and will assess, define and direct the Institute's growing diversity efforts, increasing the recruitment and retention of underrepresented populations in both the student body and faculty.
"A major challenge to academic diversity-one that is not unique to Tech-is transforming the culture and environment to one where diversity is infused throughout all aspects of teaching, learning, research and service," Barabino said.
With oversight of the Office of Minority Educational Development Services (OMED), the Center for Women in Science and Technology (WST) and Tech's FOCUS and ADVANCE programs, Barabino will spearhead the strategic development of Institute efforts to increase diversity in the Institute's established mission of research, education and service. FOCUS recruits under-represented groups into graduate school, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE initiative works to increase the representation of women in academic careers.
Barabino is a professor and associate chair for Graduate Studies in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Her lab research focuses on vascular biology and tissue engineering, specifically sickle cell disease, cartilage tissue engineering and bioreactors. She earned her doctorate from Rice University in 1986 and her bachelor of science from Xavier University in 1978. In 2007 she was named a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.
She arrived at Tech in June 2007 after 18 years at Northeastern University, where she was a full professor and served as vice provost for Undergraduate Education.
During a sabbatical at Tech's Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) in 2003-2004, Barabino initiated a project with West Georgia University psychology professor Kareen Malone and Tech's Director of Learning Sciences Research Wendy Newstetter to study gender and race in a laboratory setting-specifically, the labs within BME and IBB. "Our work is ongoing and expanding," Barabino said.
"Most recently, Kareen and I completed a study focusing on the experiences of minority women in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields, and how these experiences will impact identity formation as a scientist." Barabino says she expects the study will be published this year in the journal Science Education.
In addition, Barabino is principal investigator on the ADVANCE study "Cross-Disciplinary Initiative for Minority Women Faculty." The three-year initiative, begun in 2007, engages in research-grounded activities to enhance socialization of tenure-track minority women in engineering, while also providing professional development opportunities for participants. Public Policy Associate Professor Cheryl Leggon is co-principal investigator.
"This [initiative] is in keeping with my career-long interests and efforts related to academic diversity, and is reflective of my approach to all areas of my work-research, teaching and service-which is research- and data-driven and interdisciplinary in nature," Barabino said.
In recent years, several institutions such as Duke University, Columbia University and the University of California, San Francisco, have established provost-level positions relating to academic diversity.
"I am very pleased that Gilda agreed to accept this appointment," Smith said. "I think she has the necessary talent and skill for the job. She shows great enthusiasm and excitement about this initiative to make Georgia Tech a leader in academic diversity."
]]>When injected into rats' hearts after a simulated heart attack, the drug-embedded "microparticles" reduce inflammation and scarring, the researchers found.
Injecting the particles could cut the area of scar tissue formed after the heart attack in half and boost the ability of the heart to pump blood by 10 percent weeks later.
The results are published online this week and are scheduled for publication in the Oct/Nov issue of Nature Materials.
Doctors believe that certain anti-inflammatory drugs, if delivered directly into the heart after a heart attack, could prevent permanent damage and reduce the probability of heart failure later in life.
Fulfilling this idea -- getting drugs to the right place at the right time -- is more challenging than simply swallowing an aspirin, says senior author Michael Davis, PhD, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
"If you look at previous studies to see what it would take to get enough of these drugs into the heart, they did things like direct injections twice a day," he says. "And there are clear toxicity issues if the whole body is exposed to the drug."
As an alternative, Davis and graduate student Jay Sy, the first author of the paper, turned to microscopic particles made of a material called polyketals, developed by co-author Niren Murthy, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering.
The microparticles break down over a few weeks in the body, releasing the experimental drug SB239063. This drug inhibits an enzyme, MAP kinase, which is important during the damaging inflammation that occurs after a heart attack.
Davis says the drug gradually leaches out of the polyketal particles - half is gone after a week of just sitting around in warm water. In addition, the microparticles are broken down by white blood cells called macrophages.
"These are actually cells we're trying to reach with the drug, because they're involved in the inflammatory response in the heart," he says. "The macrophages can surround and eat the particles, or fuse together if the particles are too big."
Davis says polyketals have an advantage over other biodegradable polymers, in that they break down into neutral, excretable compounds that aren't themselves inflammatory.
Polyesters such as PLGA (polylactic-co-glycolic acid) are approved for use in sutures and grafts. However, when they are made into particles small enough to be broken down in the body, polyesters cause inflammation - exactly what the drugs are supposed to stop, he says.
When the particles were injected into rats' hearts, the researchers could see an inhibition of the MAP kinase enzyme lasting for a week. However, the effect on heart function was greater after 21 days. Davis says this result suggests that the main way the particles helped the heart was to prevent the scarring that sets in after the initial tissue damage of a heart attack.
He and Murthy are exploring polyketal particles as delivery vehicles for drugs or proteins in several organs: heart, liver, lungs and spinal cord.
The research was funded by EmTech Bio, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Homeland Security and a seed grant from Johnson & Johnson.
Reference: Sy, J.C . et al. Sustained release of a p38-inhibitor from non-inflammatory microspheres inhibits cardiac dysfunction. Nature Materials Vol, p, Oct /Nov 2008.
]]>The magazine noted Georgia Tech's reputation for being one of the nation's premier research universities and the generosity of the Goizueta Foundation as factors for the ranking.
"The College of Engineering is extremely proud to be recognized by Hispanic Business Magazine for our academic excellence," said Dean Don Giddens. "Our students benefit from a diverse student body as they prepare for the global job market."
Funding from the Goizueta Foundation has helped create and expand many programs for both retaining and actively recruiting Hispanic students. Hispanics represent the fastest-growing ethnic population at Georgia Tech with a total of 888 students currently enrolled as of fall 2007. Georgia Tech's College of Engineering has a Hispanic graduate enrollment of 58. This fall, Georgia Tech had its largest Hispanic freshman class ever with 126 students.
Student organizations such as the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), Spanish Speaking Organization (SSO), Hispanic Recruitment Team (HRT), Capoeira Cord'o de Ouro (CCO), Gringos y Latinos: Atlanta's Spanish Service Society (GLASSS), Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) Scholar Chapter, and La Unidad Latina, Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc. are dedicated to increasing the participation of Hispanic professionals and graduate students in the fields of engineering, science and other technical and non-technical professions. These student groups also provide a rich cultural experience for Hispanics and the campus community.
Each year, the number of minority and female students continues to grow, ensuring that Georgia Tech graduates will be ready to thrive in a multicultural and global workforce. Hundreds of employers, representing a substantial number of Fortune 500 companies, recruit interns, co-ops and full-time employees annually from Georgia Tech.
]]>Georgia Tech Interim President Gary Schuster welcomed Secretary Peters and Georgia Department of Transportation Commissioner Gena Abraham to GTRI's Cobb County research facility and was pleased to share Georgia Tech's ongoing research with them.
"One of the broad thrust areas on which we are focused is energy and environmental sustainability, and much of our work in this arena has a direct bearing on transportation," said Schuster. "More specifically, our work in energy focuses on efficiency, conservation and new sources, and all three of these areas have significance for transportation."
Secretary Peters and Commissioner Abraham viewed important components of Tech's research in conservation and new energy sources. GTRI researcher Bob Englar described his work on aerodynamics technology developed for jet plane wings and how his team is applying it to tractor trailer trucks to help them conserve fuel.
Their goal is to reduce the drag on 18-wheelers by at least a third, and perhaps even as much as half, which would improve their fuel efficiency by 12 percent or more. A 1 percent improvement in fuel economy in the U.S. heavy truck fleet conserves 200 million gallons of fuel. So a 12 percent improvement means saving more than 2 billion gallons of fuel.
Tom Fuller and his team in the GTRI Center for Innovative Fuel Cell and Battery Technology presented their research with fuel cells. The fuel cell is expected to be the next significant new energy source for transportation. Both Honda and Toyota are road-testing fuel-cell cars, which are much more efficient than today's hybrids. And last year Georgia Tech successfully flew the largest hydrogen fuel cell-powered aircraft to date.
Coca Cola Enterprises also unveiled the company's new hybrid Coca Cola delivery vehicles. According to Peters, Georgia Tech researchers are working hard to solve real problems affecting the transportation industry, and Coca Cola Enterprises is showing how new technology is being embraced by industry.
In addition, Secretary Peters announced a new funding plan for the U.S. Transportation Department and used Atlanta as a model for a city willing to try new ways to save and use energy efficiently.
]]>Georgia Tech ranked eighth on the list of the world's top universities in engineering and information technology prepared by the Times Higher Education Supplement-QS. The list, considered the definitive university ranking guide in the United Kingdom, was compiled though a study conducted by QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) and published in the Times Higher Education supplement, an independent annual education survey.
Georgia Tech also garnered the eighth spot on the list of the top 100 world universities in engineering/technology and computer sciences, according to Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). ARWU ranks major institutions according to their academic or research performance in each of five broad subject fields according to a formula that factors in the following indicators: alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and fields medals; highly cited researchers; articles indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI); the percentage of articles published in the leading journals of each field; and engineering research expenditures.
Earlier this year, Georgia Tech was ranked seventh nationally among public universities for undergraduates in the 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings. For the past decade, Georgia Tech has been among the top ten public universities for undergraduates in the United States.
]]>Construction project manager Steven Johnson and utilities analyst Susan Wardrope work to keep feral cats on campus at a sustainable level, all while preventing more from moving in. Together with a network of campus participants, the group works on its own time-and in most cases, its own dime-to alter, monitor and feed these felines.
A part of Auxiliary Services during his 'day' job, Johnson instills the practice of Trap, Neuter and Release (TNR), which works to equalize rather than eliminate feral cat populations. When animal control officers capture these cats, euthanasia is the typical result, as they are well past the age of human socialization. In doing this, a vacuum is created wherein other feral cats will just move into the area, continuing the cycle.
However, the central TNR theory is that a controlled community of altered cats aids in maintaining area populations and keeping more feral cats from moving in.
"The best advantages to having them altered is that they start to concentrate around the feeding stations, and they don't have any urge to mate," Wardrope said. "They have their food, their sleeping place and their area that they're familiar with."
"They defend their territory, keeping other cats from moving into the area, which stabilizes the population," Johnson said. "An unaltered male will travel up to three miles. An altered cat will only travel about 300 meters."
The program at Tech started in 1996. "We'd get reports of cats in the area," said Johnson, who added he discovered students and employees were leaving food for the animals.
He said they counted 19 adult and juvenile cats on East Campus in those early days. In the first full feral cat census for the Institute, Johnson said they easily counted 179 cats in late 1998-32 in one colony that lived in the president's glade. (Today, Johnson says, that colony is down to three occasional visitors.) Now, as far as Johnson and his group can tell, about 34 cats call Tech home, including only two or three unaltered females-which Johnson says he is still trying to trap.
According to the duo, 30 to 35 cats on campus is very sustainable. Each feeding station has enough of a colony for one dominant male and one dominant female that protect the territory. This 'territorial management practice' leads to a fairly accurate understanding of where overlap between the colonies exists.
Johnson and Wardrope work to answer the call-literally-if someone reports a cat on campus. "I'll go out that night, see if it's a new cat or one of our own," Johnson said. "If it's a new cat, I'll try to stake it out and see where it's going-to established food stations or somewhere else." Sometimes, Johnson said, people who don't know about the campus program put a food dish outside of a building for any 'strays' they see.
If it is determined that a sighted cat is a new 'resident,' Johnson traps it's an undertaking that may require several hours of waiting. ("I know all the third-shift police officers by name.") He keeps the caged animal in his garage overnight and then carries it to the vet the next morning. The cats are neutered or spayed, vaccinated-many for the first time-and dosed with flea control medication. Males are released the following day after surgery. Females are released three days later. For captured kittens, Johnson either finds adoptive families or takes them to no-kill shelters after they are socialized.
"Without a feeding program to localize a colony, you'll continue to have mangy-looking cats that are more susceptible to diseases and other vectors that they can catch." But, in what could be seen as a disadvantage in the program, unaltered females tend to have larger litters because of the better nutrition. "When we first started, cats were giving birth to four, where only 50 percent survived. Now they can give birth to a litter of nine, and seven will survive," he said.
One challenge Johnson and Wardrope have noticed is well-wishers often will leave food out, which aids in diluting established feeding stations. "We leave a note and let them know," he said. "We're trying to get the word out that there is a good program-just by going from 179 to 34 cats shows it-s working."
But Johnson and Wardrope are by no means acting alone. Roughly 30 people are on his e-mail list, Johnson said, and about six handle the campus-wide feeding stations. Johnson himself handles the heavy lifting: tracking the cats' movements and trapping them.
"We just started doing this out-of-pocket," Johnson said. Through the e-mail network, however, people donated food and money for surgeries beyond spaying and neutering.
The duo's efforts have led to collaborations outside the Institute. When Fulton County's Animal Control units respond to an on-campus call, Johnson receives a courtesy call if it's a cat issue. This in turn has expanded his TNR efforts, establishing partnerships with Fulton, Cobb, Douglas and DeKalb counties.
"It's a quid pro quo," he says. "Fulton County has the Fix 'Em Free program. When they found out we were running this initiative at Tech, they offered us use of this program. In exchange, when they have reports of a feral colony somewhere, I'm available to go out and talk to people [about TNR]."
In assisting with feral cat colonies in off-campus communities, Johnson explains the Trap, Neuter and Return philosophy, letting people know the usual fate of a feral animal taken to a shelter. "Once people learn about the program, and Steve offers to take [the cats] in to have them altered and vaccinated, they usually have no problem throwing food out for them," Wardrope said.
"I volunteer to support both the Fulton County Animal Services and Catlanta, a local organization that is basically the feral cat coordinator of the Lifeline Animal Project." Catlanta recently received a grant to aid in the spaying and neutering of feral cats within the area. It's a supplement to what Fulton County currently provides, and the group is now in negotiations with DeKalb County to create a similar 'Fix 'Em Free' program.
"We'll help get them spayed or neutered, all of them are vaccinated for rabies [and] they can receive additional vaccinations, if requested," Johnson said, adding that almost all counties have a low-cost program that supplements the cost of altering a cat or dog. "I mainly concentrate on the feral cats, and I'll go out and do the assessment-is it just a backyard colony; or an abandoned cat colony that's gone feral. Then I'll report to the agency that's going to sponsor it 'Catlanta [or] Southern Hope.'
And evidence points to TNR reducing the load on animal shelters. Excepting a spike due to foreclosure increases, Johnson said, Fulton County has noticed a marked reduction in the amount of feral cats brought to the shelter.
According to Johnson, Atlanta-area programs have attracted the attention of several national organizations, including the Humane Society of the United States and Alley Cat Allies (which fights for TNR protocols nationwide). "We haven't gotten our city commissions to enact ordinances yet, but we're working toward that."
Some organizations, however, oppose the principles of TNR, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), The Wildlife Society and the American Bird Conservancy. PETA states on its Web site: "Because of the huge number of feral cats and the severe shortage of good homes, the difficulty of socialization, and the dangers lurking where most feral cats live, it may be necessary-and the most compassionate choice-to euthanize feral cats. ... If you leave them where they are, they will almost certainly die a painful death. A painless injection is far kinder than any fate that feral cats will meet if they are left to survive on their own."
Johnson doesn't see it that way.
"In a managed colony, human caretakers have just made portions of [the cats'] lives easier by removing the stress of producing multiple litters," he said. "By offering a tended food station, caretakers provide a steady supplemental food source, which also permits the cats to be observed for injuries and, when necessary, to be trapped for treatment. A minority of cats specialize in bird hunting as opposed to rodent hunting," Johnson concedes. "But rodents are still the main natural prey species of outdoor cats. Just because one might kill a chipmunk or Carolina wren does not mean they, as a species living within a habitat, deserve to be exterminated."
Overall, Johnson and Wardrope are trying to get the feral cat management plan under way in the metro area, and then slowly branch out to the outlying counties. And he's been reaching out to other University System of Georgia units.
But as for Tech, the next steps for the program include establishing the Library and Information Center's feeding station and then moving further north on campus to the Howey building and the College of Computing. "We've gotten reports from the building manager, as well as from the College of Computing, that they've seen cats in the area. We're trying to identify where would be the best place to establish a feeding station."
]]>The award ceremony will coincide with a presentation by Crippen on his out-of-this-world travels and how hard work made it possible for him to be the nation's first Space Shuttle pilot! The lecture is free and open to the public.
The Astronaut Scholarship is the largest monetary award given in the United States to science and engineering undergraduate students based solely on merit. Nineteen of these prestigious awards are dispersed each year through the ASF to outstanding college students majoring in a science or engineering field. These well-rounded students exhibit exceptional performance, initiative, and creativity in their field, as well as intellectual daring and a genuine desire to positively change the world around them, both in and outside the classroom.
"I am pleased to be presenting Jenna with the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation Scholarship," said Crippen, who also serves as the ASF vice chairman. "Jenna is a bright, up-and-coming forerunner in the field of physics, and I feel honored to pass this award on to her so that she will be able to continue the United States' great tradition of excellence in the science and engineering fields."
Campbell is a senior at Georgia Tech majoring in physics, focusing her research on the development of silicon nano-porous structures. During her summer research she strived to develop active silicon microfilters and gas sensors through use of porous silicon, which can be used in the medical and law enforcement fields. Her research has led her to author a journal publication and co-author an invention disclosure. Upon completion of her undergraduate degree, Campbell plans to attend graduate school for biophysics or chemical physics, earn her Ph.D., and follow her love of teaching by working in academia. Campbell is a member of the Society of Physics Students, a Peer Leader volunteer for the freshman physics students, and the vice president of the Georgia Tech Equestrian Team.
"We are proud to see one of our students recognized with such a wonderful honor," said Gary Schuster, Interim President of Georgia Tech. "Jenna Campbell exemplifies the attributes that make Georgia Tech students successful graduates. She has taken advantage of undergraduate research opportunities and made strides towards achieving her career goals while still at Tech."
Twenty-seven years ago this year, Crippen piloted the maiden flight of the Space Shuttle program and orbiter Columbia. He went on to command Challenger on three other shuttle missions including the first mission to capture, repair and release a satellite. In the early 1990s, he served as director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center and then served as president of Thiokol Aerospace Group in Utah. Crippen was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 2006 and was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in.
The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation is a non-profit organization established in 1984 by the six surviving members of America's original Mercury astronauts. Its goal is to aid the United States in retaining its world leadership in science and technology by providing scholarships for college students who exhibit motivation, imagination, and exceptional performance in the science or engineering field of their major. ASF funds 19 $10,000 scholarships annually and has awarded over $2.6 million in scholarships nationwide. For more information log on to www.AstronautScholarship.org or call 321.455.7012.
]]>Game Day Recycling is an initiative to reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfills from Georgia Tech after football games. It is really a partnership between students, the Athletic Association and various campus departments.
"Football games bring thousands of people to campus to tailgate and watch the game, and in the past we just threw away tons of bottles, cans and cups every game," said Student Government President Nick Wellkamp. "With Game Day Recycling, we give every tailgate party a recycling bag and ask them to recycle their glass, plastic and aluminum. This year, there are also recycling bins in the stadium and the private boxes, so that fans are encouraged to recycle during the entire length of the game day experience."
The Game Day Recycling program is single-stream recycling, meaning that fans can just throw all of their recyclables into one bin or bag, rather than separating items out manually.
According to Wellkamp, this makes it much easier to recycle, and organizers have found almost all fans and tailgaters willing to participate.
Different student organizations will be volunteering to distribute bags for each game. For the first game, SGA volunteered to distribute bags, and IFC gave bags to all of the fraternity houses. The result was more than 1 ton of recyclable materials collected.
Wellkamp believes Game Day Recycling is an important initiative and students are getting involved because they care about the Georgia Tech community.
"The program extends Georgia Tech's green efforts to all aspects of the
community, including alumni and fans," said Wellkamp. "Football games are large special events that have a huge environmental impact, and recycling all of our glass, plastic and aluminum can save tons of this material from going
into landfills. Students are passionate about sustainability and proud that
Georgia Tech is becoming a leader in the field of sustainability."
According to organizers, the biggest challenge is educating people so that they do not accidentally use the recycling bags as trash bags. Their concern is that they don't want to get contaminated materials.
Wellkamp believes the program will be a success if Tech can get sustained student involvement and get fans and tailgaters to use the recycling containers properly.
]]>CHOT brings together the top U.S. school of systems engineering at Georgia Tech and the nation's only school of rural public health at Texas A& M. with the shared goal of transforming health care on multiple fronts. The unique partnership will ensure that innovative knowledge produced by the center will reach both large urban areas, as well as rural and underserved areas.
"Health care organizations need continual innovation in management and clinical practices to address critical issues related to care that is safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, and equitable in addition to offering the latest clinical technologies to remain competitive," said Dr. Rathindra DasGupta, NSF program director. "CHOT links excellent faculty and student talent to advance research and practice in health systems management, information systems, and systems. We are delighted to welcome this new Center and its partners."
Larry Gamm, Ph.D., professor and head of health policy and management at HSC-School of Rural Public Health, will serve as the CHOT director joined by CHOT co-director, Eva K Lee, Ph.D., associate professor and director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare at the Georgia Tech H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
"The faculty and students from these great universities look forward to developing even stronger working relationships with visionary health systems, urban and rural, that share a commitment to transformation in health care," Gamm said. "All of us seek to ensure that the center adds value for all participants taking health care research and education to the next level."
"The ability to directly inject innovative concepts into health systems, and to validate and refine them for actual usage is very exciting work, and is critical to the transformation process," said Lee. "The chain of events in patient care, from diagnosis to treatment to delivery, as well as the entire finance and organizational infrastructure, offer much room for systems advances and innovation."
The center's total research budget is funded by the NSF, along with a number of technology companies and progressive health-focused organizations including health systems composed of multiple hospitals and outpatient clinics in Georgia, Texas and several other states. Health system leaders and their staff will collaborate with the universities in guiding and conducting the center's research.
"We applaud our industrial partners for their foresight in supporting this research and are grateful for their participation and support in the transformation effort," said Lee.
A listing of health systems and their transformation leaders who are participating in CHOT will be online beginning September 4 at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/NSF-CHOT/.
]]>According to the Department of Facilities Landscape Manager Hyacinth Ide, a 2004-2005 report tallied more than 5,000 trees on campus. Ide and Facilities foreman George Roberts say that during the last couple of years, probably close to 1,000 more have been planted.
"In a normal year without a drought, we try and plant 50 trees in-house and 260 trees as new development annually," Roberts said. While some of the planting would equal new trees, in some cases - especially with a drought-new saplings are planted in an effort to replace dying older trees.
The goal, he said, is to replace the same amount that was lost. "If you take down a 20-caliper tree [20-inch diameter], you should replace that with 10 2-caliper trees." A tree's diameter, Roberts said, is measured at about five feet high.
The campus has two dedicated employees, that's one for roughly 3,000 trees, a certified arborist and an equipment operator, whose main functions are watering and inspecting trees. And with the drought, this has become a necessary task. These two, instead of embarking on long-term care for the trees, spend two to two-and-a-half days a week watering.
Ide says the younger trees especially need the attention. "We just don't have enough manpower to do what a full tree program calls for," he said. "It's critical work."
Because of heavy foot traffic around trees, which in turn compresses the dirt, Roberts says groundskeepers use a deep feeder system - a long needle to feed the root systems. "We feed all our trees this way."
Some tree losses are literally a result of growing pains, as some construction efforts have resulted in the irreversible damaging of trees or their root systems. "We have hired a full-time landscape project manager in Facilities Design and Construction to help with landscape design and manage all contract landscape installations," Ide said. "It's getting better."
And Ide says his office is talking with the Georgia Forestry Commission to consider Tech for a Tree Campus USA designation, which recognizes campuses with an effective tree-management program.
Roberts estimates roughly 80 trees are in the 75- to 100-year-old range, although it's difficult to determine while the tree is still alive. "Old pictures act as a good measurement of what trees were there [years ago]," he said.
The drought, construction and just plain old age has called for more than a few trees to be removed. A large, 80-year-old tree near the stadium was removed a few months ago. "It had become dangerous because it had decayed from the inside," Roberts said. "There just wasn't enough water."
"Clay doesn't hold water real well," Ide said. "The drought has made the trees more susceptible to disease and insects."
"If you see the tops start to die, the tree is suffering," Roberts said. "We could probably use four people dedicated to just the trees."
In addition to the money they receive for planting new trees, Ide and Roberts said that alumni have donated trees to campus. Alumnus Charlie Jones, for example, donated 165 trees to the M building's landscaping in 2006. Other groups, such as the Arbor Day Foundation, will donate up to 100 trees when the Institute is recognized as a Tree Campus USA.
]]>Breznitz, who holds a joint appointment in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Public Policy in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, explored the three emerging economies through 482 interviews and numerous site visits, encompassing five years of research.
The book examines how Ireland, Israel and Taiwan have each carved out a niche for their information technology (IT) industries by investigating the different business models from each and from those used by countries with already established technology industries. Specific actions by the state contributed to these countries-not previously known for incubating high-technology industry-and shaped the economies into technology powerhouses.
"The research started when I was still at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]," he said. "What brought me to this research is my experience as a software entrepreneur during the rapid change of the Israeli economy in the early 1990s. When I was growing up in Israel, it was a nice, quasi-socialist country-not an economic star by any means."
Breznitz says that by the mid-1970s-side by side with the currency being devalued and changed twice and an annual inflation of about 1,000 percent-a shift occurred on the policy level within the Israeli government. "Within a few years after the worst economic crisis in its history, technology and software companies were opening. It was almost an overnight sensation, transformation the country into an outpost of Silicon Valley-an amazing economic revolution."
In looking into what caused the turnaround, Breznitz said he noticed most of the business success started with policy changes. "To understand what was happening, I needed to look around at other economies." He started by examining Taiwan and Ireland, both of which also were achieving explosive success in the IT sector.
In 'Innovation and the State,' Breznitz not only explores the actions of the three states, but also suggests avenues and tactics others could take with state-orchestrated information technology innovation in the now-global economy.
"More established economies could learn some things," Breznitz said. "First, by understanding what these small states have done, they could use opportunities created by the global changes of the IT industry and its fragmentation into discrete stages of development and production.
Secondly, the study shows what capabilities are needed to excel on each specific stage." If, for example, the United States can understand what is happening in these economies, Breznitz says, then it could be understood what jobs can be created and what ground is being lost in the global IT marketplace. "How can the U.S. use this global system to sustain its advantage?"
'Innovation and the State' was published last year. Anywhere from 40 to 80 books are considered for the Don K. Price Award with an anonymous nomination process.
"I'm happy with the result [of the book]," Breznitz said. "This award truly is a complete surprise. And I see it as another proof that Georgia Tech's unique model of interdisciplinary social-science and engineering is now impacting the disciplines themselves. Without the support I received here to conduct such research on science, technology, international affairs and public policy, [the study] would not have been possible."
Currently Breznitz is continuing his research on how innovation translates-or not-to economic growth in different regions around the world. His next book details his research into China, analyzing its industrial innovational capacities and their implications for the United States.
Selected as a Sloan Industry Studies Fellow last year, Breznitz is the director of the Globalization, Innovation and Development program at the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy (CISTP), a research affiliate of the Industrial Performance Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a senior researcher at the Georgia Tech Program in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) at the Enterprise Innovation Institute.
Breznitz will sign his book and talk about his current research at 7 p.m., Oct. 9, at the Georgia Tech Bookstore.
]]>Breznitz, who holds a joint appointment in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Public Policy in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, explored the three emerging economies through 482 interviews and numerous site visits, encompassing five years of research.
The book examines how Ireland, Israel and Taiwan have each carved out a niche for their information technology (IT) industries by investigating the different business models from each and from those used by countries with already established technology industries. Specific actions by the state contributed to these countries-not previously known for incubating high-technology industry-and shaped the economies into technology powerhouses.
"The research started when I was still at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]," he said. "What brought me to this research is my experience as a software entrepreneur during the rapid change of the Israeli economy in the early 1990s. When I was growing up in Israel, it was a nice, quasi-socialist country-not an economic star by any means."
Breznitz says that by the mid-1970s-side by side with the currency being devalued and changed twice and an annual inflation of about 1,000 percent-a shift occurred on the policy level within the Israeli government. "Within a few years after the worst economic crisis in its history, technology and software companies were opening. It was almost an overnight sensation, transformation the country into an outpost of Silicon Valley-an amazing economic revolution."
In looking into what caused the turnaround, Breznitz said he noticed most of the business success started with policy changes. "To understand what was happening, I needed to look around at other economies." He started by examining Taiwan and Ireland, both of which also were achieving explosive success in the IT sector.
In 'Innovation and the State,' Breznitz not only explores the actions of the three states, but also suggests avenues and tactics others could take with state-orchestrated information technology innovation in the now-global economy.
"More established economies could learn some things," Breznitz said. "First, by understanding what these small states have done, they could use opportunities created by the global changes of the IT industry and its fragmentation into discrete stages of development and production.
Secondly, the study shows what capabilities are needed to excel on each specific stage." If, for example, the United States can understand what is happening in these economies, Breznitz says, then it could be understood what jobs can be created and what ground is being lost in the global IT marketplace. "How can the U.S. use this global system to sustain its advantage?"
'Innovation and the State' was published last year. Anywhere from 40 to 80 books are considered for the Don K. Price Award with an anonymous nomination process.
"I'm happy with the result [of the book]," Breznitz said. "This award truly is a complete surprise. And I see it as another proof that Georgia Tech's unique model of interdisciplinary social-science and engineering is now impacting the disciplines themselves. Without the support I received here to conduct such research on science, technology, international affairs and public policy, [the study] would not have been possible."
Currently Breznitz is continuing his research on how innovation translates-or not-to economic growth in different regions around the world. His next book details his research into China, analyzing its industrial innovational capacities and their implications for the United States.
Selected as a Sloan Industry Studies Fellow last year, Breznitz is the director of the Globalization, Innovation and Development program at the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy (CISTP), a research affiliate of the Industrial Performance Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a senior researcher at the Georgia Tech Program in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) at the Enterprise Innovation Institute.
Breznitz will sign his book and talk about his current research at 7 p.m., Oct. 9, at the Georgia Tech Bookstore.
]]>The search committee heard details on the upcoming search process and be formally charged with its mission from Tucker, Potts and Herbst in a meeting on the Tech campus in Atlanta.
"We have a truly excellent committee now in place," said Tucker. "I look forward to seeing the results of the committee's work, and feel confident that we will be able to locate a president who will further enhance Georgia Tech's prominence in national and international higher education."
The Board of Regents has engaged R. William Funk and Associates, Dallas, Texas, to serve as the search firm for the committee. The company was selected to aid in the search from a number of national higher education executive recruiters.
The national search will replace former Georgia Tech President G. Wayne Clough, who stepped down on June 30 to become the 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Tucker announced the membership of the Tech presidential search committee in July.
]]>Tech improved from a 'C' to an 'A' in both in the Administration and Food & Recycling categories. The addition of a full-time director to the Office of Environmental Stewardship along with a LEED-accredited building director, an alternative transportation manager and a recycling services manager, contributed to the 'A' grade in Administration.
The Food & Recycling category was giving a boost from last year, as Tech currently purchases 40 percent of its produce and 25 percent of all food from local sources and offers organic food, along with discounts given for students' having reusable cups and shopping bags. Students also have organized a campus community agriculture program. In March, the Office of Solid Waste Management and Recycling won the 2008 American Forest and Paper Association College and University Paper Recycling Award.
In the Green Building Category, Georgia Tech received an 'A,' up from a 'B' in 2008. Policy dictates that all new buildings and renovations will meet or exceed the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver standards. The Christopher W. Klaus Advanced Computing building was LEED Gold-certified in June. To date, six building and renovation projects are LEED-registered, and six historic campus buildings have been renovated to LEED Silver standards.
"People at Georgia Tech are doing more," said Office of Environmental Stewardship Sustainability Director Marcia Kinstler. "We have a long record of sustainability and can now document these efforts better that we have been able to in years. I have seen students, faculty, researchers, staff and administration collaborating and innovating at the intersection of technology, policy, business and sustainability, living the Institute's vision to 'define the technological research university of the 21st century.'"
In the rest of the categories, Tech received a 'B' in Climate Change & Energy; an 'A' in Student Involvement, a new category for 2009; a 'B' in Transportation; an 'A' in Investment Priorities; and an 'F' in both Endowment Transparency and Shareholder Engagement.
Georgia Tech performed on par with most of its peer institutions, with the University of Washington and Stanford University receiving the highest grade awarded ('A-'). Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a 'B+', while Carnegie Mellon and California Institute of Technology both received an overall grade of 'B.' Emory University received a 'B' and the University of Georgia received a 'C-'. Out of 300 schools, 15 received the highest grade of an 'A-' and were ranked as Overall College Sustainability Leaders.
]]>Although extensive resources have been devoted to planning for a worse case scenario on the local, regional and national scale, a June 2008 report issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found gaps still exist. While many states have made progress in planning for mass casualty events, many noted continued concerns related to maintaining adequate staffing levels and accessing other resources necessary to effectively respond.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering have developed a computer software system that allows flexible design of facility models, including various clinical models created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The system is designed to help federal, state and local first responders design and test more efficient plans and policies for dealing with health care emergencies.
Known as RealOpt©, the program was created by Dr. Eva Lee, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and director of the Center for Operations Research in the Medicine and HealthCare. Since its initial deployment in 2004, the system currently is approaching 400 users among the emergency preparedness community.
The appeal of RealOpt© is simple. No other system provides such an adaptive planning and assessment tool for large-scale emergencies. The program can assist in the design and of an all-encompassing, flexible and dynamic public health emergency response capability that requires strategic and operational systems planning.
"When it comes to medical emergency preparation, it is difficult to anticipate the outcome of a situation that has never occurred. Decisions must be made quickly," explained Lee. "RealOpt©, not only helps policy makers better prepare and more efficiently deploy available resources, the program also identifies gaps crucial to effective mitigation planning."
Charged with administering medication to an at-risk population during a disease outbreak or exposure to a biological agent, or to radiation or other harmful substances, the CDC and public health administrators must quickly ramp up point-of-dispensing (POD) locations and deliver appropriate emergency medical services in an orderly, expeditious and safe manner. For this reason, they value RealOpt©, as an effective planning tool.
"RealOpt©, is flexible, adaptable, easy-to-use and produces meaningful results to the user," said Bernard Benecke, a CDC staff member at the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response. "It allows for complex optimization of PODs that cannot be determined by the naked eye."
According to Benecke, RealOpt©, was used in several major exercises in 2007 and has been funded by the CDC again this year for on-site drills due to its usefulness to local planners in changing standard operating procedures and POD designs that maximize efficiency. One exercise involved a multiple-site analysis that evaluated point of distribution sites for medications in the wake of a pandemic flu outbreak. "We learned that some local health departments had good plans in place, while others had more work to do," noted Lee.
Besides pandemic planning, since 2004, Lee and her research team have participated in strategic planning and in time-motion studies for anthrax and smallpox drills. In addition, RealOpt©, was successfully utilized by the City of New Orleans in 2007 for a mass vaccination drill that actually provided citizens with free flu shots. The program assisted in the clinic design and in determining optimal staffing rates. RealOpt©, was also able to pinpoint bottlenecks and the numbers of individuals receiving flu shots proved to be close to what the system anticipated.
"RealOpt©, is the first system that looks at the design of strategic planning and operational response on the ground," said Lee. "It gives policy makers a tool to assess their capabilities for handling large scale medical emergencies and how they might handle scenarios ranging from local public health emergencies to a situation of national magnitude."
In addition to being robust, RealOpt©, is extremely accessible. As a result of Lee's negotiation with the university, emergency planners can access the program free of charge.
Beyond biological and infectious disease outbreak emergency response, RealOpt© is currently used by first responders in planning for a radiological crisis, especially in radiation contamination screening and health monitoring. Lee also points out that the program is not confined to medical scenarios. It has been successfully deployed in manufacturing and industrial settings to help pinpoint where to locate manufacturing plants, personnel and other resources.
Despite the prospects for new applications, RealOpt© has proven its worth in the emergency response arena.
"First responders are able to use RealOpt's© capabilities to design their own clinics and compare different optimization methodologies. Additionally, it allows the user to optimize staffing and deal with shifting clinic demands during a crisis event. No other modeling software that I am aware of is able to do this," concluded Benecke.
]]>The Institute teamed up with the Atlanta Fire Department, Georgia State Fire Marshal's Office, the Center for Campus Fire Safety, the National Fire Protection Association, Underwriters Laboratories and the U.S. Fire Administration to conduct the demonstration and sponsor a safety fair designed to inform the Georgia Tech community on how to reduce potential fire incidents and burn injuries.
The event was held in recognition of National Campus Fire Safety month and there are some staggering stats to consider when weighing the importance of this issue.
In the past eight years, 94 people have died nationally in campus fires, with more than 80 percent of these occurring in off-campus housing. The Center for Campus Fire Safety, colleges and universities, as well as federal legislators all recognize the need for more fire safety education to college students and their parents.
On August 14, President George W. Bush signed the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HR 4137) into law. A component of this new college safety law is the Campus Fire Safety Right-to-Know Act. The legislation requires colleges and universities to report fire safety information to the U.S. Department of Education, including fire-related injuries, deaths and incidences, as well as fire detection equipment (i.e. smoke alarms, sprinklers) in on-campus housing.
During the interactive safety fair, students had the opportunity to crawl through a theatrical smoke-filled trailer that simulates the limited visibility in a real fire. In addition, students also learned how to properly use a fire extinguisher and fight a fire.
Along with fire safety materials and handouts, students received smoke alarms, donated by Kidde and had a chance to win Apple iPods donated by Simplex Grinnell.
Officials from Georgia Tech, the Atlanta Fire Department, and the Georgia Insurance Commissioner's Office (ICO) were on hand to address the importance of fire and life safety for college students and to support Georgia Tech's efforts to provide college students with a hands-on learning experience.
Some of Georgia Tech's efforts on fire safety include:
- Georgia Tech meets or exceeds all requirements outlined by the State of Georgia Fire Marshal. Annual inspections are conducted and rechecked by contracted agencies.
- Georgia Tech has a dedicated, fulltime time fire marshal, deputized by the State Fire Marshal, and two fire safety specialists on staff.
- Georgia Tech has smoke alarms in place on every hall and in every room in residence housing giving the campus in excess of 20,000 smoke alarms.
- Fire extinguishers are located in every hallway (every 75 feet).
- An annual fire exercise is conducted with local first responders and the Atlanta Fire Department attends Georgia Tech's monthly emergency preparedness meetings.
- 300 students are trained in fire safety in campus provided housing each semester
- All Georgia Tech RAs and housing directors receive fire safety training.
- A fire drill is scheduled during the first 10 days of each semester.
- Georgia Tech bans the following items/activities in student housing sleeping rooms:
Candles
Halogen Lamps
Smoking
Cooking
Live Christmas Trees
Ceiling Tapestries
Georgia Tech requires fire-resistance ratings on furniture (including, but not limited to, beds, mattresses, desks, and chairs) in student housing sleeping rooms.
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