Veronica Rivera, an incoming assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP), studies human-computer interaction, security, and privacy to create safer digital experiences. Her research earned her selection to the second cohort of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship for Early Career Scholars.

"I am excited and honored to be part of this year's CRA Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship cohort," said Rivera. 

"This program reflects the importance of cross-disciplinary research and collaboration in building AI systems that benefit and support society. I look forward to spending the next year building collaborations that support me and my students' research into protecting the digital safety of the diverse communities who use AI tools."

Rivera's research examines how technology shapes interpersonal relationships. Using empirical and design-based methods, she partners with communities affected by technology-facilitated abuse to understand digital safety risks and develop technologies that better protect users.

Through the fellowship, Rivera will study how AI is reshaping technology-facilitated abuse and develop data collection methods that enable researchers to assess these evolving risks over time.

"Trustworthy AI is a key research area in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the College of Computing," said SCP Interim Chair Mustaque Ahamad. "The CRA Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship recognizes Veronica's innovative research and will help her build a research program that advances an area of strategic importance to our school and the broader AI community."

Supported by Microsoft, the CRA Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship recognizes early-career computing researchers who combine technical expertise with interdisciplinary approaches to address the ethical, societal, and human-centered challenges of artificial intelligence. The fellowship provides interdisciplinary training, mentorship, and collaboration opportunities that help researchers integrate ethical, societal, and human-centered perspectives into AI research and development.

Over the next year, Rivera and the other fellows will participate in a series of professional development activities, including a four-day Field School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The program also includes quarterly virtual meetings, mentoring opportunities, and collaboration with scholars participating in related AI and data ethics programs.

DeMillo was among 80 computer scientists worldwide selected for the Academy's founding class and was the only Georgia Tech faculty member recognized.

"I am honored to be included in the inaugural class of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy," said DeMillo. "This recognition reflects the work of outstanding students, collaborators, and colleagues over many years. Software engineering research has transformed the way society builds and depends upon software, and I hope our community will continue to advance the scientific foundations needed to make software more reliable, secure, and worthy of the trust people place in it."

Established by ACM SIGSOFT, the Software Engineering Academy is a standing body of honor that recognizes members of the software engineering community whose lasting technical contributions, leadership, and service have shaped the field. The Academy celebrates researchers whose cumulative work and influence have advanced software engineering as both a scientific discipline and professional practice.

"Rich's research in software testing is recognized among the most influential contributions to the field of software engineering," said SCP Interim Chair Mustaque Ahamad. "His inclusion in the inaugural ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy demonstrates the lasting impact of his research on building more reliable software systems."

The inaugural class was selected from leaders whose contributions have already been widely recognized across the software engineering community, including ACM Fellows and recipients of ACM SIGSOFT's Outstanding Research Award. Beginning next year, new Academy members will be elected annually through a community nomination process.

DeMillo served as the founding chair of Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, the first school of its kind at a top research university. He previously served as the John P. Imlay Dean of the College of Computing and directed the Georgia Tech Information Security Center.

Throughout his career, DeMillo has held leadership positions across academia, industry, and government. He served as Hewlett-Packard's first chief technology officer, led computing research at Bell Communications Research, directed the Computer Research Division at the National Science Foundation, and led the Software Test and Evaluation Project in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

His research spans software engineering, cybersecurity, election security, and the societal impacts of digital technology. His 1979 paper, Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, is widely regarded as a foundational work in software engineering and has been recognized as one of the 50 most influential papers in computer science.

In addition to his research, DeMillo has helped shape higher education through the creation of Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not trendy. In fact, it’s downright grubby. But the work that a Georgia Tech researcher and his students are doing is improving campus sustainability, one pound of food waste at a time. 

Read more »

Recycled materials promise a cleaner future, but recycled content alone does not necessarily make a product sustainable. At Georgia Tech’s Daedalus Lab, assistant professor, National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient, and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Faculty Fellow Christos Athanasiou and postdoctoral researcher Danqi Sun are working to provide greater certainty to designers and engineers by rethinking how materials are tested for their fracture characteristics. Their article in Science Advances details a new testing protocol that reduces cost, increases speed, and simulates real-world conditions.

Materials shape nearly every part of modern life, from packaging and consumer products to bridges and medical devices. Choosing the right material involves balancing durability, cost, manufacturability, and environmental impact. Yet those decisions are not always guided by a clear understanding of how materials age and fail under real-world conditions, especially for recycled materials like plastics.

One way that materials frequently fail is by cracking. A small crack can begin almost invisibly. Over time, it can spread from regular wear and tear and exposure to common environmental factors like moisture, temperature fluctuations, or even dirt. Eventually, the crack expands, and the part fails. Engineers have studied fracture for more than a century, but connecting the science of cracking to practical decisions about sustainability remains a major challenge.

The characteristics of recycled plastics often vary from those of the same material in unrecycled, or virgin, form. Products made from recycled plastics may be sold with sustainability claims under the assumption that they will perform as if they were made with virgin material. However, premature failure requiring repair or replacement can quickly change the sustainability equation as well as the acceptance of recycled materials by manufacturers and consumers.

Beyond Conventional Fracture Testing

Materials rarely fail due to a single factor. They may be exposed to several factors simultaneously, such as mechanical loading, chemical environments, temperature changes, moisture, and time. Traditional fracture protocols test one specimen at a time under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, which bear little resemblance to the real world. To move beyond this limitation, Sun developed an in-situ, high-throughput platform capable of studying how materials degrade and fail under more realistic conditions.

The platform changes conventional fracture testing in three important ways. First, it can test multiple specimens simultaneously rather than one at a time. By monitoring samples in parallel, testing time can be reduced by more than 60%. Second, it allows materials to be tested in realistic environments. In this study, researchers examined virgin and recycled plastics in alkaline environments that resemble conditions encountered in applications like landfill liner membranes and geotextiles. Third, the platform incorporates an imaging technique known as photoelasticity, which reveals the formation of stress fields that form around the origin of a newly developing crack. This allows researchers to see cracks develop earlier than before, giving them a clearer picture of the forces that drive crack growth.

The researchers have made the technology available for licensing through Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing. “Our goal was to make fracture testing not only faster but also more informative,” Sun said. “By combining high-throughput testing, realistic environments, and full-field stress imaging, we can better understand how materials fail under conditions closer to real-world applications.”

An Honest View of Sustainability

Recycled plastics are often viewed as a greener choice. But according to the study, it’s not always so straightforward. If a recycled product fails prematurely and needs to be replaced frequently, its environmental and economic costs can increase despite its recycled content. As Athanasiou puts it, “Failing materials don’t just break products. They can break sustainability promises.”

For example, comparing virgin polyethylene terephthalate (PET) with recycled PET (rPET) in applications such as landfill geotextiles, the researchers discovered that rPET showed lower resistance to environmental stressors, particularly in alkaline conditions over a pH of 9. In this application, specifying rPET over virgin PET would likely eliminate all of the presumed economic and environmental advantages of using a recycled material.

“Recycling is essential, but recycled content alone does not tell the full story. If a material fails too soon, the environmental benefits can disappear,” Athanasiou said.

From Cracks to Circularity

For the researchers, the significance of the work extends beyond recycled plastics. The broader goal is to provide a fast, affordable, and realistic platform for evaluating the sustainability of any material choice. Because current testing protocols are costly, not widely available, and limited in the information they yield, engineers, manufacturers, and policymakers often have little choice but to continue to specify non-recycled materials because they will perform as expected. Having cheap and accurate data on recycled materials will help to accelerate their adoption because matching the engineering properties of recycled materials to their most appropriate applications will become more obvious.

The researchers also hope to expand the platform to simulate even more complex environments and apply it to a wider range of materials. Because the system generates large amounts of detailed data, it may enable opportunities to use computational modeling or artificial intelligence to digitally simulate mechanical testing, driving down costs and expanding availability even more.

The larger vision is a future in which sustainability is judged not by labels or assumptions, but by evidence for how a material performs, how long it lasts, how it fails, and what it costs society and the environment over its full lifetime.

Please visit the Daedalus Lab YouTube channel to see an explainer video about this new testing protocol: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zmRhiRIiAkQ

Read the paper here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh0456

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award No. 2338508.

Their work, led by Sourabh Saha, associate professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow, and Harnjoo Kim, who conducted the research during his doctoral studies and later as a postdoctoral fellow in Saha's lab, was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

Nanoscale 3D printing allows researchers to create structures thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. These structures have potential applications in fields ranging from advanced computing and optics to biomedical devices and clean energy technologies. However, increasing printing speed often comes at the expense of quality.

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

But a forthcoming study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis by Xindi He, assistant professor of finance at the Scheller College of Business, and his co-author Ning Zhu, professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, suggests that individual investors don’t always treat money as fungible when making decisions in their brokerage accounts. 

Their findings complicate that assumption.  

He and Zhu’s research shows that investors often treat money differently depending on where it comes from. A dollar transferred from a savings account does not feel the same as a dollar generated by selling a stock, even when both sit side by side as cash in the same brokerage account. 

The Idea of “Cash Temperature” 

To capture that difference, He introduced the idea of “cash temperature.” 

“I would describe cash temperature as a way to measure how money feels to an investor based on its recent history,” He said. “‘Cold’ cash is money that recently came from a stable source, such as a savings account. ‘Hot’ cash is money generated by selling stocks or other risky assets.” 

That distinction might sound subtle, but in practice, it shapes how people invest. As He and his co-author analyzed detailed brokerage data, a clear and surprising pattern emerged. 

“What struck us was how systematic the pattern was,” He said. “This was not just about one measure of risk.” 
Across nine dimensions, investors using colder cash behaved more cautiously. They chose less volatile stocks, stocks with weaker recent run-ups and lower attention measures, and stocks more likely to be part of major market indexes. They also held these positions longer, and the stocks had better subsequent performance. 

“The consistency across these dimensions made the pattern much more compelling,” He said. 

By contrast, when investors used hotter cash, money that had already been exposed to market risk, they were more willing to take chances. They pursued riskier stocks, often without better returns to show for it. 

“The evidence points to harm, especially when investors treat hot cash as easier to risk,” He said. “In our data, hotter cash leads investors to buy riskier stocks, and those purchases are followed by lower subsequent returns. Investors take more risk but do not appear to be rewarded for it.” 

Meaning Behind the Money 

At the heart of this behavior is something deeply intuitive. People assign meaning to their money. 

“A dollar from savings may feel like protected wealth, while a dollar from selling a stock may feel like money already set aside for investing,” He said. 

In a pre-registered experiment, that feeling showed up in how people experienced loss. Participants reported that a hypothetical loss felt more painful when the money was framed as coming from a savings account than when it was framed as coming from a brokerage account. 

“That suggests that the source of money changes how investors experience potential losses,” He said. 

The effect plays out in everyday decisions. Someone who transfers $5,000 from savings into an investment account may tread carefully, treating it as something to preserve. But that same person might take bigger risks with money that came from a recent stock sale, seeing it as already “in the market.” 

The study also finds that these mental labels are not fixed. 

“We were also surprised by how dynamic the effect was,” he said. “Cash labels were not fixed forever. They were refreshed as money moved through the brokerage account and faded over time when there was no salient account activity.” 

What Investors Can Learn 

For investors, the takeaway is simple but powerful. Before deciding, pause and strip away the story attached to the money. 

“The practical lesson is to pay attention to the mental labels attached to cash,” He said. “Ask yourself, ‘Would I still make this purchase if I ignored where the cash came from and evaluated the stock on its own merits?’” 

While money may be identical on paper, it does not always feel that way in practice. Its source can shape the stocks investors choose and the returns that follow. 

Read More: "Portfolio Choice with Non-Fungible Brokerage Cash"

• AI is accelerating cyberattacks.
• The same technology can strengthen defenses.
• The biggest risk is falling behind.

Artificial intelligence is changing cybersecurity on both sides of the battlefield. The technology helping organizations improve efficiency also enables cybercriminals to identify vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and launch attacks at unprecedented speed.

Researchers in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) say the greatest concern is not that AI is creating entirely new forms of cyberattacks. Instead, it is accelerating activities that attackers already perform, making existing threats quicker, cheaper, and harder to stop.

"AI is dramatically speeding up cyberattacks," said Brendan Saltaformaggio, associate professor in the SCP and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). "AI can identify vulnerabilities far faster than humans and often in places humans wouldn't think to look."

Hackers Are Moving Faster

Most cyberattacks include several stages: finding vulnerabilities, developing ways to exploit them, gaining access to systems, and pursuing a goal such as stealing information or disrupting operations. According to Frank Li, associate professor in the SCP and ECE, AI is having its biggest impact on the early phases of that process.

"AI can help attackers explore potential decisions and implement attacks faster than in the past, whether it's identifying software bugs or constructing social engineering hooks," Li said.

The pace of attacks has already changed dramatically. Peter Swire, J.Z. Liang Chair in the SCP and professor of law and ethics in the Scheller College of Business, says attackers are moving from vulnerability discovery to exploitation much faster than in the past.

"The average time until an exploit is detected even a couple of years ago was measured in months," Swire said. "Now it is measured in hours."

That compressed timeline is forcing organizations to rethink how quickly they identify, prioritize, and patch vulnerabilities.

The Risk Reaches Everyone

Healthcare systems, critical infrastructure providers, government agencies, and small businesses remain attractive targets because they often manage sensitive information or essential services while relying on legacy technology. But experts emphasize that no organization is immune.

"Unfortunately, everyone is at risk," Saltaformaggio said. "AI is not creating new victims; AI is making attackers faster and more effective at targeting the same organizations they have always pursued."

Organizations with outdated systems or limited cybersecurity resources face particular challenges because AI allows attackers to identify weaknesses in less time and at lower cost than ever before.

Fighting AI With AI

Cybersecurity defenders also have access to the same technology.

Experts say AI can strengthen defenses before, during, and after a cyberattack. Defenders can use AI to identify and patch vulnerabilities more quickly, reducing opportunities for attackers to gain access. AI can also detect subtle signs of intrusion by correlating activity across networks and recognizing patterns that would be difficult for humans to spot in real time.

Once an attack occurs, AI can support rapid investigation and response by analyzing how the compromise happened, identifying root causes, and helping deploy targeted protections.

"AI can help defenders in every step of stopping a cyberattack," Saltaformaggio said.

Researchers at Georgia Tech are already demonstrating AI's defensive potential. Saltaformaggio pointed to Georgia Tech's recent success in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge, which highlighted how AI systems can autonomously discover and reason about software vulnerabilities at large scale. Swire also noted that a Georgia Tech team led by Professor Taesoo Kim won a $4 million DARPA prize for developing advanced AI-based cybersecurity defenses.

Speed Is the New Defense

Despite the promise of AI-powered security, significant challenges remain. Security teams need AI tools they can trust, ones that explain how they reached conclusions and provide evidence that analysts can verify. Attackers may also attempt to manipulate AI systems, creating new risks for organizations that rely heavily on automated tools.

Li says organizations cannot rely on traditional, human-paced security processes to keep up.

"AI's primary impact on cyberattacks is enhancing speed and scale," Li said. "Organizations need to adapt to more agile defenses and processes that account for this, in many cases relying on AI as well to help speed up defensive actions."

Organizations also need to rethink how they respond to vulnerabilities. Swire argues that traditional patch management is no longer fast enough in a world where exploits can emerge within hours.

"The entire process for patching systems will have to be re-engineered," he said.

The cybersecurity landscape has always been an arms race between attackers and defenders. AI hasn't changed that reality. It has simply accelerated it. The organizations that will be best positioned are those that adopt AI as quickly as the adversaries they are trying to stop.

The SCC is home to seven student engineering competition teams and provides workspace, tools, and resources to help students apply classroom learning to real-world engineering challenges.

In his new role, Simmons will provide strategic leadership and operational oversight for student competition teams, facilities, staff, budgets, sponsorships, and safety programs. He also will teach and mentor students through engineering design and experiential learning courses, helping connect classroom instruction with project-based experiences.

“Richard brings a unique combination of industry experience, research leadership, and deep commitment to student success,” said Carolyn Seepersad, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair. “As an accomplished engineer and a Georgia Tech alumnus, he understands the value of experiential learning and is well-positioned to lead the Student Competition Center.”

Simmons, ME 1993, joined Georgia Tech in 2016 after spending the first 20 years of his career leading research, technology, and business development initiatives in the automotive industry, energy sector, and federal government. After graduating from Tech, he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Purdue University and later became a licensed professional engineer.

Over the past decade, Simmons has held several leadership and research positions within Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute, including founding director of the Energy Policy and Innovation Center and, most recently, director of Research and Studies. He has also taught a variety of courses at the Woodruff School, including ME 2110, Capstone Design, Energy Systems, and Renewable Energy.

Read Full Story on the ME News Page

Blending engineering challenges, field experiences, and team-based design projects, the weeklong program in June gave students a dynamic introduction to energy, sustainability, and engineering innovation and a rare opportunity to engage directly with the technologies, infrastructure, people, and ideas that help power the world.

“Our goal is to get outside of the classroom, have fun, and demonstrate how a STEM education can literally help turn on lightbulbs,” said SEI’s director of Research and Studies, Rich Simmons, who also directs Energy Unplugged. “Through hands-on learning, field trips, and real-world experiences, these creative students are learning that everyone can play a role in our energy future. Along the way, they are gaining a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs and challenges engineers face and learning from experts about pathways to an energy career.”

Mousetrap-Powered Cars
Putting those ideas into practice from day one, the camp began with an engineering challenge in which students designed and constructed mousetrap-powered cars. Using the stored potential energy of a mousetrap spring to propel their vehicles, participants explored how energy is converted from one form to another and identified sources of friction and inefficiency that affect the distance traveled. The activity encouraged students to think like engineers, iteratively testing and refining their designs to improve results.

Engineering Optimization and Tradeoffs
Similar problem-solving skills were put to the test during an RC car optimization challenge. Equipped with a battery-powered vehicle and energy-monitoring systems, students were tasked with completing a driving course while maximizing their score by balancing speed, energy consumption, safety, and cargo capacity. Participants had the option to add weights and tennis balls to increase potential points, but doing so increased the risk of penalties from dropped cargo, missed obstacles, or vehicle rollovers. The exercise highlighted the tradeoffs engineers routinely face when optimizing systems under competing constraints.

“The overall interest in green energy among youth is increasing, so having demonstrations and experiments as well as some high-level lectures on the actual science was a great way to engage the students,” said student assistant William Nudd, a senior in mechanical engineering who assisted with the camp. “When I was in their shoes, I had never attended a physics class, so the camp was definitely getting them a step ahead and did a great job introducing and showcasing key concepts related to energy: How does my home get electricity? Where does energy come from? How do power plants operate?”

Trivia, Demos, and Scavenger Hunts
Additional activities throughout the week included energy-themed trivia competitions, a steam engine demonstration, a solar microgrid exercise, and a campus scavenger hunt. Together, they reinforced classroom concepts through interactive learning and encouraged students to connect technical principles with practical applications.

Field Trips to Power Plants
While these activities taught foundational concepts, a highlight of the camp was a series of field trips that allowed students to observe large-scale energy infrastructure in operation. Participants toured the Georgia Power McDonough-Atkinson Plant, where they learned how combined-cycle power plants generate electricity using both gas and steam turbines to improve efficiency. Students also visited the Morgan Falls hydroelectric facility, getting an up-close view of the massive generators and equipment used to convert the energy of flowing water into electricity.

Campus Tours
In addition to exploring regional energy infrastructure, students were introduced to Georgia Tech’s innovation ecosystem through visits to campus makerspaces and research facilities, including the Flowers Invention Studio and The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design. Students explored one of the nation’s most advanced examples of sustainable building design during a guided tour of The Kendeda Building, which generates 200% of the energy it consumes. Here they learned how energy efficiency, renewable generation, and resource conservation can be integrated into the built environment.

Final Projects 
To bring together the concepts explored throughout the week, students worked in teams on a final design challenge centered around a solar-powered disaster relief trailer on loan from the Footprint Project. Equipped with photovoltaic panels and battery storage, the trailer was originally designed to provide off-grid power during emergencies. Students were challenged to identify additional uses for the system during periods when disaster response was not required. Many teams proposed sustainable food truck businesses powered by the trailer’s solar energy system.

Teams also evaluated cooking technologies such as pressure cookers and slow cookers, comparing energy consumption, power requirements, efficiency, and operating costs. Students examined how energy demand aligned with available solar generation and battery storage while conducting economic analyses to determine business viability and profitability. The project integrated engineering, economics, and sustainability principles while encouraging creative thinking and collaborative problem-solving. 

“Energy Unplugged is an inspiring demonstration of how hands-on engineering experiences can spark curiosity and passion in the next generation of STEM leaders,” said student assistant Alvaro Hucker, a senior mechanical engineering student. “Working with this group and seeing the fun they were having brought back fond memories of my own childhood. It was an amazing experience.”

Student Contributors: Alvaro Hucker, Senior, Mechanical Engineering and William Nudd, Senior, Mechanical Engineering.

When a bartender checks an ID, they quickly verify a customer’s date of birth and identity before serving them. 

Researchers at Georgia Tech say they have developed a system to help answer that question.

Known as FIRA, the tool analyzes drone crashes to determine whether they were caused by tampered machine-learning (ML) models. The team will present its findings at the 35th USENIX Security Symposium in August. 

The research addresses a growing safety challenge as drones are increasingly used for deliveries, infrastructure inspections, and agriculture.

As drones rely more on machine learning to navigate and make decisions, they also become vulnerable to model poisoning attacks. In these attacks, adversaries manipulate an AI system during its learning phase, embedding hidden triggers that can cause failures under specific conditions.

“Machine learning drones are making more decisions in flight, which makes ML a safety-critical component of these systems,” said Yizhi Huang, Ph.D. student and lead researcher on the project. 

“When something goes wrong, investigators need a way to ask whether the model was responsible, but the model is the part of the system that no one can examine after a crash. FIRA gives investigators a way to investigate these cases by reconstructing what the model was doing during the crash. As more drones run with ML, this kind of forensic capability can help drones be used more effectively and safely.”

When a drone crashes, investigators must determine whether the cause was malicious interference, weather, or mechanical failure. Without reliable forensic tools, accountability is difficult to establish, and safety standards are harder to enforce.

FIRA identifies how drone components interact with machine learning models and monitors those interactions in real time, even with limited bandwidth.

The system functions like a flight recorder, capturing key system activity and reconstructing a timeline after a crash. It then analyzes the model’s behavior to determine whether a malicious trigger was introduced via poisoned ML training data.

In tests across multiple drone platforms and crash scenarios, FIRA identified failure causes and distinguished cyberattacks from environmental or mechanical issues.

The system does not require access to a drone’s source code, making it practical for real-world investigations.

“As commercial drone use expands, tools like FIRA could help improve accountability and trust in AI-powered systems operating in public airspace,” said Huang. 

FIRA: Enabling Automatic Forensic Investigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles was led by Georgia Tech’s Cyber Forensics Innovation Lab in cooperation with the Cyber-Physical Security Lab. These labs reside in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computing Engineering. 

The surrounding trees resemble those of a eucalyptus forest, which could indicate northern Portugal or the Spanish region of Galicia.

It’s the signposts on the road that give it away. They are flat and wide, which is common in Spain but not in Portugal.

Casapu, a master’s student in Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning, correctly reasons that the picture of a road he’s looking at is in Galicia.

Give Casapu a photo, and he will likely be able to tell you where it was taken. 

“I start with infrastructure clues that are specific to a country, region, state or province,” Casapu said. “They include roads or electricity poles, which often remain consistent throughout a country. Once you narrow down the country, you can use more specific factors like vegetation, specific landscapes, or architecture, because these are very nuanced. It’s a top-down approach.”

This is why Casapu is the reigning GeoGussr World Champion — and the ideal expert to test vision-language models (VLMs) on how good they are at geolocation.

GeoGuessr is a geography browser game launched in 2013 that invites players to guess the location of random Google Street View images. Casapu was already known as one of the top players in the world before he won the third annual GeoGussr World Championship in September.

At the beginning of the spring 2025 semester, School of Interactive Computing professor James Hays reached out to Casapu and invited him to collaborate on a new project. Hays was looking to create a dataset to evaluate VLMs' geolocation ability and reasoning. 

“VLMs are surprisingly good at geolocation right out of the box, even when they’re not trained to be good at it,” Hays said.

Hays and his colleagues, associate professors Alan Ritter and Wei Xu, took issue with many AI companies claiming that the VLMs they were releasing were not good at geolocation.

“When Open AI released GPT 4 Vision, there were privacy concerns about the model’s ability to geolocate someone based on photos they’ve shared on the internet,” Ritter said. “Open AI said this wasn’t a concern and claimed the model wasn’t good at geolocation beyond being able to recognize a city or famous monument. We found that wasn’t the case. These VLMs are state-of-the-art at image geolocation tasks.”

Show Your Work

Hays and Ritter enlisted a team of some of the world’s top geolocators. It consisted of Casapu, Joshua Diao, a master’s student in computer science, and Tejas Santanam, a Ph.D. student in industrial engineering. They each received 500 images to geolocate.

Team members recorded their reasons for each of their answers. The result was GeoRC, the first benchmark for VLM geolocation performance, consisting of 800 “ground truth” reasoning chains. 

Hays and Ritter gave the same images to GPT 5, Gemini, Llama, and Qwen. The highest-performing model geolocated with 90% accuracy — not far off from the team’s 96% score.

However, a major distinction showed up in the reasoning chains. While Casapu and Diao provided clear explanations for how they deduce each location, the VLMs either couldn’t provide reasoning for their guesses or were vague in their answers.

“The research community has been demanding explanations from these models,” Hays said. “For example, how do they know the location is in Italy?”

Hays has been researching this subject for almost 20 years. As a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, he was the first researcher to take a machine learning approach to geolocation. He introduced a new algorithm that could estimate a geographic location from a single image.

“When experts have audited these reasoning chains, we’ve noted many suspicious or hallucinated attributes,” he said. “When they hallucinate a geographic property, why is it so often consistent with the correct guess?

“I believe they’re not revealing the true reasoning pathway that they used to determine the image was Italy. They’re just implicitly recognizing that it was Italy for many reasons, then hunting for evidence to support that. Some of the things they say are true and supported by the image, and some are fabrications.”

Practice Partner

Casapu said there may be only a handful of GeoGuessr players who can currently outperform some top-tier VLMs in geolocation, and it may not be long before no one can.

“I think it could be more difficult playing against these models than playing against another human because a human has the possibility of making mistakes at the top level,” Casapu said. “If a well-trained model has that level of consistency, that is far beyond a normal person, and it would be much more difficult to beat.”

He added that working with Hays and competing against a machine improved his skill level and provided valuable practice ahead of the world championship. 

“It helps to take a step back and see why you’re making the guesses that you are,” he said. “Since then, I’ve taken a more methodical approach to how I practice. Writing these things down is a great way to see what you know and see why you make the guesses that you do. It’s been a great training tool.”

Casapu will defend his title at the 2026 GeoGussr World Championship in September.

Hays, Ritter, Xu, Casapu, Diao, and Santanm are all co-authors of a paper on GeoRC along with lead author Mohit Talrej and Ph.D. students Ethan Mendes and Jim Thannikary. The paper will be presented next week at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in San Diego.

The Petit Center is made possible by a transformational commitment from technology entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Georgia Tech alumnus Parker H. "Pete" Petit.

Since 1980, Petit has provided significant philanthropic support across campus, including the naming of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB), one of Georgia Tech’s 11 Interdisciplinary Research Institutes. IBB is an interdisciplinary hub for transforming biological discovery into real-world health impact, bringing together engineers, scientists, and clinicians to accelerate innovations in diagnostics, therapeutics, medical devices, and biomanufacturing. With more than 300 interdisciplinary faculty researchers, 13 research centers, and 1,300 trainees making unprecedented discoveries and generating innovative technologies, IBB is a catalyst for innovative bioengineering and bioscience research. 

The success of IBB led Petit to make his latest investment, which will build on Georgia Tech’s broader commitment to medical innovation: applying engineering, computing, AI, biosciences, and systems thinking to health challenges that require more than any one field can solve. The Petit Center’s work will strengthen the tools, partnerships, and research pathways needed to help more discoveries move from the lab toward real-world patient care. 

A key goal of the Petit Center will be to use AI to build more precise models of how disease works in the body. Its first research initiative will focus on creating virtual models of human cells. Led by Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor and Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, researchers will use those models to study how diseases progress and to identify treatments that may work best for individual patients. 

By modeling disease at the cellular level, researchers can test ideas faster, uncover links among different diseases, and focus on therapies most likely to help patients based on their unique biology. The work could expedite the discovery of new therapies for some of the hardest-to-treat diseases, including pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. 

“Medical innovation is one of the fastest-growing areas in Georgia Tech’s research, and Pete Petit’s commitment will help us further shape the future of medicine," said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “This new research center will find new ways to harness the power of AI to accelerate critical medical discoveries and move them into clinical settings so patients can get the care they need. We’re deeply grateful for Pete's support, and we’re excited to get started.”

The Parker H. Petit Center for AI-Driven Health Innovation will operate under the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) and bring together researchers from across Georgia Tech to advance AI-driven approaches to human health. Researchers affiliated with the Petit Center will work across fields and with clinical and healthcare organizations to help close the gap between discovery and practical use. Over time and with additional investments, the Petit Center’s work will expand into areas such as cancer biomarker discovery, healthy aging, advanced cellular therapies, and AI-supported healthcare systems. 

"Georgia Tech has the expertise to redefine what is possible in healthcare through AI," said Skolnick. "By combining advanced computational methods with biological and medical insights, we can create powerful new approaches to predicting disease, identifying treatments, and improving patient outcomes." 

Petit’s commitment will support advanced computing infrastructure, graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, seed research grants, and annual programs that will bring together leading researchers from around the world working at the intersection of AI and health. 

Petit hopes this investment will inspire others to support interdisciplinary research at the Institute. "Georgia Tech has long demonstrated its ability to solve complex challenges," said Petit. "I believe artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape healthcare, and I am excited to support a center that can help accelerate discoveries to improve and save lives." 

This transformative commitment is included in Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech and is propelling the comprehensive campaign’s success.  

When Robbie van Zyl first started working with drones, it was not for defense. It started with curiosity. 

It’s a role she knows well.

For more than 11 years, Stoinski has served as president, CEO, and chief scientific officer of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, leading efforts to help the world better understand and protect Rwanda’s mountain gorillas — a species with only about 1,000 left in the wild.

Although she now oversees a multimillion-dollar budget and 400 employees worldwide, she never planned to be a CEO.

“I’m a scientist at my core,” says Stoinski. “Day to day, I function more as a leader and executive, but I still think of myself as a scientist first.”

Her job covers a wide range of responsibilities, including fundraising, public speaking, budgeting, and strategy. One week, she might find herself observing gorilla behavior in Rwanda; the next, she’s back in the U.S., discussing conservation on the popular Armchair Expert podcast. 

“I love my job,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like work; it’s a passion.”

A Helluva Scientist

One of the reasons Stoinski chose Georgia Tech for her Ph.D. was its connection to Zoo Atlanta.

Her doctoral advisor, the late Terry Maple, emeritus professor in the School of Psychological and Brain Sciences, served as director of Zoo Atlanta, giving students rare access to conservation-focused research.

“The zoo was our lab. I studied elephants, lemurs, gorillas, and golden lion tamarins, both in the zoo and in the wild in Brazil and Africa,” says Stoinski.

She appreciates how Georgia Tech prepared her for the challenges of her career.

“The rigor of a Georgia Tech education is something you need as a scientist,” she says. “I also had the opportunity to do a lot of public speaking and teaching, which are huge parts of my job now.”

Leading Global Conservation Efforts

After earning her Ph.D., Stoinski spent 14 years with Zoo Atlanta while also working with the Atlanta-based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. She became CEO in 2014 and now oversees conservation and research programs in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Under her leadership, the Fossey Fund has expanded its footprint, including opening its Ellen DeGeneres Campus in 2022, a 12-acre research and education center in Rwanda.

The site includes labs, classrooms, and a restored landscape, where roughly 250,000 plants from 110 species have been planted to reestablish native ecosystems.

“We host hundreds of students — including groups from Georgia Tech, and support dozens of graduate and postdoctoral researchers, from countries all over the world including many from Africa,” she explains. “Seeing their excitement and commitment gives me lots of hope for the future.”

Scientific Storytelling

A Gorilla Story follows the Pablo family of mountain gorillas living on the slopes of Volcanoes National Park in northwestern Rwanda.

“The Pablo group goes back to Dian Fossey’s time,” explains Stoinski. “It’s the largest group of gorillas ever recorded, at one point reaching 65 individuals. An average gorilla family is about 10.”

Due to Rwandan regulations, filming could take place for just one hour each day. Filmmakers and scientists would often have to hike for five to six hours to reach the gorillas.

Because Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund researchers have followed these gorilla families for decades, they were already familiar with the individual gorillas, including six generations of family history, which “makes the story incredibly rich,” says Stoinski.

“You see grief, relationships, alliances — all of it,” she says. “Ultimately, I hope that connection leads people to care and to take action.”

Collaborative Conservation

Stoinski’s career is all about taking action — and inspiring others to do the same.

“We need people on the ground doing this work, but we also need people outside of our field to support and be aware of what’s happening to gorillas and the planet’s biodiversity,” she says.

She encourages Tech students to stay informed:

 “Even if you’re not going into conservation, take a class, listen, learn,” she says. “Unfortunately, there are real challenges facing the next generation.”

She frequently points out that by helping gorillas, we’re saving ourselves, sharing that gorillas live in the Congo Basin, one of the most important ecosystems on Earth. By dispersing seeds and maintaining forest structure, they help sustain environments critical for climate stability and planetary health.

“Protecting gorillas means protecting those ecosystems, which ultimately support human survival.”

A Lasting Georgia Tech Connection

Stoinski maintains strong ties to Georgia Tech through research collaborations and student engagement. Projects over the years have included helping to establish the Center for Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing at the University of Rwanda, geospatial mapping, and architectural design and planning. 

She invites alumni and students to engage with the work firsthand.

“I encourage more Georgia Tech alumni and students to work with us or come see us. And if you want to meet with a Georgia Tech grad, I lead tours: we can put on our Tech gear and take a photo with the gorillas!”

For communities across the country, this growth hits close to home, and not without controversy. What do data centers actually deliver for the local economies that host them?
 

New research from Daniel Yue, assistant professor of Information Technology Management at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, and his co-author, Yiyang Zeng, examines how data center openings affect local jobs, wages, business activity, and electricity prices. Their findings suggest that geography plays a decisive role in whether communities see meaningful economic gains.
 

“Enormous amounts of capital are flowing into specific communities, much of it tied to new construction, while rigorous evidence on the local benefits of these facilities has been thin,” said Yue. “Community pushback has organized rapidly across the country. Our paper begins to fill that gap by providing new evidence using detailed, facility-level data paired with county-level economic indicators.”

A Historic Investment Wave

There are more than 2,500 data centers, either active or under construction, across the United States. Individual hyperscale facilities often cost more than $1 billion to construct and can consume as much electricity as a small city. Is it all worth it?

On average, Yue and Zeng found that when a data center opens, the host county sees a measurable lift: Employment rises by about 3.5%, wages by 5%, business establishments by nearly 5%, and household income by about 2%. Building permits also increase sharply, reflecting construction activity tied to new facilities.

These are real, economically meaningful gains. But Yue and Zeng discovered that these gains are much smaller than what might be expected from a large investment. And they’re not evenly distributed.

Why Metro Areas Benefit More

The researchers’ clearest finding is that metropolitan areas capture most of the economic benefits from data centers, while rural areas see far fewer spillover effects. While metro counties saw increases in employment and new business growth, non-metro counties saw no measurable gains.

The reason comes down to what economists call “agglomeration,” or economic density.

Data centers don’t operate in isolation. They rely on construction contractors, engineers, equipment suppliers, professional services, and a skilled workforce. Those connections are far easier to build in places that already have deep labor markets and established business networks.

Metropolitan areas are well-positioned to absorb the indirect spending that data centers generate. High-wage technical employees support restaurants, retail, and local services. Suppliers and contractors can scale up quickly. These spillover effects amplify the impact of the initial investment.

In rural areas, that amplification is much harder to achieve. Facilities tend to employ relatively few permanent workers — often fewer than 100 — and many specialized services are imported from outside the county. As a result, the broader economic ripple never materializes.

That doesn’t mean rural communities see no benefit at all. The research finds a small but real drop in unemployment rates in non-metro counties, and local governments may still gain tax revenue or infrastructure investments. But the sweeping job and wage growth often promised during local recruitment efforts will not likely arrive on its own.

“Location, not facility size, determines whether the local benefits show up,” Yue said.

The Hidden Cost: Electricity Prices

Yue and Zeng’s research also uncovers an important trade-off. Data centers use a lot of electricity. A single large facility can use as much power as roughly 80,000 homes. In areas where the researchers can cleanly measure price effects, electricity prices rise by about 5% after a data center enters.

“When the benefits to communities are small, even downsides like higher electricity prices that strain infrastructure will be felt by locals,” Yue shared.

Who pays for the increased cost of electricity isn’t straightforward. Yue and Zeng’s research suggests communities should ask specific questions about who pays for new infrastructure and how those costs will be distributed. Local utility companies divide costs differently among homeowners, businesses, and large industrial users, including data centers. Because cost-sharing systems vary by state, each data center development is unique.

What Communities Should Consider

As states and cities work to attract or push back against data center construction, Yue and Zeng hope their research will encourage more evidence-based decision-making.

For metro areas with strong labor markets and dense business ecosystems, data centers can deliver meaningful, though not transformative, economic gains. For rural communities, the positive impact is more complicated.

“In 10 years, communities will likely wish they had pressed harder on the quality of the decision itself, including whether the debate was evidence-based, whether their local economy was equipped to capture the gains, and whether the fine print aligned with residents' long-term interests,” Yue said. “It’s vital that communities look past flashy, headline incentive packages and focus on the details: tax abatement structures, electricity tariff arrangements, and who ultimately pays for infrastructure upgrades.”

As data centers continue to dot the American landscape, understanding where they create shared value — and where they don’t — will be critical for community leaders and policymakers alike.
 
Read More: The Local Economic Effects of Data Center Entry

The North Georgia Lightning Mapping Array (NGLMA) uses specialized detection equipment to generate detailed maps of the lightning that occurs in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Through a collaboration between GTRI and the National Weather Service (NWS), the array provided continuous lightning information to agencies responsible for visitor safety.
 

“The North Georgia Lightning Mapping Array is providing decision-support information to agencies responsible for protecting events in Atlanta related to the World Cup,” said Michael Peterson, director of the GTRI Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC). “The system has been up and running and gave us excellent measurements of the thunderstorms that occurred in mid-June. It complements the other sources of weather information that the agencies have available.”
 

Read the full article on the Georgia Tech Research Institute news page

That dichotomy is part of what drives the field of synthetic biology: where scientists apply engineering principles to learn from and carefully adapt nature’s biological systems to address human problems. By understanding biological systems, scientists can carefully redirect them when natural processes cause harm.

This principle has shaped my work as a biomedical engineer for over two decades. My lab studies how to program cells in order to better understand their behavior and ultimately use them as medicine. The goal is not to discard or replace nature, but to learn from biological principles and use that knowledge to responsibly help society.

Researchers announced on July 2, 2026, that they had created the first synthetic cell built from purified, nonliving components.

The lab’s cell-like system, dubbed SpudCell, raises key questions: What does it take to build a cell from scratch? If scientists assemble something that feeds, grows, copies genetic material and divides, have they created life?

How to Create Cells From Scratch

Natural cells are astonishingly complicated. Researchers want to use synthetic cells to learn more about how life works, and they are doing this by rebuilding some of life’s basic features in a simpler, more understandable form.

Earlier designs of minimal cells, used to test which components are necessary for lifelike behavior, began with existing living cells and reduced the size of their genomes. A minimal cell is useful because it is simple, but that simplicity comes at a cost. It may reveal which parts are needed for lifelike behavior, but it usually lacks the autonomy, resilience, metabolism and evolutionary capacity of natural cells.

Instead, synthetic cells are built through a bottom-up engineering approach. Scientists start with a simplified compartment – a kind of biological “box” – and ask what must be added for it to behave more like a living cell. A membrane separates the inside from the outside. Genetic material stores instructions. Molecular machinery reads those instructions to make molecules. Energy sources power reactions. Other components can allow growth, division and adaptation.

A useful way to think about synthetic cells is to compare them with technologies society already depends on. The radio wasn’t invented all at once. Engineers learned how to combine an antenna, tuner, amplifier, power source and speaker to convert invisible electromagnetic waves into sound. A car is not just a metal shell; it becomes transportation only when a frame is connected to wheels, brakes, steering, an engine, and transmission and control systems. A computer began with switches and strings of ones and zeros that could be assembled into circuits capable of storing and processing information.

Similarly, SpudCell was assembled from the bottom up with purified, nonliving parts. Researchers used lipid molecules to create a cell-like membrane, DNA molecules to store genetic instructions, purified enzymes to copy and read those instructions, and other molecular machinery to help build proteins and other molecules from small chemical building blocks, such as amino acids and nucleotides.

SpudCell is exciting scientists because it appears to bring several features of life together in one system. The researchers describe it as capable of feeding, growth, genome replication, genetically encoded division and something close to evolution. These features resemble a biological cell cycle.

Close to Life, But Not Quite

While SpudCell is an important milestone in the field, it stops short of being a fully synthetic living cell. A membrane-bound compartment containing DNA is not automatically a living cell, just as a pile of car parts is not a car.

SpudCell can carry out several life-like processes, but it is not independent. It still relies on carefully controlled laboratory conditions and on researchers to supply its molecular machinery. It doesn’t reliably pass on its genetic material or spontaneously evolve the way natural cells do.

To approach life, a synthetic cell must coordinate many processes at once. NASA describes life as a “self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution,” meaning it must independently use energy, copy information, grow, divide, respond to its surroundings and persist over time. Natural cells do this with extraordinary reliability because they are the products of billions of years of evolution.

SpudCell still falls short of that standard. It depends on researchers to continuously supply it with the molecular machinery to function and to physically help it divide. It also cannot reproduce indefinitely outside a carefully controlled laboratory environment. In other words, SpudCell may have been built rather than born, but it is not yet autonomous life.

That limitation does not make the achievement unimportant. In fact, it is scientifically valuable precisely because it exposes what is still missing to create life. Which parts are essential? Which processes must be coordinated? How much complexity is necessary before chemistry begins to look like biology?

Why Create Synthetic Cells?

Those questions have practical importance. Answering them can help scientists and engineers design safer biological systems for a wide range of industries.

Synthetic cells allow scientists to more cleanly test how the surrounding membrane separates the inside of a cell from its environment, how genetic instructions are read, how energy is used, and how growth and division are coordinated. These cell-like systems could eventually become simplified test beds for studying biological circuits, disease mechanisms and the origins of life.

They could also help scientists build safer systems for making medicines, fuels or materials, detecting environmental toxins, or delivering therapies without relying on fully living organisms.

More broadly, synthetic biology connects medicine and biotechnology: Viruses can be redesigned into vaccines or gene therapy, immune cells can be reprogrammed to recognize cancer, and microbes can be engineered to make useful molecules, such as insulin, or detect pollutants.

Similarly, researchers could use synthetic cells to deliver a drug only to diseased tissue, or create microbial systems that detect toxins or pathogens in water. They can also act as simplified biological factories that can make medicines without requiring a fully living organism, or as biosensors providing early warning of dangerous threats, such as bioweapons.

Creating Life Responsibly

The philosophical question “Is SpudCell alive?” may not have a simple yes or no answer.

Depending on whether your definition of life emphasizes metabolism, reproduction, evolution, autonomy or cellular organization, the boundary between living and nonliving can look very different.

Life is not defined by one property alone. Viruses contain genetic information but depend on host cells to reproduce. Mitochondria perform essential metabolism but cannot live independently outside of cells. A seed can remain dormant for years before resuming growth.

When synthetic biology is guided by a strong sense of responsibility, scientists can learn how to redirect harmful processes, build safer tools and help society. This requires not only asking whether biological systems can be built, but also whether their creation should be controlled, where they should function and what safeguards are needed.

Over the past two decades, scientists have built many kinds of biological kill switches – that is, genetic circuits that can shut down engineered cells under specific conditions. Some researchers have made cells dependent on a specific nutrient. Others have created cells that can survive only in a particular environment or activate self-destructive pathways when conditions change.

Kill switches are not magic off buttons and do not replace careful regulation, physical containment or public oversight. But they are an important example of synthetic biology’s moral compass: to not only build useful biological tools, but to build them with safety, accountability and humility in mind.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For years, scientists studying the human gut have relied on a material that most people would never expect: a jelly made from mouse tumors. Called Matrigel, it is used to grow tiny, patient‑derived versions of the intestine that help researchers understand disease, test new drugs, and explore future therapies. However, since this material comes from animal tissue, it’s unpredictable, difficult to control, and limits medical applications. 

Colleagues and friends remember Shelton as a dedicated mentor, collaborator, and educator, whose curiosity, generosity, and sense of humor left a lasting impression on students and peers.

“Sam exemplified the very best of Georgia Tech, and his legacy will continue to inspire generations of engineers and educators,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. “I am deeply grateful for his friendship, mentorship, and leadership. My heartfelt condolences go to his family, and to the many students, colleagues, and friends whose lives he touched.”

A nationally recognized leader in energy systems, Shelton founded SEI as an interdisciplinary organization that brought together engineers, researchers, policy experts, and industry leaders to advance high-impact energy solutions. That vision remains central to SEI’s mission and continues to guide its work today.

“Sam was the quintessential engineer and innovator, whose vision was always accompanied by the development and demonstration of actual products instead of leaving them as promising concepts,” said Srinivas Garimella, Hightower Chair in the College of Engineering and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “He had the rare ability to see through nebulous ideas and claims and get to the fundamental engineering truths. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to seek his advice, which he freely gave. I will miss his friendship and counsel very much.”

During a career of more than 35 years, Shelton made lasting contributions to sustainable energy and engineering innovation. His work spanned combustion research, solar energy technologies, and offshore wind systems. He secured more than $30 million in research funding, held eight patents, founded two energy-focused companies, and helped translate research into real-world energy solutions.

In addition to his research, Shelton was deeply committed to education. During his academic career, he developed undergraduate and graduate courses in energy technology, teaching both in person and online. His Energy 101 course reached tens of thousands of learners through a massive open online course platform, covering topics such as energy supply, independence, economics, and society’s energy demands.

“When I first started at SEI in 2016, Sam and I would meet for lunch to discuss the latest research, consider how far we've come since the Carter administration, and grapple over the world’s energy problems,” said Rich Simmons, SEI’s director of Research and Studies. “Sam was genuine and objective, not working backward from a preconceived notion, but working forward with an open mind to understand, appreciate, and apply the first and second law. He was also colorful and witty! We are all privileged to pay these lessons forward to future energy students.” 

Beyond academia, Shelton’s engineering expertise reached a global stage as the designer of the Olympic torch for the 1996 Atlanta Games, an enduring symbol of innovation recognized worldwide. “The Olympics represented world peace, mankind coming together, and overcoming adversity. It was an amazing event to think about, to witness, to live through, and be a part of helping to create it,” Shelton said in a 2016 interview.

Shelton is survived by his daughters, Suzie and Stacy, three granddaughters, and a wide network of students, colleagues, and collaborators. His legacy continues through the programs he built, partnerships he fostered, and the people he helped.

A memorial service celebrating Shelton’s life will be held Aug. 1 at 1 p.m. at The 57th Fighter Group Restaurant in Atlanta. The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, memorial gifts be directed to Roll Call, Georgia Tech’s Fund for Excellence. Donations may be made at gtalumni.org/SamShelton.

Housing and transportation are top priorities for many city mayors, policymakers and public policy researchers—including Brian An, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. But in February 2021, soon after Winter Storm Uri wreaked havoc in Texas, an eight-hour power outage at his Atlanta home became an epiphany.

“While housing stability had long been on my mind, losing power drove home the importance of another piece of urban infrastructure: reliable access to electricity,” says An, an EPIcenter faculty affiliate and co-director of the Center for Urban Research. “It sparked my interest in studying the intersection of energy and urban policy to help make cities and communities not only socially equitable but also resilient to extreme weather.”

Read Full Story on the EPIcenter News Page

Six years after demonstrating that membranes could separate crude oil at the molecular level, Georgia Tech researcher Ryan Lively is part of an international team that has taken the concept a significant step further.

The team, including investigators at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), discovered that a membrane material widely believed to be non-selective for molecules as small as those found in crude can in fact selectively separate crude oil into lighter and heavier fractions in a way researchers did not expect. 

Communities across Georgia and the nation are navigating a range of economic and energy-related pressures. Gas prices, inflation, and the rapid growth of data centers are shaping the cost of goods and services, influencing everyday household financial decisions.

At the same time, ongoing geopolitical tensions are driving fluctuations in global oil markets and fuel prices. The expansion of AI data centers is also increasing demand for land, power, and water resources. And conflicts involving energy infrastructure in parts of the Middle East and Europe have affected supply stability.

Responding to these challenges requires careful analysis of emerging trends, supported by strong research in policy and economics. Faculty Affiliates of Georgia Tech’s Energy Policy and Innovation Center study these complex, interconnected issues affecting energy systems, costs, and access. They analyze emerging trends, evaluate policy options, and identify practical pathways forward.

Read Full Story on the EPIcenter News Page

This battle of the brains has also been playing out over the course of evolution, but not as a simple clash between old and new. 

“There was a theory proposed in the ‘50s that the brain evolved in layers starting with basic bodily functions, to emotions in the reptilian brain, leading up to sophisticated reasoning in humans,” explains Nabil Imam, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering and a faculty member with Georgia Tech’s Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS). “This is not how an evolutionary biologist would think about the problem.”

Instead of a “new” brain layered over an “ancient” one — or even a logical brain versus an emotional one — research published in Science Advances reveals that brain evolution may come down to wiring. 

By studying the architecture of both biological and artificial brains, Imam’s team found that brain evolution is a strategic allocation of limited real estate. They propose a computational tug-of-war between two fundamentally different types of internal wiring — ones established even before birth.

This new understanding not only helps resolve a longstanding mystery in brain evolution but could also help us design more efficient AI systems.

The Problem With the “Lizard Brain”

When we refer to our “logical” or “lizard” brains, we’re really talking about different groups of brain regions. The logical brain is known as the neocortex, the brain’s outer layer responsible for vision, perception, reasoning, and other higher-level functions. For the lizard brain, the story gets a bit complicated.

“The limbic system, sometimes called the ‘reptilian brain,’ controls emotion broadly speaking — but it also has other components with distinct functions,” explains Imam. The system has separate regions for memory, smell, and navigation in addition to emotional regulation. “Why do people group all these different regions into one big system? There hasn’t been a good theory for what is common between these different circuits.”

To investigate, Imam’s team looked beyond individual regions to examine how these systems scale across species. Instead of comparing single areas based on function, the team analyzed how the limbic system and the neocortex change together across evolutionary history.

The result was remarkably consistent. When one component of the limbic system was larger, the others were also larger, while the neocortex was consistently smaller. These regions don’t vary independently. “Rather,” says Imam, “it’s a coordinated expansion of these regions across species.”

This reveals something new: The limbic system behaves not as a loose collection of functions, but as a unified network that expands and contracts as a group across evolution.

But what is driving this coordinated push and pull?

Maps Versus Barcodes

Imam argues that it comes down to how these different parts of the brain are wired before birth.

In the neocortex, neural circuits are organized as spatial maps. Areas that process touch in nearby parts of your body, like your index finger and thumb, are physically close to each other in the brain. The same is true for sight and sound. 

Wires in the limbic system, however, are not spatially organized. They function more like a bar code, firing in unique, distributed patterns to represent specific scents or complex memories.

To test whether this was an innate trait or acquired through experience, the team developed AI models for different senses. They found that when they pre-wired an AI with localized, spatial connectivity, the network was naturally very good at processing vision, sound, and touch information. Conversely, distributed, “barcode-style” networks were essential for the AI to excel at scent recognition and memory.

The Evolutionary Tug-of-War

The final piece of the puzzle explains how the size of brain components changes predictably across species. Because resources like space and energy are limited, natural selection chooses which system to prioritize.

The team simulated evolution by creating a multimodal network where the spatial and distributed domains competed for “real estate.” When the environment rewarded smell, all areas of the distributed system expanded and the neocortex shrank. When vision was rewarded, the opposite occurred.

This explains why the nine-banded armadillo, which relies on scent, has a massive limbic system, while the highly visual squirrel monkey is dominated by its neocortex. Across the 182 species studied, the research shows that brain evolution is not about adding new layers of "logic," but about strategically reallocating space between different wiring systems to support survival.

By translating this biological architecture to AI systems, engineers could create machines that learn as efficiently as the human brain, requiring far less data and energy.

“Today's artificial neural networks are trained by vast amounts data — it’s about nurture,” says Imam. “But the brain is not a blank slate that gets trained by experience. It is a mix of nature and nurture, and the nature is that pre-wired architecture.” 

“We could translate that architecture to AI systems to make it more brain-like, or make it learn or function as efficiently as the brain.”

This work was a collaboration with Cornell University and was supported by the National Science Foundation.

DOI: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec6112

The latest rankings build on a record year for Georgia Tech commercialization. In 2025, the Institute reported advancing hundreds of technologies toward the marketplace, while achieving record levels of invention disclosures, issued patents, and licensed technologies. Those milestones underscore Georgia Tech’s expanding role in transforming research discoveries into products, companies, and partnerships that create economic and societal value.

“The strong performance reflects a commercialization strategy focused not only on protecting IP, but also on helping researchers translate discoveries into practical applications,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, chief commercialization officer at Georgia Tech. “Whether through licensing technologies, launching startups, or partnering with industry, we are building pathways that help researchers transform discoveries into real-world solutions.” 

From advanced health technologies to environmental monitoring tools and next-generation aerospace ventures, Georgia Tech innovations are reaching users and markets in increasingly diverse ways. One example is Kinemo, a startup developed through Georgia Tech research that is helping people with limited mobility regain independence through wearable assistive technology. Founded by researchers from the College of Engineering, Kinemo uses physiological sensing and small intentional movements to enable users to control digital devices. The company works closely with clinicians and patients at Shepherd Center to refine the technology and expand accessibility for individuals living with spinal cord injuries and mobility limitations.

Another example is Skopii, a startup launched from research in the lab of environmental engineering professor Ameet Pinto. The company is commercializing portable imaging and artificial intelligence technology that enables users to rapidly analyze microorganisms in water and environmental systems, eliminating the need for lengthy laboratory testing. The technology has the potential to improve decision-making for water utilities, food production systems, and environmental monitoring efforts.

As research institutions face increasing pressure to demonstrate impact beyond publications and laboratory discoveries, Georgia Tech continues to show how world-class research can translate into technologies, startups, jobs, and solutions that improve lives. The latest AUTM rankings provide another measure of that success, highlighting an innovation ecosystem that consistently moves ideas from the lab to the marketplace.

Startups such as Kinemo and Skopii illustrate the broader commercialization approach reflected in Georgia Tech's AUTM rankings. 

T1D is caused by the autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells, requiring individuals to manage their blood glucose levels through lifelong insulin therapy. Transplanting pancreatic islets has long been investigated as a potential curative treatment, but long-lasting success in extrahepatic sites has been limited—particularly when islets are transplanted beneath the skin—due to poor blood vessel formation, immune rejection, and cellular stress following transplantation.

Vlahos’ research addresses these limitations by combining synthetic biology and tissue engineering in a new way: engineering cells to actively reshape their local environment after transplantation to make it more hospitable for the graft. Rather than relying solely on biomaterials or porous structures to support transplanted cells, the project focuses on programming the cells themselves to sense stress and respond dynamically.

Read the full story.

Through a major investment from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Georgia Tech is helping accelerate the development of domestic critical minerals from unconventional and secondary resources. The $7.5 million award positions the Institute to advance supply chain solutions that span resource discovery, processing, recycling, and circular materials management.

Selected by DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, Georgia Tech will lead the Critical Minerals in the Atlantic Seaboard Plain (CM-MAP) project. The regional effort builds on DOE’s Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) initiative and will examine potential resources across the Atlantic coastal plain.

The CM-MAP project will focus on sedimentary deposits, including kaolin, bauxite, heavy mineral sands, and phosphates, as well as legacy mining residues, coal combustion byproducts, and other unconventional and secondary resources that could support future recycling and circular economy opportunities.

Drawing on existing infrastructure, regional assets, industry bases, and scientific expertise, CM-MAP will establish a regional innovation ecosystem that supports domestic critical mineral production, recycling, and advanced manufacturing, while fostering new economic opportunities throughout the Southeast.

“This is a powerful example of how Georgia Tech brings together leading research capabilities and partnerships from industry, government, nonprofits, and national labs to address complex national challenges,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research. “By identifying and domestically sourcing critical minerals, we are helping secure essential supply chains, while enabling the next generation of energy and materials technologies.”

The DOE award builds on a growing network of research, industry, regional, and international partnerships led by Georgia Tech to translate scientific discovery into real-world supply chain solutions, including:

• Research leadership — Founded in 2024, Georgia Tech’s Center for Critical Mineral Solutions serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research and technology development across the Institute.
• Regional partnerships —Through the Georgia Partnership for Essential Materials, a flagship regional collaboration platform, Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and the Georgia Mining Association convene stakeholders from across the critical minerals sector. The partnership brings together industry, nonprofit organizations, regional economic development agencies, national labs, universities, and technical colleges to connect, collaborate, and stay engaged in the latest developments.
• International engagement — A U.K.-U.S. working group extends partnerships across the Southeastern United States and Southwest United Kingdom, connecting researchers, industry leaders, and government agencies working to strengthen global supply chains.
• Georgia Critical Mineral Supply Chain Manufacturing Demonstration Center — Supported through congressional funding, the center is developing capabilities and regional supply chain demonstrations that connect resource development, materials processing, recycling, and advanced manufacturing.

As part of CM-MAP, researchers will analyze materials collected from natural deposits and industrial sites throughout the Southeast to identify their critical mineral content. The resulting large datasets will be combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches to better understand and predict where resources exist, optimize extraction pathways, and inform future recovery and recycling strategies.

“This project brings together a highly collaborative team from Georgia Tech, national labs, industry partners, and research institutions across the region,” said Yuanzhi Tang, the principal investigator and Georgia Power Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Tang is also the founding director of the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions and executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute. 

“Through this award, we are working to build secure and resilient critical materials supply chains, from resource discovery and characterization to processing, recovery, recycling, and advanced manufacturing, while also developing the skilled workforce needed to support these emerging industries,” Tang said. “Our vision is to create a regional innovation ecosystem that embraces both unconventional resources and circular economy approaches to maximize the value of materials already in use.”

Learn more about critical materials research and workforce development efforts at Georgia Tech by visiting the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions webpage.   

It affects up to one-third of the human population and can create symptoms severe enough to lead to hospitalization, yet much about what causes it remains a mystery. It’s rarely discussed in public, often goes undiagnosed, and remains a consistently underfunded and understudied area of science.  

The grant will support building a robotics and AI ecosystem for dexterous and mobile manipulation, enabling robots to move through environments, interact with objects, and adapt to changing conditions.

Ye Zhao, LIDAR director and associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, leads the project, with Anqi Wu, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, serving as co-principal investigator.

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

FIFA President Gianni Infantino likened the scale of each game to that of a Super Bowl. The success of a tournament that large will rely heavily on technology, affecting everything from the players on the pitch, all the way to viewers at home.

On top of the state-of-the-art technology used at many large events, this World Cup will also see the debut of new technology. At the center of much of it will be electrical and computer engineering.

Experts from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) weigh in on how the field is enabling the technology behind the world’s largest sporting event.

Read Full Story on the ECE News Page

Researchers at Georgia Tech say they have developed a system to help answer that question.

Known as FIRA, the tool analyzes drone crashes to determine whether they were caused by poisoned machine-learning (ML) models. The team will present its findings at the 35th USENIX Security Symposium in August. 

The research addresses a growing safety challenge as drones are increasingly used for deliveries, infrastructure inspections, and agriculture.

As drones rely more on machine learning to navigate and make decisions, they also become vulnerable to model poisoning attacks. In these attacks, adversaries manipulate an AI system during its learning phase, embedding hidden triggers that can cause failures under specific conditions.

“Machine learning drones are making more decisions in flight, which makes ML a safety-critical component of these systems,” said Yizhi Huang, Ph.D. student and lead researcher on the project. 

“When something goes wrong, investigators need a way to ask whether the model was responsible, but the model is the part of the system that no one can examine after a crash. FIRA gives investigators a way to investigate these cases by reconstructing what the model was doing during the crash. As more drones run with ML, this kind of forensic capability can help drones be used more effectively and safely.”

When a drone crashes, investigators must determine whether the cause was malicious interference, weather, or mechanical failure. Without reliable forensic tools, accountability is difficult to establish, and safety standards are harder to enforce.

FIRA identifies how drone components interact with machine learning models and monitors those interactions in real time, even with limited bandwidth.

The system functions like a flight recorder, capturing key system activity and reconstructing a timeline after a crash. It then analyzes the model’s behavior to determine whether a malicious trigger was introduced via poisoned ML training data.

In tests across multiple drone platforms and crash scenarios, FIRA identified failure causes and distinguished cyberattacks from environmental or mechanical issues.

The system does not require access to a drone’s source code, making it practical for real-world investigations.

“As commercial drone use expands, tools like FIRA could help improve accountability and trust in AI-powered systems operating in public airspace,” said Huang. 

FIRA: Enabling Automatic Forensic Investigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles was led by Georgia Tech’s Cyber Forensics Innovation Lab in cooperation with the Cyber-Physical Security Lab. These labs reside in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computing Engineering. 

Logically this makes sense and has been backed up by past security research. However, researchers at Georgia Tech have found hidden paths in cyber-physical systems that attackers can use to disrupt or even destroy them.

To find these hidden paths before an attacker does, the researchers built a testing tool called ICSFlux. This new tool leans on the physics used by the industrial process and maps out the system to find new threats that were once thought impossible. 

ICSFlux was deployed across 11 different programmable logic controllers in six industrial sectors, including chemical manufacturing, water treatment, power grids, aircraft, desalination, and waste processing. The process uncovered twenty genuine safety violations. 

In one case drawn from a chemical-plant simulation, an attack path uncovered by the tool drove a reactor past its safe pressure limit and into a simulated explosion. By using nothing but valid operator commands, the team took the reactor from a completely normal and stable state to critical territory. 

Because the method relies only on the physics of a process and not on the details of any one controller, the same tool worked across all six sectors without being rebuilt, and it reduced the search space by roughly 50%.

Burak Sahin, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech and the study's lead author, found that by sending a series of perfectly normal, fully authorized commands, intruders can slowly nudge a physical process toward a dangerous state. 

“These systems are usually judged safe as long as nobody hacks into them,'' Sahin said. “What we found is that an attacker who can send everyday commands, the same ones a normal operator sends, can patiently steer the process toward a failure. No single command looks wrong, which is exactly why the usual defenses miss it.''

Most existing tools assume an attacker can rewire the controller or change the software inside it. In the real world, those controllers are locked down and cannot be touched. ICSFlux takes the opposite and more realistic view. It treats the controller as a sealed box that cannot be opened and works only with the commands an operator is normally allowed to send.

Rather than measuring how much of a controller's software it has exercised, the usual yardstick for this kind of testing, ICSFlux measures how close the physical system is getting to an unsafe limit and steers its testing in that direction.

“Two different sensor readings can run through the exact same code and still send a reactor in completely different directions,'' Sahin said. “Looking only at the software tells you nothing about whether the physical system is safe. We had to follow the physics, not the code.''

One of the study's most important takeaways emerged when the researchers tightened the safety margins to see whether caution alone would help. Even when every command stayed within approved limits, the way the controller reacted to a steady stream of small adjustments could still cause pressure to overshoot and the reactor to fail. In other words, staying inside the rules was not always enough.

All of the team's experiments were carried out on secured, controlled test beds. The work was conducted with Georgia Tech's Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab, whose research spans the security of cyber-physical systems from industrial programmable logic controllers to marine, automotive, and drone platforms. Georgia Tech's Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory, a team of researchers who work together to further the investigation of advanced cyber crimes and the analysis and prevention of next-generation malware attacks, also contributed to the paper. 

The labs are a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

Fuzzing the Physical Space: Physics-Aware Testing of Black-Box Industrial Control Systems' was accepted to the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. In addition to Sahin, the team includes Ph.D. students David Oygenblik, Mingxuan Yao, and Yizhi Huang as well as Associate Professors Brendan Saltaformaggio, and Saman Zonouz.

The workshop is part of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pathways (AMP) program, a collaboration between the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which connects rural educators with hands-on manufacturing training. This particular training was delivered through a partnership between GTMI, STEM@GTRI — GTRI’s K-12 outreach program — and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, leveraging the facilities and expertise of the Montgomery Machining Mall to provide teachers with direct experience in modern manufacturing. Building on GTRI’s Rural Computer Science Initiative, the program expands access to high-skill, high-wage career pathways across rural communities. The initiative is supported through state funding.

The workshop comes at a time when demand for skilled manufacturing workers continues to grow nationwide, particularly in roles requiring precision, technical expertise, and problem-solving.

Inside the Machine Shop 

The training took place June 3 – 5 in the Montgomery Machining Mall, where staff provided access to facilities, equipment, and technical expertise that made the immersive learning experience possible.

Teachers designed and manufactured a metal meat tenderizer and a metal coaster etched with both the Georgia Tech logo and their name. For many, this was their first exposure to advanced manufacturing tools and processes, and a glimpse into high-skill, high-wage careers within reach for their students.

“Many of these teachers have never been exposed to any advanced manufacturing,” said Sean Mulvanity, a program manager for STEM@GTRI and project lead for this workshop. “By the time they walk out of here, they’ve actually created and manufactured physical items they can take back to their students.” Unlike traditional professional development, the workshop places teachers directly in the machine shop, working on heavy equipment. 

For AMP program leaders, this pilot was a way to build momentum for school districts that may add advanced manufacturing courses and to make the machine shop feel less intimidating in the process. 

“One of the biggest misconceptions about modern manufacturing is that it is inaccessible or limited to specialized factory environments,” said GTMI Deputy Director Steven Ferguson. “Today’s manufacturing combines hands-on skills, digital technologies, AI, and problem-solving in ways that are relevant to students across many career pathways. By giving teachers direct experience in the machine shop, we help them bring that excitement back to their classrooms and show students that they can design, build, and innovate in their own communities.”

From the Shop Floor to the Classroom 

One of the workshop participants is James Beveridge, who teaches computer science for grades 6-12 in the Chattahoochee County School District, a small, rural district south of Columbus. He has participated in multiple Georgia Tech-led training programs, and he runs a full computer science pathway for 450 middle and high school students. This fall will mark his third year in the Rural Computer Science Initiative and teaching computer science after two decades in industry.

Beveridge had some informal experience with tools growing up — his father taught him basic carpentry and welding — but he had never done formal machining work before the AMP workshop.

“Working with metal is different than working with wood, obviously, but it’s been really interesting to see the precision involved,” he said. “With wood, you can be off by a sixteenth of an inch, and nobody cares. When you’re machining metal parts, it has to be very, very precise. Learning to use the precision measuring tools has been eye-opening.”

For Beveridge, one of the biggest benefits of his ongoing work with Georgia Tech through the Rural Computer Science Initiative and related programs is that he never leaves empty-handed.

“Every time I come up here to learn something new, they send me home with the equipment to teach it with,” he said. “The first time, I left with a classroom set of robots so my students could learn to program. Another time, it was a more advanced humanoid robot with artificial intelligence. Now, I’m going back with new skills in machining and a physical project I can show my students.”

Another participant, Juone Brown, teaches high school computer science and AI to students at Dooly County High School in Vienna, Georgia. This is her second year in the rural computer science partnership and her fourth year teaching at Dooly. Previously, Brown was a professor for 25 years at Fort Valley State University. 

Like Beveridge, Brown has no formal machining background but said the way workshop instructors broke down each step — especially the math behind the cuts — made the work feel approachable.

“It has been fantastic and really well-paced,” she said. “We all come from different backgrounds, but the way they present the information makes it click. We know the math, but when you’re on the machine, and they show you easier ways to get the cut you need, it’s very encouraging.”

She’s already thinking about how to translate that feeling for her students, many of whom prefer building things to writing code. “I’m always telling them that skills pay the bills,” Brown said. “A lot of my students are hands-on. Now I can connect what we’re doing in class to real parts and jobs.”

Bringing Advanced Manufacturing to More Georgia Classrooms 

After the workshop, teachers are expected to integrate machining concepts into existing courses or help build new manufacturing pathways at their schools.  

AMP program leaders intentionally kept this pilot cohort small. The team plans to repeat the workshop several times over the coming year, expanding to more schools and districts across Georgia, building local champions who can help launch advanced manufacturing programs in their communities.

About the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI)

The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) convenes industry leaders, government partners, and top researchers to collaborate on the grand challenges facing manufacturing today: accelerating technology development and deployment; creating, maintaining, and filling quality jobs; ensuring global competitiveness; and advancing economic and environmental stability. 
Our vision is to ensure rapid innovation that secures U.S. dominance in advanced manufacturing. Through the design and development of artificial intelligence systems, secure digital manufacturing, additive and subtractive processes, and large-scale production enterprises, GTMI stands at the forefront of manufacturing innovation — leveraging state-of-the-art facilities, including the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility, to turn research breakthroughs into market-ready solutions. 

About the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 3,000 employees, supporting eight laboratories across more than 20 locations nationwide and performing more than $919 million in problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

“I used to see ash settling on our terrace from time to time and thought it was just waste,” Tripathi said.

Years later, at Georgia Tech, Tripathi started looking at that ash differently. What once appeared to be ordinary industrial waste became the focal point for her work. 

As a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tripathi, along with Ching-Hua Huang, Turnipseed Family Chair and Professor, and Xing Xie, Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor, both in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, developed a method to recover rare earth elements from coal fly ash.

Rare earth elements (REEs) help power electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, MRI machines, smartphones, and defense systems because of their unusually strong magnetic and electrical properties. Despite the name, most REEs are not actually rare in quantity. They’re rare in concentration. REEs are scattered through the Earth’s crust in amounts too small to mine easily, and much of their global supply chain remains concentrated outside of the United States.

That imbalance has turned REEs into both an economic and national security concern. Countries are competing for the materials sustaining advanced manufacturing, energy systems, and military technologies, increasing pressure to find domestic sources. That urgency has pushed researchers like Tripathi, Huang, and Xie to look at coal fly ash differently: not just as industrial waste but as a potential source of materials that modern technology depends on.

Coal naturally contains trace amounts of rare earth elements. Burning the coal concentrates those elements in the ash left behind.

Tripathi developed a method for extracting rare earth elements that avoids the corrosive chemicals used in conventional extraction. The same ash that once coated her rooftop could now become a secondary domestic source of critical materials.

Mining What Was Left Behind

Coal fly ash already exists in enormous quantities across the United States. About 2 billion tons are stored in impoundments, such as storage ponds and landfills, according to the Department of Energy.

Those sites require long-term monitoring because coal fly ash can release contaminants into soil and groundwater. Major storms can also damage storage sites and spread the material into surrounding communities and waterways.

Inside that ash, REEs are dispersed in tiny concentrations. Recovering them is a challenge; recovering them cleanly is an even greater one. Many existing recovery methods rely on concentrated acids, large amounts of water, or extreme heat during extraction. Some techniques require temperatures high enough to rival industrial furnaces. Others create additional waste streams.

Tripathi and her team wanted a different approach. 

They built the system around a recyclable ionic liquid, a salt-based substance stable enough to operate under conditions that would break down water-based systems. The liquid pulls rare earth elements away from the ash. An applied electrical current then causes the recovered elements to collect onto a surface where they can be removed. Afterward, the liquid can be cleaned and reused.

“The beauty of this system is that it works beyond the limits of water,” Tripathi said. 
“The ionic liquid allows us to recover rare earth elements under conditions that water-based systems just can’t handle.”

The process also changes depending on the voltage applied. At lower voltages, the system selectively recovers neodymium, an REE used in high-strength permanent magnets found in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defense systems. At higher voltages, it recovers a broader mixture. The system recovered nearly half of the available neodymium during testing.

Beyond Coal Ash

Tripathi has shown that the chemistry works in small batches. The next challenge is scale: whether the system can recover enough rare earth elements efficiently enough to make the process commercially practical.

The same approach could extend beyond coal fly ash. Batteries, discarded electronics, and medical waste all contain valuable metals that often end up buried in landfills or destroyed during disposal.

For Tripathi, the idea began at home, where fly ash would settle on her terrace. What once seemed like an ordinary nuisance could help reshape how critical materials are recovered from waste. 

Tripathi’s research is published in Environmental Science and Technology. 
It was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

For most, that heart-pounding uncertainty ends the moment the foot finds solid ground. But for many individuals living with conditions like stroke or spinal cord injury (SCI), that sense of disconnect is a permanent reality.

“These conditions of course have a huge effect on our ability to move around and be independent — but the other side of it is the sensory feedback that we lose,” says Matthew Flavin, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Most rehabilitation treatments primarily focus on restoring movement, but “even if you have motor control, if you can’t feel when your foot's touching the ground it can be really hard for you to move around safely.” 

In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Flavin and an interdisciplinary team of researchers introduce a way to bridge this gap: a wearable “sensory substitution” system that translates foot pressure into high-tech patterns of heat and vibration they can feel elsewhere. 

The system uses high-resolution pressure-sensing insoles designed by the team, which are placed inside a user's shoes to record how their weight shifts in real-time. This data is streamed via Bluetooth to a flexible, skin-conformable array of haptic receivers worn on the forearms, a part of the body that often retains sensation in SCI. The receivers give quick pressure feedback through vibration, while also alerting the user to longer-term pressure “hotspots” through heat. 

“One of the limitations of a lot of approaches in haptics is that you're having to map a missing sense onto a completely different sense,” says Flavin. “We’re keeping the type of information that we're missing, which is the distribution of pressure, and we're just basically putting it on a different part of their body.”

Rerouting the lost sensation was key to making the device intuitive to learn. Participants were able to correctly identify the “feel” of the ground through their arms with high accuracy within a mere two-hour session. When tested with a small group of participants with stroke or SCI, the wearable significantly improved standing balance and led to steadier walking.

“What’s encouraging about these early results is that participants appeared to use the feedback in ways that supported balance and walking,” says John Rogers, a materials science and engineering professor at Northwestern University who collaborated on this study. “Our study suggests that providing pressure information through another part of the body could be a practical path for helping people compensate for lost sensation.” 

While vibration provides immediate feedback for walking and balance, the team views the thermal feedback as a tool for long-term health. Heat is a slower, low-frequency signal that could alert patients to pressure hotspots, potentially preventing diabetic foot ulcers or pressure injuries for those who are bedridden or use wheelchairs.

The small, lightweight system is completely untethered, making it suitable for use during daily activities in and outside the clinic. It’s also highly adaptable to different injury types, which is ideal for conditions as variable as stroke, SCI, and diabetic neuropathy. Placement of the haptic receivers can be adjusted based on where a patient has the most sensation, and the sensitivity of the insoles can be tailored to each patient. 

As a member of several of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Institutes — the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society, the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences — Flavin credits the project’s success to an interdisciplinary effort and deep engagement with clinicians and patients.

“This reinforces the importance of really engaging with your stakeholders very early on,” says Flavin. “If you're not continually refining that concept with those stakeholders, you quickly find that they might be looking for something that your device isn't delivering.”

With new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the team is now working to make the technology even smaller and more reconfigurable, moving closer to a standard wearable for daily clinical use.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2536577123

1. It’s not about exposure anymore. Atlanta is already a global city, so the focus is on whether the World Cup delivers lasting value for residents.
2. Economic impact is uneven. Big headline numbers do not show who actually benefits, and much of the spending may not reach local communities.
3. Infrastructure will be tested. Transportation and downtown systems will face heavy strain, raising concerns about what improvements last beyond the event.
4. The hidden story is food and logistics. Behind the scenes, Georgia Tech researchers are working to reduce food waste and strengthen systems that could outlast the tournament.

A Global Stage and Familiar Promises

As Atlanta welcomes the world for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the promises are familiar: millions of visitors, global attention, economic growth, and a chance to showcase the city on one of the biggest stages in sports.

But Georgia Tech experts say the real question is not whether the tournament will generate activity — it is who benefits from it and what remains after the final match is played.

From Visibility to Value

Mega-events have long been sold as catalysts for transformation. The 1996 Olympics reshaped Atlanta’s physical landscape and helped position the city as a global destination. Thirty years later, the World Cup arrives at a very different moment.

“There are similarities,” said Emily Barrett, assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning. “Like the Olympics, the World Cup is an accelerator for infrastructure upgrades and public and private investment alike.”

Atlanta is seeing significant public investment in transportation improvements and billions of dollars in private development downtown. But today’s Atlanta is very different from Atlanta in the 1990s.

“Atlanta is no longer a city seeking recognition on the world stage,” Barrett said. “We are a thriving and growing city.”

That shifts the conversation from visibility to value.

“The open question is whether hosting mega-events makes the city work better for the people who live here,” Barrett added.

The Economics Behind the Headlines

Assessing that value becomes more complicated when economic forecasts enter the conversation.

Large projections often dominate headlines, but Declan Abernethy, lecturer in the School of History and Sociology, cautions that economic impact estimates rarely tell the whole story.

“It is far easier to put out an economic impact projection compared to the difficulty of measuring impact,” Abernethy said.

While visitors will spend money on hotels, restaurants, transportation, and entertainment, he notes that much of that spending may not reach the community.

“When we look closely at that spending, we can see that much of the profit will be taken in by large corporations or FIFA in the immediate vicinity of Mercedes-Benz Stadium and not as much by Atlanta residents or small businesses,” he said.

According to Barrett, economic studies often overlook a critical question: What could alternative investments have accomplished?

“Economic studies rarely account for displacement costs, or whether the same public dollars could have generated similar or better outcomes if invested elsewhere,” she said.

Pressure Points Across the City

The World Cup’s impact extends beyond economics; it will also test Atlanta’s infrastructure at a scale few events can match.

Michael Hunter, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says the biggest challenge may be the volume of people moving through the city.

“There will be a number of pressure points. However, one of the most significant will be just the number of people,” Hunter said. “This event will attract significant crowds.”

Atlanta’s transportation agencies have spent years preparing, drawing on lessons learned from events including the Super Bowl, World Series, and major concerts. Still, capacity limits are unavoidable.

“There is only so much traffic that MARTA or any transit agency can handle,” Hunter said. “People need to understand that there will be congestion and longer wait times. The key is to be patient.”

The concern is whether those investments result in lasting improvements or merely support a few weeks of activity.

Abernethy argues that the World Cup should be viewed as part of a broader vision for Atlanta rather than a standalone catalyst.

“We are seeing the World Cup as a part of a longer-running and more cohesive vision for sport and economic development downtown,” he said. “Atlanta may not be repeating the same cycle nor cracking downtown’s development problem with the World Cup itself.”

Behind the Scenes: Food and Logistics

Infrastructure challenges extend beyond transportation. Feeding hundreds of thousands of visitors while minimizing waste requires its own network of logistics, coordination, and planning.

Nicole Kennard, a research scientist at Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, views the tournament as an opportunity to strengthen how food moves throughout the city.

“These large events are a really big opportunity for us to coordinate and test our infrastructure,” Kennard said. “We have to think critically about how to improve the infrastructure and ensure its resilience and efficiency.”

Working with organizations such as Second Helpings Atlanta, the official food rescue partner for the World Cup, Georgia Tech researchers are building technologies and tools to improve coordination among food rescue groups. The effort aims to keep surplus food out of landfills by quickly moving it from stadiums and vendors to local food organizations.

“It’s really a logistics problem, a data problem, and a coordination problem,” Kennard said. “The faster you can move food from the point of surplus directly to a pantry, the more likely it is to reach people who need it.”

What Legacy Looks Like

Ultimately, Atlanta’s World Cup legacy may not be measured by attendance figures or visitor spending alone.

“How we evaluate success depends on what we choose to measure, and too often we focus on headline numbers instead of who actually benefits,” said Abernethy.

Kennard sees the tournament as a chance to build systems that outlast the event itself. “What we build for the World Cup could become critical infrastructure for future emergencies and disasters,” she said.

Atlanta already knows how to host a global event. Whether the investments, partnerships, and infrastructure created for the World Cup leave the city stronger after the crowds leave remains to be seen.

The continued recognition highlights Georgia Tech’s research leadership in advancing energy solutions across technology, science, policy, and economics and in delivering technically advanced solutions that is scalable, secure, and sustainable for the future.

“The scale and integration of our energy ecosystem is among Georgia Tech’s great strengths,” said Executive Vice President for Research Tim Lieuwen. “A defining part of that ecosystem is the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), our interdisciplinary research institute that brings together the talents of researchers from across disciplines to accelerate energy innovation and deliver real-world solutions.”

SEI integrates energy activities at Georgia Tech by connecting more than 1,000 researchers across the entire energy value chain and enabling collaboration with industry, government, communities, and nonprofits. SEI is deeply engaged in building community, developing resources, promoting thought leadership, and marshaling the full resources of Georgia Tech around tackling the tough energy and environmental problems and opportunities society faces.

“Georgia Tech’s energy leadership is built on the depth of our research and the breadth of our collaborations,” said Yuanzhi Tang, SEI’s executive director. “By connecting expertise across the full energy value chain, we are advancing solutions that enhance affordability, reliability, security, and sustainability.” 

U.S. News & World Report evaluates the academic research performance of universities in 51 subject areas using indicators such as publications, citations, and global and regional research reputation. Georgia Tech was assessed among 292 institutions in the U.S. and continues its strong standing in the rankings, claiming the No. 32 spot overall in the nation and No. 9 among public universities.

The seed grant program, administered by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), reaches faculty members from a diverse array of disciplines due to the generous support provided by broad-based partnerships in addition to the funds provided by the Sustainability Next committee. This year’s partners are the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the College of Design, BBISS, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, and the Institute for Data Engineering and Science.

The goal of the program is to nurture promising research areas for future large-scale collaborative sustainability research, research translation, and/or high-impact outreach; to provide mid-career faculty with leadership and community-building opportunities; and to broaden and strengthen the Georgia Tech sustainability community as a whole. The call for proposals was modeled after the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research’s Moving Teams Forward and Forming Teams programs.

This year’s seed grant awards align with the four main thematic areas in which BBISS aims to enhance Georgia Tech’s research to address some of our most pressing sustainability challenges:

• AI and Sustainability, and the Sustainability of AI Infrastructure.
• Climate Science, Technology, and Solutions.
• Healthy Environments and Sustainable Resource Use.
• Resilience and Regeneration.

The 2026 Sustainability Next Seed Grant awards are:

Forming Teams:

• Actualize Shallow Geothermal Systems for Decentralized Heating. Principal Investigator (PI): Sheng Dai.
• Building Community University Research Capacity for PFAS Testing and Treatment. PI: Ruth C. Yow. Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs): Joe Bozeman, Yongsheng Chen, and Ahmed Ibrahim Yunus.
• A Global Sustainability Analysis of Places “Urbanizing from Within.” PI: Gregory Randolph. Co‑PIs: Sabina Dewan, Yiyi He, John Taylor, and Celine Vacchiani‑Marcuzzo.
• Creating a Refusal Taxonomy to Explore Alternate Computing Practices. PI: Richmond Wong. Co‑PIs: Heidi Biggs and Carl DiSalvo.
• Demystifying Data Centers: Examining Georgia Tech’s Coda HPCC in the Context of Sustainability and Resilience. PI: Scott Duncan. Co-PIs: Jung-Ho Lewe and David Solano Sarmiento.
• Physical Transport of Sunlight‑Exposed Dissolved Organic Carbon in the New Arctic. PI: Lilian Dove. Co‑PI: Jennifer Bowen.

Moving Teams Forward:

• Agentic AI Digital Twins for Hurricane Resilience in Coastal Georgia. PI: Ali Sarhadi.
• CLEAR‑SE: Co‑Creating a Center‑Scale Network for Advancing Collaborative, Long‑Term Action Research on Community‑Led Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction in the Southeast. PI: Sofía Pérez‑Guzmán. Co‑PI: Jennifer Hirsch.
• Data Center Effects on Communities in Georgia’s Black Belt. PI: Cindy Kaiying Lin. Co‑PIs: Joe Bozeman, Anthony Harding, Allen Hyde, Nicole Kennard, Jung-Ho Lewe, and Ahmed Saeed.
• Reimagining Southern Forests: Enabling Cost‑Effective Sustainable Production of High‑Value Climate‑Ready Southern Pines. PI: Caitlin Petro. Co‑PIs: Lucas Clay, Ulrika Egertsdotter, and Joel Kostka.
• Human‑Technology Collaborations: Towards Sustainable and Inclusive Food Systems. PI: Rosemarie Santa Gonzalez. Co‑PIs: Ashutosh Dhekne, Sylivia Janicki, Nicole Kennard, Yaman Sangar, and Abigale Stangl.
• Guiding Transportation with Community Action through Research, Education, and Service (GT‑CARES). PI: Rounaq Basu. Co-PIs: Sofía Pérez‑Guzmán, Jennifer Hirsch, and Scott Moffat.
• Instability‑Resolved Ocean Mixing for Climate Prediction and Climate Solutions. PI: Suhas S. Jain. Co‑PIs: Mohammad Mohaghar, and Donald Webster.
• Buildings Next: Forming a Transdisciplinary Consortium for Sustainable Building Innovation. PI: Paula Gomez. Co‑PI: Allison Bridges.
• Paper and Natural Dye Living Exhibition. PI: Anna Doll. Co‑PI: Virginia Howell.

1. You’re paying more at the pump, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Gas prices are the most visible sign of the crisis, and the increases are already significant. National average retail gasoline prices are more than $1.20 higher than they were in February, before the conflict escalated.

“Even though U.S. petroleum production often exceeds our consumption, we are not insulated from disruptions in global oil supply because oil is a globally traded commodity,” says director of the Energy Policy and Innovation Center, Laura Taylor. “If supply is restricted anywhere in the world, prices will rise everywhere, including in the U.S.”

Markets expect some relief by fall, with future prices pointing lower than today’s levels. But Tony Harding, assistant professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, cautions, “Prices are likely to remain above pre-conflict levels for the foreseeable future, and temporary relief measures, such as Georgia’s motor fuel tax suspension, will not last forever.”

Taylor puts it plainly: “Wages are not rising faster than prices, so people are feeling the pinch and will continue to do so.”

2. Your summer plans just got more expensive.

The impact does not stop at the gas station. For Americans planning summer travel, the timing of this conflict could not be worse. Matthew Oliver, associate professor in the School of Economics, points to commercial air travel as one of the most exposed sectors.

“Jet fuel prices have roughly doubled in the wake of the current oil price spike, putting immediate upward pressure on airfares,” says Oliver.

The ripple effects extend far beyond travel. 

“Oil is an input into the supply chain of nearly every good at some point,” says Bobby Harris, assistant professor in the School of Economics. “When input costs go up, prices go up.”

3. Expect to pay more at the grocery store.

The connection between Middle East tensions and the American dinner table is more direct than many realize, because petrochemicals are a key feedstock for fertilizer production.

“Higher oil prices lead to higher fertilizer prices, which lead to higher food prices,” says Oliver. 

Combined with existing tariff pressures and tight supply chains, the strain on household budgets is coming from multiple directions at once.

“If the crisis persists, there will be upward pressure on the prices of nearly every physical good,” Oliver adds.

4. The government’s options are limited, and the clock is ticking.

Washington has tools to respond, but none are silver bullets. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve currently holds around 400 million barrels and can release about 4 million barrels per day, roughly 20% of U.S. daily demand.

“I see the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a tool to buy time during a crisis,” says public policy professor Dan Matisoff. “But if the conflict drags on, we will ultimately be in a more vulnerable position.”

Quick fixes like price caps or demand subsidies carry trade-offs. 

“Subsidies can mitigate the impact of price shocks, but they can also mask important market signals that help balance supply and demand,” says Harding, using Europe’s 2022 energy crisis as a cautionary example.

5. The smartest thing Americans can do right now is think about efficiency.

“People in general tend to undervalue energy efficiency,” says Matisoff. “Think of energy efficiency investments as a sort of hedge or insurance against volatile energy prices.”

That means considering fuel efficiency when buying a car, and looking at heat pumps, electric vehicles, and home energy upgrades when the time is right.

“Higher energy prices increase the value of investing in energy efficiency upgrades to your home and adopting technologies that are less dependent on fossil fuels,” says Harding.

For families navigating uncertainty, both economists and policy experts point to the same practical advice: Reduce your exposure to fossil fuel price swings before the next crisis hits.

Lieuwen, the executive vice president for Research and Regents’ Professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, received the ASME medal in 2025 in recognition of his pioneering contributions to combustion, clean energy, and the science of resilient energy systems. It is the first ASME Medal ever awarded to a Georgia Tech faculty member or graduate, marking a milestone both for Lieuwen and the Institute.

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

Scientists have captured the most detailed structural images to date of a specific type of protein’s DNA repair process. The research could reveal ways to inhibit the effects of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations that heighten the risk for breast, ovarian, and other cancers.

“This work lets us see, step by step, one mechanism by which cancer cells could manage to repair their DNA when BRCA genes mutate and fail,” says study co-author Vicki Wysocki, who is chair of the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “By capturing this process in detail, this study opens the door to understanding how those cancerous cells survive and how treatments might disrupt that mechanism.”

Designated as a Breakthrough Article, the study Mechanism of single-strand annealing from native mass spectrometry and cryo-EM structures of RAD52 homolog Mgm101 was recently published in Nucleic Acids Research.

In addition to Wysocki, who is a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a professor emerita at Ohio State University, the Georgia Tech research team included co-first author Zihao Qi, a Ph.D. candidate in the Wysocki Lab.

They were joined by Ohio State researchers co-first author Carter Wheat and senior author Charles Bell, who is a professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology in the College of Medicine. Additional authors include Metro High School student Miqdad Hussain and CAS researcher Katerina Zakharova.

When BRCA Fails

Normally, BRCA genes help prevent cancer by acting as tumor suppressors — producing proteins that help repair broken DNA. When cancer cells lack the tumor-suppression function of normal BRCA genes, research has shown that a protein called RAD52 performs DNA repair.

Since RAD52 allows cancer cells to survive and replicate without tumor suppression, researchers have wondered if blocking it would kill the cancerous cells. Blocking RAD52, however, requires fully understanding its repair activities, which have been difficult to capture with even the most sophisticated techniques. 

DNA strands break every day in cells, which is why proteins exist to fix the breaks and keep cellular processes running smoothly, the team says. But because repairs must happen quickly and human proteins are often more complex than their ancestral counterparts, even the most advanced imaging equipment can’t capture every step in the process.

In order to understand RAD52 better, the research team turned to its ancestral protein, Mgm101, to observe several key steps in its DNA repair process.

A Clearer Image

The team decided to leverage multiple types of imaging. Wysocki’s lab at Georgia Tech conducted native mass spectrometry and mass photometry, using light to measure masses of protein-DNA complexes. The results showed that the ancestral protein Mgm101 assembled from a single copy of itself into a large multi-unit ring composed of 19 copies of the protein.

“This ring is essentially a template,” Wysocki explains. “The first strand of DNA can come down, and then the second strand comes on and starts being annealed to the first strand.” Annealing occurs when two single strands of DNA come together to form the characteristic double helix structure.

The findings were supported by what Bell’s lab determined using cryogenic electron microscopy, observing structures floating in solution and frozen in a thin layer of ice.

“RAD52 high-resolution structures have been determined with single-stranded DNA, but not with the two DNAs that it’s trying to anneal,” Bell says. “Its job is to bind single-stranded DNA and anneal it to its complement sequence. It’s been captured structurally, but only in a few states relevant to the reaction.”

“Here, we have more of the states along the full pathway from substrate, to intermediate and product. And the duplex intermediate is a conformation that’s never been seen before.”

Previously, researchers were unsure if this DNA repair process used one protein ring or two rings working together, the team says. Their findings show that just one ring is used — and that this is likely consistent across different species.

Paths to Treatment

Next, the team plans to try capturing the same phases of the DNA repair process with RAD52 from humans. A clearer understanding of how this family of proteins binds to DNA strands and coaxes them back together after a break provides insights for drug targets that could halt the process in cancer cells empowered by mutated BRCA genes, they say.

“It’s still a proposed mechanism: Just because we see these snapshots of the process doesn’t mean we know all the details, but we do have the best snapshots for any protein that does this single-strand annealing,” says Bell. “This focuses our strategies for drug development.”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkag320

Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The cryo-EM data were collected at Ohio State’s Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis and processed using the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

It was Ferguson’s own first manufacturing industry job at Glidden Paint in high school that tipped a row of dominoes, clearing his way out of poverty. Following next in the Hall County native’s favor was his receiving the Pell Grant and HOPE Grant, which led to his associate’s degree and first job in education.

Since then, Ferguson has spent the better part of three decades advancing workforce preparation and education access in Georgia, first as chief information officer for the Technical College System of Georgia, and now through his current roles at Tech.

“Access to higher education changed the trajectory of my life. The question now is how we build systems that create those same opportunities for others — whether someone starts their career right out of high school, earns credentials while working, or returns later to pursue advanced technical education or engineering. We need to create flexible pathways that develop talent at every stage of life.”

Steven Ferguson

Forged in Manufacturing

Ferguson was born into a family of “makers,” who got by on odd jobs and money from their small bait and tackle shop on Lake Lanier and later peddling a variety of goods. At a young age, Ferguson learned salesmanship and picked up the tinkering spirit.

“My dad was always entrepreneurial, and I think you might even consider us manufacturers, always making fishing equipment or other things,” said Ferguson. “From a very young age, I was out making jig heads, tying flies, and bagging hooks or sinkers. It was definitely in my blood.”

When he was in 10th grade, a teacher nominated Ferguson for a new youth apprenticeship program. That opportunity ultimately led to his role as an information technology apprentice at Glidden Paint, which became Ferguson’s first job in the manufacturing industry. The job was a perfect fit for Ferguson, who enjoyed learning more about the manufacturing process and the practical outlet for his computing knowledge.

He continued working there until he began studying computer science at North Georgia College and State University. Later, he transferred to Gainesville College (GC) to participate in a joint enrollment program designed to lead to eventual enrollment for a bachelor’s degree at Tech.

However, before Ferguson completed his time at GC, he had an associate’s degree and, more importantly, a job offer. GC wanted him to train others for careers in information technology.

Read Full Story on the Enrollment Management News Page

That principle is especially relevant today across the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape. As systems scale, they increasingly become harder to measure, compare, and fix, particularly within proprietary environments. 

A team led by Georgia Tech, working with collaborators across industry, has developed a new approached called Chakra to bring greater clarity to complex AI systems. 

“Imagine a room where everyone is trying to collaborate, but each person speaks a different language,” said Tushar Krishna, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who is leading the effort. “That’s a bit like today’s AI ecosystem. The internet worked because it was built on shared practices and protocols. In AI, we’re still building that kind of common foundation.” 

The work, which Krishna leads through the nonprofit MLCommons, was released alongside a paper at the 2026 Conference on Machine Learning and Systems(MLSys) in Bellevue, Wash.

RAI calls the bicycle robot an ultra-mobility vehicle (UMV). It can reach a height of 3 feet and can jump from the floor onto a platform.

The contributions of a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student helped make these feats possible through a robot control policy he developed.

Jeonghwan Kim, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in robotics under the advisement of Associate Professor Sehoon Ha, spent two semesters interning at RAI. His task was to design a policy to teach the UMV to land after a flip.

The result was iterative motion imitation (IMI), a novel method that imitates flip trajectories generated from prior examples. Kim said the robot bases its flip on a demonstration, and human engineers reconstruct and refine the flip path through simulation to fill in the gaps.

“To guide the robot to flip, we started with an imperfect trajectory generated by a motor-based controller and then ran simulations,” Kim said. “It’s an unstable trajectory, but we use it as a guide to train a single policy that can track it as it lands and tries to balance itself.”

Sticking the Landing

Kim interned under the supervision of Shamel Fahmi, a research scientist at the RAI Institute. RAI has been developing the UMV for nearly three years.

“We wanted to work on a different robot morphology that wasn’t legs or legs with wheels,” Fahmi said. “That’s when we thought of working with bikes. 

“We want to merge the athleticism of (Boston Dynamics’) Atlas with the mobility of a bike. We wanted a robot that can go anywhere, do parkour, and acrobatics.”

Fahmi said that before Kim arrived, the research team had trouble getting the UMV to land consistently without breaking or falling.

The UMV has two joints — an upper and a lower. The upper joint contains the motors and pulls the lower joint along as it propels into the air. The problem is getting the lighter lower joint to absorb the impact of landing without being crushed by the heavier upper joint.

“That’s what brings reinforcement learning into the equation,” Fahmi said. “We teach the robot to minimize its impact on the ground to land gracefully.”

Fahmi said that Kim proved the imitation examples the robot learns from don’t have to be perfect. The process takes some time, but all it needs is a rough idea to get started.

“You can have an imperfect sketch and then constantly refine it,” Fahmi said. “The first time, it’s not going to go well. 

“We don’t care about torque or power limits as long as it does the motion. Then we’ll have a slightly better reference, repeat it, and imitate it again. In every iteration, we can add more parameters.”

Up Against the Clock

Kim said he felt the pressure of time constraints during his two semesters with RAI as he worked to achieve consistent, successful landings. Even though he had multiple UMVs to experiment with, they broke down dozens of times. Each time one broke, a hardware team at RAI had to repair it.

“There was a lot of pressure to not only get this working before my internship ended, but also knowing there are costs behind every failed attempt, and every time the robot breaks, it takes time to repair it,” Kim said. 

“It took almost five months for it to land without breaking. Then we needed two more months for it to stay balanced after the landing. It requires a lot of engineering effort to achieve a robust control policy for a safe flip.”

By the time Kim left RAI, the IMI policy had achieved consistent, seamless landings.

“The jump right now is what we call the visitor demo,” Fahmi said. “If there are guests coming over to see it, we want to show them something that is extremely impressive, but also, more importantly, extremely reliable. It never fails.

“It was only possible because of the huge effort we put into designing, maintaining, and continuously improving the robot.”

Kim authored a paper on his framework and will present it at this week’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Vienna.

For more information about the UMV project, please visit the RAI blog or watch their video on YouTube.

As an energy economist, I am often asked about what contributes to gas prices and what different policies can do to affect them.

The price of a retail gallon of gas is the sum of four things: the cost of crude oil, refining, distribution and marketing, and taxes.

In nationwide figures from January 2026, crude oil accounted for about 51% of the pump price, refining roughly 20%, distribution and marketing about 11% and taxes about 18%. That mix shifts with conditions: When crude oil prices spike, that can drive more than 60% of the price; when the price drops, taxes and logistics are larger shares of the cost.

Crude Oil is the Biggest Ingredient

Because the price of crude oil is the largest element, most of the price at the pump is derived from the global oil market.

Usually, big swings in crude prices come mainly from shifts in global demand and expectations – not from supply disruptions, according to widely cited research in 2009 by the economist Lutz Kilian.

But what is happening in early 2026 with the war in Iran is one of the exceptions: a classic supply shock. Severe disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on Middle East oil infrastructure have taken millions of barrels a day off the global market.

Most drivers generally can’t quickly reduce how much they drive or how much gas they use when prices rise, so gasoline demand doesn’t change much in the short run. That means a jump in crude costs tends to result in people paying more rather than driving less.

Refining, Regulations, and the California Puzzle

Refining turns crude into gasoline at industrial scale. The U.S. doesn’t have a single gasoline market, though. Roughly a quarter of U.S. gasoline is a cleaner-burning blend of petroleum-derived chemicals called “reformulated gasoline,” which is required in urban areas across 17 states and the District of Columbia to reduce smog.

California uses an even stricter formulation that few out-of-state refineries make. California is also geographically isolated: No pipelines bring gasoline in from other U.S. refining regions.

California’s gasoline prices have long run above the national average, explained in part by higher state taxes and stricter environmental rules. But since a refinery fire in Torrance, California, in 2015 reduced production capacity, the state’s prices have been about 20 to 30 cents a gallon higher than what those factors would indicate.

Energy economist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Severin Borenstein has called this the “mystery gasoline surcharge” and attributes it to the fact that there isn’t as much competition between refineries or gas stations in California as in other states. California’s own Division of Petroleum Market Oversight says the surcharge cost the state’s drivers about $59 billion from 2015 to 2024. It’s not exactly clear who is getting that money, but it could be gas stations themselves or refineries, through complex contracts with gas stations.

Getting the Gas Into Your Car

The distribution and marketing category covers the costs of everything involved in getting the gasoline from the refinery gate to your tank.

Gasoline moves by pipeline, ship, rail and truck to wholesale terminals, and then by local delivery truck to service stations.

At the retailer’s end, the key factors are station rent and labor, the cost to buy gasoline in bulk to be able to sell it, credit card fees of as much as 6 to 10 cents a gallon at current prices, and franchise fees paid to the national brand, such as Sunoco or ExxonMobil, for permission to put their branding on the gas station.

Most gas station operators net only a few cents per gallon on fuel itself – which is why many gas stations are really convenience stores with pumps out front. Borenstein and some of his collaborators have also documented that retail gas prices rise quickly when wholesale costs climb but fall slowly when wholesale costs drop.

The Question of Gas Tax Holidays

The federal government charges a tax on fuel, of 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.3 cents a gallon for diesel. States charge their own taxes, ranging from 70.9 cents a gallon for gas in California to 8.95 cents in Alaska.

When gas prices rise, many politicians start talking about temporarily suspending their state’s gas tax. That does reduce prices, but not as much as politicians – or consumers – might hope. Research on past gas tax holidays has found that consumers get about 79% of the reduction in gas taxes. That means oil companies and fuel retailers keep about one-fifth of the tax cut for themselves rather than passing that savings to the public.

Gas tax holidays also reduce funding for what the taxes are designed to pay for, typically roads and bridges. That pushes road and bridge upkeep costs onto future drivers and general taxpayers.

There is an additional problem, too: Taxes on gasoline are supposed to charge drivers for some of the costs their driving imposes on everyone else – carbon emissions, local air pollution, congestion and crashes. But Borenstein has found that U.S. fuel tax levels are already far below the true cost to society. Removing the tax on drivers effectively raises the costs for everyone else.

The Jones Act: A Small Number That Adds Up

The 1920 Jones Act is a federal law that requires cargo moving between U.S. ports to travel on vessels built and registered in the U.S., owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed primarily by U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Of the world’s 7,500 oil tankers, only 54 meet this requirement. Only 43 of these can transport refined fuels such as gasoline.

So, despite significant refining capacity on the Gulf Coast, some U.S. gasoline is exported overseas even as the Northeast imports fuel, in part reflecting the relatively high cost of moving fuel between U.S. ports.

Economists Ryan Kellogg and Rich Sweeney estimate that the law raises East Coast gasoline prices by about a penny and a half per gallon on average, costing drivers roughly $770 million a year. In light of the war’s effect on gas prices, the Trump administration has temporarily suspended the Jones Act requirements – an action more commonly taken when hurricanes knock out Gulf Coast refineries and pipeline networks.

What Moves the Number

The result of all these factors is that the price that drivers see at the pump mostly reflects the global price of crude, plus a stack of domestic costs, only some of which are inefficient.

Tax holidays give a partial, short-lived rebate. Jones Act waivers trim pennies, though permanent repeal may cause more fundamental changes, such as reduced rail and truck transport of all goods, which could lower costs, emissions and infrastructure damage associated with cargo transportation. Harmonizing fuel blends across states and seasons may lower prices somewhat, but likely at the expense of increased emissions.

Ultimately, the best protection against oil price shocks is a more efficient gas-burning vehicle, or one that doesn’t burn gasoline at all. In the meantime, the best I can offer as an economist is clarity about what that $4.30 actually buys.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The new technology is also set to revolutionize the scale of policy training data collection, which is essential to advancing robotic capabilities and meeting growing production demand.

COBALT is a mobile app that turns smartphones into controllers for robot arms. With a secure Wi-Fi connection to a server, users can move their phones in any direction, and the robot arm will mirror the motion — from anywhere in the world.

Ayush Agarwal, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing who leads a research team developing COBALT, said it works like the games people play on smartphones. Users can press a button to have the arm grasp an object, move it, and release it with another button.

Agarwal conducted several user studies with participants in nine countries who remotely operated robot arms inside Georgia Tech’s People, AI & Robotics (PAIR) Lab. The lab is directed by Assistant Professor Animesh Garg, who advises Agarwal.

“We built an entire distribution system for remote teleoperation scaled to where we had people from Indonesia, India, and Pakistan operating for us,” Agarwal said. “They were novice operators who had never done it before. By collecting data from these new users, we showed that we can train policies to automate certain tasks.”

Garg envisions a world where data collection for policy training is done through crowdsourcing. He began working toward this goal 10 years ago as a postdoc at Stanford University, when he developed RoboTurk, an earlier version of COBALT.

“There is a large-scale data collection requirement for mass robot production to be possible, and it will not be solved purely through simulation,” Garg said.

“Our idea was, what if we could get almost every person on the planet to be a passive source for data collection? There are almost five billion people who have smartphones and know how to use them.”

Education and Economy Impact

Another major implication of COBALT could be expanded access to CS and robotics education.

Students can learn to operate a robot remotely in any classroom. In fact, Garg and his lab recently hosted students from Midtown High School in Atlanta to demonstrate COBALT and let them control robot arms from a phone.

Garg also sees the possibility of a “gig economy” in which people pay remote operators to control assistive robots in their homes and complete household chores for them.

“It could be Uber for robots,” he said. “People who want to log onto the platform can do so at their convenience and for as long as they want.”

Companies with robot-dependent labor tasks could also use the platform to enable human oversight.

“If I deploy a robot in a factory that achieves high autonomy for most tasks, but there are still times it needs help, a human could operate the robot from anywhere in the world,” Garg said.

Building a Network

Agarwal’s studies showed that people prefer to interact with and control a robot using a smartphone rather than virtual reality (VR) headsets, controllers, keyboards, mice, or other devices.

“The phone is a more intuitive interface and can provide data quality that’s on par with other commonly used devices,” he said.

Agarwal also said there is minimal latency in the video feed sent back to operators on the other side of the world. That’s because the amount of data being processed is small.

The data is carried over Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), the same technology used by many streaming services and web conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet.

“There’s a connection from your phone to the teleoperation server, which is connected to the robots,” Agarwal said.

“Then there’s another connection from the teleoperation server back to the user, which allows for a video stream. We need low latency on both because you don’t want the user to move their phone and wait 10 seconds to see the visual feed.”

Agarwal is the co-lead author of a paper on COBALT that is being presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation this week in Vienna. He said the paper stands out because it has moved from theory to the implementation of an entire distribution network. 

“The real novelty of our paper is the systems that we build around it to actually support the scaling of remote operation and data collection at a global level,” he said. 

Fiona Ryan, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, is pioneering research that tracks and predicts user gaze from a first-person perspective in 3D environments.

Currently, most AR devices react to where users look, playing catch-up. Ryan’s method could give these devices a heads-up and make the user experience more seamless.

“It allows an AR system to anticipate what the person will interact with next and where they’re going to look next so it can proactively render the experience,” she said.

Ryan is the lead author of the paper Forecasting 3D Scanpaths in Egocentric Video, which she will present next week at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Denver.

While there is existing research on predicting user gaze from 2D still images, her work is the first to address the issue through a 3D framework.

“Because we live in a 3D world and people are dynamically moving around from multiple points of view, we need to predict gaze in 3D rather than 2D,” she said. “What we’re seeing is a path of the person’s attention in 3D through space. Our paper is the first to attempt to model this.”

Ryan conducted most of the research while interning at Meta, where she used data from Meta’s Aria Digital Twin dataset. The dataset contains first-person video footage of users interacting with objects in an apartment.

“We chose that dataset because it has a high-fidelity 3D reconstruction of a full environment, which helps us get a ground-truth 3D gaze,” she said. “We can trace eye movement and see how it intersects with the environment.”

A video demonstration of Ryan’s work shows her software tracking a user’s path toward a table with a cup on it. Once the user picks up the cup, the software correctly predicts the direction the user will turn next.

“When we look at a scene, we don’t take in everything in full detail all at once,” she said. “We fixate on certain areas, and our gaze is a sequence of fixations, which might depend on what we’re trying to do. If we want to pick up a cup, we might look toward that and then the next step would be looking at where we’re going to put it down.”

Ryan said the software can predict, on average, up to three seconds into the future — and as far as 10 seconds in some cases. That’s enough time for the AR system to proactively render a more enhanced environment.

“We’re not looking that far into the future right now, but it would be interesting to explore longer forecasting windows,” she said. “I think potential futures would diverge pretty quickly, so we’re trying to explore what can reasonably be predicted from a short segment of a person looking and moving through space.”

Ryan said her paper served as a proof-of-concept, and that there is still much future work to be done. She already has some ideas.

“I think future models can include different scenarios to help narrow down possibilities. Sometimes a person’s gaze stays on one thing for a long time. If we know what someone is trying to do, we’ll have a better idea of the likely path their attention might go.”

There could also be future implications for her work in robotics research.

“It could potentially be used for training algorithms for robots to emulate active human perception. If we can understand what a person looks at as they perform a task, we could use that to facilitate a robot learning to do that same task.” 

Fiona Ryan, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, is pioneering research that tracks and predicts user gaze from a first-person perspective in 3D environments.

Currently, most AR devices react to where users look, playing catch-up. Ryan’s method could give these devices a heads-up and make the user experience more seamless.

“It allows an AR system to anticipate what the person will interact with next and where they’re going to look next so it can proactively render the experience,” she said.

Ryan is the lead author of the paper Forecasting 3D Scanpaths in Egocentric Video, which she will present next week at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Denver.

While there is existing research on predicting user gaze from 2D still images, her work is the first to address the issue through a 3D framework.

“Because we live in a 3D world and people are dynamically moving around from multiple points of view, we need to predict gaze in 3D rather than 2D,” she said. “What we’re seeing is a path of the person’s attention in 3D through space. Our paper is the first to attempt to model this.”

Ryan conducted most of the research while interning at Meta, where she used data from Meta’s Aria Digital Twin dataset. The dataset contains first-person video footage of users interacting with objects in an apartment.

“We chose that dataset because it has a high-fidelity 3D reconstruction of a full environment, which helps us get a ground-truth 3D gaze,” she said. “We can trace eye movement and see how it intersects with the environment.”

A video demonstration of Ryan’s work shows her software tracking a user’s path toward a table with a cup on it. Once the user picks up the cup, the software correctly predicts the direction the user will turn next.

“When we look at a scene, we don’t take in everything in full detail all at once,” she said. “We fixate on certain areas, and our gaze is a sequence of fixations, which might depend on what we’re trying to do. If we want to pick up a cup, we might look toward that and then the next step would be looking at where we’re going to put it down.”

Ryan said the software can predict, on average, up to three seconds into the future — and as far as 10 seconds in some cases. That’s enough time for the AR system to proactively render a more enhanced environment.

“We’re not looking that far into the future right now, but it would be interesting to explore longer forecasting windows,” she said. “I think potential futures would diverge pretty quickly, so we’re trying to explore what can reasonably be predicted from a short segment of a person looking and moving through space.”

Ryan said her paper served as a proof-of-concept, and that there is still much future work to be done. She already has some ideas.

“I think future models can include different scenarios to help narrow down possibilities. Sometimes a person’s gaze stays on one thing for a long time. If we know what someone is trying to do, we’ll have a better idea of the likely path their attention might go.”

There could also be future implications for her work in robotics research.

“It could potentially be used for training algorithms for robots to emulate active human perception. If we can understand what a person looks at as they perform a task, we could use that to facilitate a robot learning to do that same task.” 

The $250,000 funding award, made through GRA’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) program, supports the translational work of Ankur Singh, Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Andrés García, Regents’ Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Executive Director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Singh and García are collaborating to develop functional human antibodies against some of the most difficult-to-treat diseases. While antibody therapies already benefit an estimated 20 million patients worldwide, fewer than 10 percent of discovery efforts ultimately yield candidates suitable for clinical use.

This shortfall spans major disease areas — from oncology and autoimmune disorders to heart and metabolism-related conditions and neurological and infectious diseases — limiting therapeutic options for patients. The challenge lies not only in identifying candidate antibodies, but in engineering them to function reliably in the human body.

“The I&E program exists to bridge the gap between a discovery that works in the lab and one that can anchor a company,” said Justin Burns, Chief Innovation Officer and Vice President for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at GRA. “Singh and García are tackling a problem the field has faced for decades: A significant fraction of drug targets remains inaccessible to antibody-based therapies. Our goal is to help move bold, high-potential science toward real-world impact.”

GRA’s model targets a well-known bottleneck in translation. While university labs generate promising technologies, many stall before reaching the marketplace due to a lack of validation and early-stage development. 

Singh and García aim to overcome this barrier by using a proprietary antibody-engineering framework developed in Singh’s laboratory, and supported by an earlier GRA grant. The objective is straightforward: Increase the success rate of discovery efforts so more antibody candidates can advance toward clinical use.

“The implications extend well beyond our laboratory,” said Singh. “By expanding the pipeline of functional human antibodies, we can begin to address diseases that currently lack durable treatment options. GRA’s support is transformative — not only for advancing the science, but for positioning Georgia as a leader in biotechnology innovation.”

The project is built with real-world use in mind, aiming to turn the research into a new company and eventually a clinical product. By testing the idea early and lowering risk, the team hopes to attract investment and move the technology quickly beyond the Institute. 

García emphasized the translational vision of the work. 

“This is a transformative platform technology that overcomes major bottlenecks in antibody discovery and will accelerate and increase the efficiency of this powerful class of therapeutics,” he said.

“This effort is about rethinking how we design antibodies from the ground up — integrating biological insight with engineering principles to produce molecules that are not just viable, but clinically meaningful,” he said. “With GRA’s support, we can de-risk early discovery and create a clearer path from promising concepts to therapies that reach patients.”

 Tracey Mullen, a seasoned biopharma executive, entrepreneur, and antibody discovery and engineering leader currently serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Mosaic Biosciences, is advising the team on translational strategy, commercial development, and company formation. 

“The ability to rapidly generate functional human antibodies in physiologically relevant systems could meaningfully change how therapeutic discovery is approached,” Mullen said. “By moving beyond largely empirical, animal- or screening-heavy workflows and incorporating human-specific, mechanism-informed evaluation earlier in the process, this platform has the potential to generate more relevant antibody candidates and create a stronger path from discovery concept to translational development.”

As global demand for advanced therapeutics grows, efforts like this reflect a broader shift in how innovation moves from bench to bedside — one driven not only by scientific ingenuity, but by targeted investment at critical early stages.

With more than 150 attendees from industry, academia, and research organizations, the event’s high-level engagement underscored the urgency of critical issues facing the energy sector today, including the surging electricity demand, resiliency of the grid, and evolving supply chains, as well as the value of a dedicated space for candid, solutions-oriented dialogue.

“INTERSECT 2026 demonstrated the power of bringing together leaders who are actively shaping the future of energy,” said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter. “What began as a forum to explore emerging ideas has grown into a critical platform for aligning perspectives and advancing actionable solutions across the Southeast.”

This year’s program focused on real-world implementation challenges, including managing large-scale load growth and coordinating infrastructure investments to meet demand reliably and affordably. Panels featuring leaders from utilities, global energy corporations, and research organizations emphasized the importance of aligning strategy across sectors to ensure that the Southeast remains competitive and resilient.

Chris Womack, chairman, president, and CEO of Southern Company, delivered the keynote address, highlighting the unprecedented scale of current energy demands. 

“Meeting this moment requires us to think differently — serving growth while ensuring reliability, resilience, and long-term value for our customers and communities,” said Womack.

Launched in 2017, the inaugural INTERSECT conference marked the launch of EPIcenter itself and established Georgia Tech’s commitment to connecting research, industry insight, and policy development. It focused on the need to bridge the gap between rapidly advancing technologies and slower-moving regulatory and market frameworks, a theme that continues to shape its mission today. 

As INTERSECT 2026 concluded, participants pointed to a shared takeaway: With its industrial base, growing population, and integrated energy systems, the Southeast is uniquely positioned to lead in the next phase of the energy transition. With AI-driven power demand and grid infrastructure playing a significant role going forward, it is imperative to bring together the right voices to shape policies and strategies that will connect ideas to action.

The highly competitive Laboratory Placement program is a paid opportunity offered through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships. It provides students from a wide range of disciplines an opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge research at leading facilities, including Argonne National Laboratory, Ames National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Laboratory of the Rockies, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Savannah River National Laboratory.

The program’s 2026 cohort includes 16 Georgia Tech students from disciplines such as artificial intelligence, materials science, aerospace engineering, nuclear engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and physics. Their research placements reflect the interdisciplinary nature of today’s scientific challenges, with projects covering bioinformatics, high-energy and condensed matter physics, accelerator science, environmental management, and advanced materials.

Many of the internships are closely aligned with national energy priorities, with students working in research areas including nuclear energy, hydrogen and chemical systems, materials for energy applications, plasma and fusion sciences, and complex engineered systems.

“Georgia Tech’s deep engagement with the national laboratory system creates unparalleled opportunities for our students to contribute to the future of energy,” said Yuanzhi Tang, executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute. “By connecting interdisciplinary talent with world-class research environments, we are not only advancing discovery but also shaping the next generation of leaders who will drive secure, sustainable, and resilient energy systems.”

Working alongside national lab scientists, students will not only gain access to world-class facilities but benefit from mentorship and professional networks, while contributing to research critical to national security, economic competitiveness, and a more sustainable energy future. 

“These internships demonstrate the strength of Georgia Tech’s relationships across the federal research ecosystem,” said Robert Knotts, executive director of Federal Relations in the Office of Institute Relations. “They provide a direct pathway for students to engage in public service through mission-driven research at national laboratories — while strengthening connections that are vital to advancing national priorities in energy, security, and innovation.”

Traditional sleep monitoring systems often rely on bulky equipment and nasal cannulas — small tubes inserted into the nostrils to measure airflow. While effective, these systems can be uncomfortable, intrusive, and difficult to tolerate overnight, limiting their use for long-term monitoring at home.

Now, researchers led by W. Hong Yeo, Peterson Professor in Pediatric Research at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, have developed a soft, wireless nasal patch that could offer a more comfortable alternative for monitoring breathing during sleep.

The technology, described in a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), uses ultrathin, skin-like wearable electronics to detect subtle movements of the nose caused by breathing without tubes, wires, or direct airflow measurements.

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

The CAREER Award is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Blazeck will receive $647,941 over five years for “Creating and evolving antibodies from scratch in yeast.”

Antibodies are key proteins of the immune system that help fight disease. In people, immune cells called B cells create antibodies and then evolve them. B cells take months to do this, which makes it difficult to study antibody creation and evolution, Blazeck explained.

His CAREER project will design a method to evolve antibodies “from scratch” in yeast, which will open new avenues for exploring antibody creation, evolution, and function. 

Read the full story on the School of Chemistry and Biomolecular Engineering's website. 

Now, in a project led by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) researchers are closing the gap between Earth-based simulations and the true space environment by sending experimental materials to the International Space Station (ISS) for several months of in-orbit exposure. In a rare chance for space research, where most hardware is either left in orbit or burns up on reentry, they are getting those samples back for detailed analysis on Earth.

The materials are set to launch to the ISS in the near future as part of the Materials International Space Station Experiment 22 (MISSE-22), a testbed attached to the outside of the station. Mounted on the forward-facing side of the ISS to ensure predominant exposure to highly corrosive atomic oxygen, the test samples will spend several months enduring the extreme temperatures, radiation, and reactive environment of low Earth orbit. The team is testing a selection of lightweight, research-grade polymers designed to survive these harsh conditions. Once the samples return to Earth, engineers will examine how they held up and use that data to enhance the strategic of future satellite constellations.

This project represents a collaboration across government, academia, and industry, bringing together GTRI, Georgia Tech, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), a California-based R&D firm Hedgefog Research Inc., and DuPont de Nemours, Inc. The research is also supported by Aegis Aerospace, which owns and operates the MISSE Flight Facility platform aboard the ISS.

Why Space is So Hard on Satellites 

Harsh conditions in low Earth orbit — the region of space extending from approximately 100 miles to over 1,000 miles above Earth, where many satellites and the ISS travel — can darken, roughen, and weaken spacecraft surfaces over time. That damage shortens satellite lifetimes and requires engineers to add extra layers of protection, increasing overall logistical burden and mission costs. 

Optimizing material durability is a strategic necessity, explained Elena Plis, a GTRI senior research engineer and principal investigator for the project, because every additional unit of shielding increases the cost of getting to orbit. To design lighter, more resilient materials, researchers need to examine how they degrade in a true space environment. However, most hardware is built for a one-way trip — designed to operate in orbit and then burn up on reentry, taking that valuable material data with it.

“The beauty of this type of experiment is that the materials return to Earth,” said Plis, who is also an affiliate of the Georgia Tech Space Research Institute. “For many missions, stuff is sent up and never seen again. Being able to test returned samples from real space conditions is unique, and I can’t stress enough how exciting that is for us.”
 

A New Generation of Polymers Head for Space

Instead of relying on familiar spacecraft materials like DuPont’s Kapton — a tough, heat-resistant polyimide plastic film that has coated spacecraft exteriors since the Apollo era — the team is sending up a set of new, lightweight, research-grade polymers. These materials are designed to improve the survivability of assets against space’s unforgiving elements.

Plis and her collaborators started with dozens of candidate materials they developed. To earn a spot on the MISSE-22, a sample has to be transparent or translucent, so light can pass through it, and researchers can examine how its optical properties change in orbit. The materials also have to be tough enough to withstand intense atomic oxygen exposure without fragmenting, which would create debris near the ISS. In the end, only a select number of the team’s materials made the cut.

The MISSE-22 testbed holds multiple experimental polymers. Instead of standard illumination, the team constructed a custom on-orbit polariscope: LEDs beneath each sample shine polarized light up through the material. A small camera system then slides over the top to capture these highly specific optical changes on a set schedule over the course of several months in space.

Using Light to Reveal Space Strain

Using polarized light and machine learning to rapidly analyze color patterns in the images they receive from orbit, the researchers can track how stress inside each sample changes over time. Periodically, the system will cycle through the materials, and the images will be downlinked to Earth.

When the extended mission ends and the samples return, the team will compare those in-orbit measurements with detailed lab tests on the actual pieces that flew. Without returned materials, they would only have images and sensor data to work from. By testing the same samples in the lab, they can check how accurate the remote measurements really are and refine their methods.

If the materials perform as expected, the results could help engineers design satellites that last longer in orbit without carrying so much protective weight —providing a significant technological advantage in space domain awareness and asset longevity.

About the Space Research Institute

The Space Research Institute (SRI) at the Georgia Institute of Technology is an interdisciplinary hub that unites faculty, staff, and students to advance research, education, and collaboration in space science and technology. Bringing together expertise across engineering, science, policy, and the humanities, SRI drives innovative projects in areas such as astrophysics, aerospace systems, astrobiology, and space policy while fostering partnerships with academia, industry, and government. As Georgia Tech’s central nexus for space-related initiatives, SRI is committed to advancing discovery, developing the future workforce, and expanding humanity’s understanding of space and its impact on life on Earth. Learn more at space.gatech.edu.

“Her outstanding research accomplishments and contributions to the School and Georgia Tech led to this selection,” said Professor Christopher W. Jones, the John F. Brock III School Chair in ChBE@GT.

The $20,000 in discretionary funding from this one-year fellowship will support Jamali’s research activities focused on developing new tools for in situ liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy, stochastic thermodynamics, and nanoscience-based platforms.

The Spencers established the endowment from which the term fellowship funding comes in 2017. This endowment will eventually lead to the establishment of a professorship in ChBE@GT.

“Bob Spencer is a successful alumnus who has remained connected to our chemical engineering program,” according to Jones. “His family’s gift will allow ChBE@GT to support an early career professor at a critical stage of their development—the crucial years just before their promotion and tenure review. We are grateful for their support and generosity.”

Read Full Story on the ChBE Newspage

The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia awarded the program the 2026 Teaching Excellence Award for Department or Program.

MSHCI program director Dick Henneman and assistant director Carrie Bruce received the award on May 12 during a Board of Regents (BOR) meeting.

Henneman has served as director of the program since 2015, and Bruce has served as assistant director since 2014. The program began in 1996 and has since expanded to be offered by four Georgia Tech schools:

• Interactive Computing
• Industrial Design
• Literature, Media, and Communications
• Psychology 

“As we put our award submission together, it was nice for us to reflect on all our hard work and to understand the impact this program has had on students,” Bruce said. “We recently surveyed alums, and so many said they were thankful for the way this program shaped their careers.”

Under the leadership of Henneman and Bruce, the program has achieved a 99% graduation rate, with about 60 graduates per year, up from about 30 since 2015. Henneman said the program has become one of the most competitive of its kind in the world, with an admission rate under 10%.

“We have some incredibly qualified students who are a part of the program,” he said. “We’ve had a number of graduates move into design management positions, and some have started their own companies.”

Henneman and Bruce said that one thing that distinguishes Tech’s MSHCI program is its close partnerships and alignment with industry. The program has an industry advisory board that keeps students informed about the skills companies value.

“We adapted our core classes quite a bit to ensure that they weren’t just getting the academic version of HCI methods,” Bruce said. “Our program is practical and focuses on what they are going to do when they get into industry.”

Though the program continues to grow, Henneman says it has maintained a sense of community among students, which he says is another thing that sets it apart. Many alumni keep in touch and return to offer industry advice, critique resumes, and conduct mock interviews with current students.

“A lot of times graduate school can be all about the individual,” he said. “As we prepare students to go work in industry, it’s all about collaboration and the people you’re working with and learning how to work on teams.”

Georgia Tech had 21 faculty and researchers recognized in the 2026 Regents Awards. From the College of Computing, Santosh Vempala was named a Regents’ Professor, while Srinivas Aluru and Ellen Zegura had their Regents’ titles renewed.

The peak of the severe weather season is nearing its end, but in Georgia, it's been a quieter period than residents have become accustomed to in years past, devoid of the flurry of tornado warnings, heavy rain bands, and thunderstorms. Zachary Handlos, director of the B.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences degree program, explains that the region lacked a major component of the severe weather formula.  

The NSF CAREER Award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. The award provides $662,045 over five years to support Sanders’ project, Patterning Hard Interlocking Particles to Achieve Soft Materials and Structures.

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

Omar Garcia Urdiales, CREATE‑X’s associate director of Learn, brings a global entrepreneurial experience to Georgia Tech: founder and CEO of a startup operating in the AWS Accelerator Loft, longtime startup coach in Europe’s major innovation hubs, lecturer across multiple universities, and an external doctoral researcher in entrepreneurship and digitalization. He brings this background to his teaching of Startup Lab’s latest iteration – a significant redesign developed by VentureLab’s Director Keith McGreggor. McGreggor created the course and has evolved it over many years, building on its initial success.  

“This new iteration of Startup Lab allows us to meet students exactly where they are,” said McGreggor. “By doing this, we give them the strongest foundation possible, providing them with the tools to grapple with uncertainty and build their confidence.” 

Startup Lab has long anchored the Institute’s entrepreneurial pathway with clearer structure, a unified language, and a deeper focus on reflective growth, so more Georgia Tech students can discover (and trust) their own entrepreneurial judgment.

Startup Lab is expanding responsibly, with six sections in Atlanta and additional global sections in France and Asia-Pacific taught by faculty trained in the curriculum. Students here benefit from a program that’s learning across borders and bringing that learning back to campus.

“Startup Lab is not about becoming an entrepreneur, but about engaging in the unknown and adopting entrepreneurial behavior, which can be applied to all career paths,” Urdiales said. “Students become better equipped to identify problem spaces and solve them through evidence-based building.” 

Start Where You Are

Urdiales emphasized that Startup Lab is built for students who are still exploring, uncertain, or are simply curious.

“Many students tell us they’re curious about entrepreneurship but feel not ready,” he said. “They worry they’re too introverted for customer interviews or assume Startup Lab is only for people with fully formed ideas. In fact, those are the most common misconceptions.”

The course’s first few weeks focus on training students to see struggles and patterns in the world. Then, they apply those skills on a team, exploring, designing, and testing a concept with real people. The nonnegotiable outcome isn’t the best idea; it’s a more confident, evidence-driven version of you. 

“Startup Lab is strengthening that self-awareness. All of us who are entrepreneurs, we don’t grow linearly. We have various iterations of how we see things,” Urdiales said. “This ability to see patterns or to see problems with customer discovery, it’s a learning process and a growth process.” 

Building Muscle Memory

Urdiales said that students won’t have a passive experience in the lab.

“To become an entrepreneur, you need to do it. You need to engage with customers. You need to get out of the building,” he said. “It gives you the ability to incorporate theoretical frameworks into practical solutions and then understand these more practical outcomes.”

Aligning with CREATE-X’s culture of continuous iteration, Startup Lab is tightening the hands-on core of the course around four simple, repeatable tools so that entrepreneurial thinking becomes muscle memory, not a one-off assignment. The new iteration of the curriculum, developed by McGreggor, helps students learn to: 

• Elicit grounded problem stories from real people (and separate observations from interpretations).
• Make explicit strategic decisions — who you serve, what you offer, how you deliver, how you get paid — and back them with discovery evidence.
• Externalize your logic with clear Business Model Canvas snapshots (hypotheses ≠ decisions ≠ open questions).
• Design minimum viable experiments (MVEs) that can falsify assumptions, not just confirm them. 

“What we have is a frontier model in entrepreneurial education,” said McGreggor. “The result is a course that teaches sound decision making and builds entrepreneurial confidence that rewards authentic discovery and iteration over performative polish. It creates a more solid foundation for entrepreneurial thinking and sets students up to engage more deeply with everything that follows in their CREATE-X pathway.” 

Reflection as a Feature

As a part of Startup Lab, instructors integrate reflection throughout the semester, which helps students notice patterns of work, make small experiments, and adjust based on what’s learned. Students often worry they’re not the founder type or that their introversion will hold them back; Startup Lab reframes those worries as raw material for growth, including communication skill building and one-on-one interactions you won’t always get in higher-level courses. 

Startup Lab integrates HaradaLite — McGreggor's adaptation of the Japanese Harada Method — as a weekly reflection practice in which students keep a reflection log, helping them notice patterns of work, run small experiments, and adjust based on what's learned. With this approach, educators are able to measure the growth of entrepreneurial confidence by self-report, leading to a more quantitative approach to teaching.

A Common Language Across CREATE‑X

There’s no mandated order for CREATE-X courses. Startup Lab simply makes the next steps clearer by providing a shared language and milestone structure across sections and instructors, so whatever comes next (I2P, Capstone, Launch, or an internship), you can carry forward a coherent, evidence- aware story of your work. 

“All CREATE‑X Learn sections will work with the same milestone objectives,” Urdiales said. “Students trained in Startup Lab are already trained in the muscles of entrepreneurship. They’re more equipped to go into Make and Launch or be a leader within their industry.”

Built To Be Inclusive Across Disciplines and Needs

Startup Lab is about becoming the kind of person who can see opportunities, reason from evidence, and make better decisions when the path isn’t obvious. 

• You do not need an idea or a pre‑built team — curiosity is enough.
• You do not need special permits to enroll. Startup Lab is open to anyone ready to explore.
• You can benefit from the course before or after I2P or Capstone, since there’s no fixed order to the CREATE‑X pathway.
• Introverts are welcome. The course intentionally builds communication skills through structured, low-pressure interviews and guided interaction. 

“Startup Lab helps students see the world’s problems and fill the gaps with fresh ideas, teaching them to see and understand the important difference between evidence and inference,” said McGreggor. “This lays the foundation that leads to good founders, and builds the entrepreneurial confidence needed to succeed.”

What You’ll Actually Do 

Students in Startup Lab can expect a workshop-heavy, conversation-rich semester with weekly artifacts, scenario-based decision prompts, startup reports, and quizzes that keep you honest about what you’re learning. You’ll assemble a Continuity Pack near the end: a compact bundle of your best discovery evidence, decisions, MVEs, economics, and final story slides so your future self (or your I2P/Launch application) can pick up right where you left off. 

The course also sets norms for modern tool use. AI is welcomed as a coach and organizer, after your own baseline thinking and research, and as an enhancement of the real conversations you have. That matters because Startup Lab’s promise is that you build solid judgment under the test of uncertainty, critical to the world of today and the future that is being built. 

Jump Into Startup Lab

You don’t have to have it all figured out. If you’re a first-year student still exploring, a junior craving real-world projects, or a senior looking to stand out in interviews, Startup Lab is for you. 

Seats fill quickly across all sections — and for good reason.
This course gives you the clearest, most supportive on‑ramp into CREATE‑X, with a global methodology, a unified curriculum, and instructors who believe deeply in your potential to grow. Learn how to think entrepreneurially. See the world differently. Build the confidence that will follow you long after the semester ends.

Register for Startup Lab for Fall 2026.

 

The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) at Georgia Tech has launched the Spatial Omics and Data Analytics (SODA) Center, a new interdisciplinary research hub advancing the next frontier of biomedical discovery. 

Christopher Zuo never thought of himself as someone mosquitoes singled out. They bit him from time to time, he said, but no more than anyone else who spent a lot of time outdoors. 

Mizan Rahman knows there’s much that academia and industry can learn from each other.

He’s living proof of it.

The 52-year-old entrepreneur will receive his Ph.D. in human-centered computing (HCC) as he walks across the stage on Thursday at Georgia Tech’s Spring 2026 Ph.D. Commencement.

When Rahman was accepted into the HCC Ph.D. program, he’d already founded three successful tech startups and was an angel investor in numerous others. He also earned a master’s in computational science and engineering from Georgia Tech in 2013.

Rahman took on the challenge of a Ph.D. because he’s always been in pursuit of a holistic view of technology. One perspective he said he needed to understand was that of the end user.

“I’d already done computer science and computational science and engineering, so I wanted to look at the human dimension, the user’s perspectives, and society,” Rahman said. “You’ve got to build technology that fits into our human dynamics.”

Rahman’s journey began as an undergraduate in chemical engineering at Miami Dade College and Florida Atlantic University. He switched to computer science after his roommate, also a CS major, showed him some programming he had been working on.

“I couldn’t sleep after that,” Rahman said. “I was writing software all night. I loved solving problems through technology.”

Early Success

Rahman invented BayBuilder, a strategic sourcing automation technology, in 1999. The software was adopted by major Fortune 500 companies. Rahman estimates it has saved these companies $1 billion in procurement spending.

Baybuilder was acquired by a NASDAQ-listed firm in 2001, and he was ready to start his next company.

“I’ve been an entrepreneur as far back as I can remember,” Rahman said. “I was born with it. If I saw something that didn’t exist, I created it.”

After relocating to Atlanta, Rahman founded a new company, M2SYS Technology. Governments around the world used the company’s innovative identity technology to automate processes and deliver efficient services to citizens. M2SYS also worked with the CDC to treat HIV in Haiti and Zambia, as well as many U.S. hospitals, including Grady Memorial in Atlanta, to protect patients from fraud and receiving the wrong treatment.

Rahman’s most recent startup, CloudApper AI, introduced a new system architecture that generates secure software requiring minimal ongoing maintenance. His non-biased algorithm, which he created during his Ph.D. for CloudApper, is now used by major companies to streamline automated resume analysis and candidate scoring.

Living in Two Worlds

Rahman began his Ph.D. in 2021, but he kept his new venture to himself and his family. He didn’t tell his employees he was pursuing a Ph.D., and he didn’t disclose his industry background to his fellow doctoral students.

“I kept the other side of me far away,” he said. “The people who knew, they knew, but I purposefully didn’t discuss my outside activities and experience. I wanted to fit in, and I think I was able to do that.”

When Rahman was at his company, he was a CEO and entrepreneur, and when he was at Georgia Tech, he was a researcher. But what he was learning as a researcher began to change how he perceived his business. 

“I wanted to be a researcher and think like a researcher and not just always think about sales and marketing,” he said. “I started bringing in more ideas about how the user should be thought of in our products. I’m sure they were wondering why I was emphasizing that so much, but it was because I was applying what I was learning in my Ph.D. 

“Now I’ve been on both sides, I want to be connected to both in the future, applying research principles and practices in product development and innovation.”

Building Community Through Makerspaces

When it came time for Rahman to choose a subject for his dissertation, he returned to his roots and looked for ways technology can support young entrepreneurs and their startups. That’s when he began conducting research in makerspaces.

“I wanted to find out how we can bring innovation to a scale where anybody can participate,” he said. “I saw this happening in makerspaces where regular people learn, collaborate, and build products and companies from scratch. I saw that the community at large is facing a sustainability crisis.”

Rahman argued in his dissertation that makerspaces can play a significant role in local innovation. When people struggle to survive, it disrupts communities in numerous ways.

Rahman details four studies conducted over three-and-a-half years that show how socio-technical factors drive organizational sustainability in makerspaces and how AI tools can foster an innovative culture within them.

“The compelling thing about his research is that he shows that people come to makerspaces for the tools, but they stay for the people,” said Rosa Arriaga, associate professor and Rahman’s advisor.

“He has plenty of work from his ethnographic research that shows that a makerspace can have all the tech and resources, but if there isn’t cohesion among the people, there’s a problem.”

It Takes a Village

Rahman is the first to admit that it’s not possible for one man to run a company while pursuing a Ph.D. He needed a community. This starts with his family. His wife, Mohu Sultana, now serves as interim CEO of M2SYS and has supported Rahman throughout his Ph.D. research.

The Georgia Tech community has been part of Rahman’s life in some way since he started his career. 

Sultana holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tech, and their daughter, Malisha Rahman, is graduating this week with a bachelor’s in economics and international affairs. Malisha Rahman has also been accepted into the HCC program and will begin her Ph.D. in the fall. 

Rahman said that any student who wants to create a tech startup will have an advantage from access to Georgia Tech’s network.

“The Georgia Tech startup community is fantastic,” he said. “There is a tremendous amount of knowledge here, and the research community can help shape the next big thing. We have CREATE-X, a place where you can find mentorship from faculty who started in industry. You’ll learn things I wish I knew before I started.”

As an energy economist and an international trade economist, we field a lot of questions during such episodes, because when oil prices go up, manufacturers, businesses and ultimately consumers pay more.

Some basic economics

Crude oil may be the most important commodity in the global economic system.

It’s a literal fuel for the industrial economy. It powers the engines that drive transportation and paves the roads vehicles drive on. It’s a source for plastics from which the world’s products get made and packaged, and a key ingredient at some point in almost every supply chain. Even fertilizers that boost the food supply are made from it. In short, it is difficult to imagine modern life without oil and its derivatives.

And when its supply changes, its price changes. Economists explain this using a fundamental model of our field: the supply-demand diagram. When there’s less of something to go around, competition among consumers who want it and companies that need it can drive the price up.

Sometimes this process can play out over time, allowing people to adjust their purchasing or activities to dampen price shocks. But when a significant source of the world’s oil is effectively blocked without much advance notice, such as when the the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, prices can rise sharply in a short period of time.

A natural question many people ask when oil prices spike is: Where does all that additional money go, and who benefits from it?

Some people have written entire books dissecting all the places that money goes when it leaves consumers’ pockets. But ultimately, the bulk of the money heads in the direction of the source of the oil itself – the oil companies.

What they do with the money varies widely, depending on where in the world an oil company is operating and who owns it. What also matters is the business environment – the set of laws and regulations – in which the company operates.

Middle East faces danger

Oil producers in the Middle East face significant new risk because of the war in Iran, including threats to production, processing locations and shipping routes. These risks raise their costs for insurance, security and transportation.

But production costs in the region are relatively low, so higher global oil prices typically still translate into strong profits.

For a major exporter such as Saudi Arabia, the government owns and controls nearly all oil production, so high prices generally benefit the government’s finances and investments, even during a war. In Saudi Arabia, oil revenue has historically been used to fund public spending.

West Texas gets a windfall

The Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the U.S., is a long way from the Persian Gulf. When global oil prices rise because of the war in Iran, oil companies operating in West Texas effectively get a windfall gain: Prices rise more quickly than costs, at least in the short run.

The immediate effect is more income from higher prices. The money largely goes to company owners – meaning shareholders – through dividends, debt reduction, company-backed purchases of its own stock, and reinvestment in drilling and production. Over time, companies may decide to spend some of that windfall on building more production capacity or pipelines to get more oil and gas to market.

North Sea boosts government revenue

In the North Sea, between the island of Great Britain and Scandinavia, a mix of multinational and government-owned companies produce most of the oil.

In the U.K., private shareholders are the primary beneficiaries of higher profits from increased oil prices, though an additional tax on oil and gas companies’ profits means the government also collects a significant share of the money, which it uses to help pay public expenses.

In Norway, oil revenues flow into the Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, valued at over $2 trillion. Laws govern how much, and for what purposes, money can be withdrawn from the fund, supporting public spending and preserving wealth for future generations. This is a similar model to Alaska’s state-owned program, funded by oil revenue, that pays for government services and sends an annual dividend to every permanent resident.

Russian oligarchs get rich

Russian oil is subject to stringent economic sanctions imposed by major industrial countries as a response to the Russian invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine. While the U.S. cannot control how much Russia charges for its oil, it can control services needed to move Russian oil around the world. Under current price sanctions, Western shipping, insurance and financing can be used to ship and sell Russian crude oil only if the price is below $60 per barrel.

Russia’s oil industry is dominated by government-controlled companies whose leaders maintain close ties to President Vladimir Putin. The dealings of those shadowy figures are often shrouded in secrecy, but it is likely that they and Putin’s military-industrial complex – not the Russian people – are the main beneficiaries of high oil prices.

What this means for you

Everyday U.S. consumers may not like the idea of their hard-earned cash going into the already deep pockets of any of these groups. But in the short run, there’s not much to do but pay the price. For the long run, however, people around the world are already thinking and talking about, and opting for, sources of energy that don’t depend on fossil fuels.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Eight faculty members received funding for projects that advance Georgia Tech energy research by generating early insights, expanding shared research tools, and exploring solutions related to energy policy, grid reliability, clean energy incentives, and industry‑driven innovation shaping Georgia’s energy future.

By supporting timely, policy-relevant research and engagement that connect Georgia Tech expertise with pressing regional energy challenges, the ACCELERATE program encourages collaboration across the Institute and with external partners, supports graduate student involvement, and amplifies research outputs that inform policy, regulatory, and market decisions. 

“ACCELERATE is designed to help early- and mid-career faculty move quickly on ideas that can shape energy policy and practice,” said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter. “By supporting both early‑stage collaboration and more developed policy research, the program enables Georgia Tech researchers to engage decision‑makers and stakeholders when it matters most.”

Proposals considered for funding were grounded in policy and behavioral research, including studies that examined how past or potential policies and regulations worked, and analyses of current market and behavioral outcomes that revealed management, policy, or regulatory gaps and opportunities.  

Funded projects span a range of disciplines and policy‑focused topics aligned with EPIcenter’s mission, with a strong emphasis on challenges facing Georgia and the Southeast. Collectively, the awards support research development, data creation, stakeholder engagement, and public-facing thought leadership intended to inform energy policy and implementation.

"As electricity demand grows, it is increasingly important to understand how industrial processes could use energy flexibly to enable efficient use of renewable resources like solar and wind,” said Micah Ziegler, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. “Support from the EPIcenter ACCELERATE program enables us to ask fundamental questions about how to design flexible systems and supply chains."

Awards ranged from $5,000 to $75,000. Projects that received ACCELERATE funding include:

Measuring the Alignment Between Legislators’ Energy Bill Votes and Their District Characteristics in the Georgia House of Representatives
Faculty Researcher: Clio Andris, Associate Professor, School of City and Regional Planning and School of Interactive Computing

Strengthening Georgia Tech’s National Energy Modeling of Priority Research Areas
Faculty Researcher: Marilyn Brown, Regents' Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy

Protecting Consumers From Price Volatility: Evidence and Policy Lessons From Georgia's Natural Gas Market
Faculty Researcher: Dylan Brewer, Assistant Professor, School of Economics

Can Place-Based Incentives Accelerate the Energy Transition?
Faculty Researcher: Gaurav Doshi, Assistant Professor, School of Economics

The Revolving Door in Utility Regulation
Faculty Researcher: Michelle Graff, Assistant Professor, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy 

How Do Data Centers Affect Tradeoffs Between Reliability and Decarbonization?
Faculty Researchers: Tony Harding, Assistant Professor, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, and Brian An, Assistant Professor, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy

Calculating the Emissions Cost of the Solar Rebound for the United States
Faculty Researcher: Matt Oliver, Associate Professor, School of Economics

Evaluating Long-Duration Flexibility of Industrial Demand in Electric Power Systems
Faculty Researchers: Micah Ziegler, assistant professor, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, and Constance Crozier, Assistant Professor, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

ACCELERATE is an annual program open to all Georgia Tech faculty, focusing on policy‑ and decision‑relevant research that advances energy affordability, reliability, resilience, and decarbonization in the region.

More information about EPIcenter’s research areas and programs is available at epicenter.energy.gatech.edu.

In 2018, the company broke ground in Social Circle, a small town an hour east of Atlanta with about 5,000 residents, to build one of its largest U.S. data centers. It opened in 2020.

Local officials called it a win. Shane Short, president and CEO of the Development Authority of Walton County, said the plant generates about $10 million annually in property tax revenue and has led to road improvements and expanded broadband.

Electric vehicle maker Rivian followed Meta’s lead and began construction on a plant near Social Circle in September 2025, adding to the area’s rapid industrial growth.

But for residents, the shift from a largely rural, agricultural economy to an energy-intensive industrial one has put new pressure on power and water systems.

“They’re seeing higher water and power bills, worse air quality, and very few jobs in return for this, while large corporations get tax benefits,” said Ahmed Saeed, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science, describing why residents in some communities push back on new data center development.

Saeed and Josiah Hester, associate professor of interactive computing and computer science and director of the Center for Advancing Responsible AI, have spent the past year studying the energy, water, and financial demands associated with these facilities, and how those costs are distributed.

Betting on Demand

AI data centers run on specialized chips that use large amounts of electricity. That power generates heat, which requires energy- and water-intensive cooling.

The state is adding capacity based on expected demand, not current use.

Last year, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved an estimated $16 billion expansion for Georgia Power to support that growth. It is expected to produce about 10 gigawatts of electricity at a given time. That’s enough energy to power about 7.5 million homes for a year.

If that demand materializes, the electricity is used. If it doesn’t, the cost still has to be paid.

Grid Stability

“Those workloads can put a very large demand on the grid all at once, and then remove it just as quickly,” Saeed said. “That sudden change is difficult for the system to handle.”

That volatility is a separate issue.

Even if data center operators pay for the infrastructure they use, large swings in demand can still strain grid operations, especially during peak periods or extreme weather.

What Comes Next

Back in Walton County, the Meta facility is already attracting additional data centers.

Each new site adds power and water infrastructure designed to operate for decades.

The servers inside need to be upgraded every few years.

Saeed and Hester said if Georgia wants to remain an AI and cloud hub, the state needs to set the terms and companies need to meet them.

That starts with disclosure — how much power data centers draw from the grid, how that demand spikes, and how much water they use. It includes clear expectations for how those facilities respond when the grid is under stress, and protections for the communities where they’re built.

The researchers maintain that “build it and hope” is not a strategy.

A research team led by Yuhang Hu, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has created a new material designed to do exactly that. In a new study published in Advanced Materials, Hu and her collaborators describe a groundbreaking class of “living” polymers that can grow, shrink, heal, and even regenerate long after fabrication.

Their work combines advances in chemistry, mechanics, and materials design into a polymer platform that could reshape how engineered products are built, maintained, and recycled.

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

But powering devices is only part of the challenge. Enabling those same systems to communicate at modern data rates is a much harder. That’s the leap the team is now making. The same lens-based approach is being used to unlock high-speed communication once considered out of reach for ultra-low-power systems.

In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers in Professor Manos (Emmanouil) Tentzeris’ Agile Technologies for High-performance Electromagnetic Novel Applications (ATHENA) lab demonstrated a first-of-its-kind lens-enabled backscatter system capable of multi-gigabit data rates, reaching up to 4 gigabits per second (Gbps). At the same time, it operates using only a fraction of the power required by conventional wireless devices — bringing high-speed connectivity to systems that were never meant to support it.

For years, backscatter has been treated as a tradeoff: extremely low power, but extremely limited performance. Rather than generating its own radio signal, a backscatter device modulates and reflects existing wireless transmissions to communicate, allowing it to operate with minimal energy. 

As a result, backscatter has typically been used only to send small amounts of data, most often in simple identification and sensing systems.

“What we’ve shown is that backscatter doesn’t have to be slow,” said Marvin Joshi, the research lead and Ph.D. candidate in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “With the right architecture, it can operate at gigabit‑per‑second speeds while remaining ultra‑low power.”

Associate Professor Alan Ritter and Ph.D. student Ethan Mendes were awarded fellowships for their work on creating artificial intelligence (AI) agents that function as teammates.

Mendes was named a fellow, while Ritter will serve as his fellowship advisor.

The Microsoft Research Fellowship is open to faculty, students, and postdocs. Ritter said that if Microsoft sees alignment in a project, it gives recipients the opportunity to work even closer with their collaborators by inviting them to join as additional fellows.

That turned out to be the case with Mendes after Ritter listed him as a collaborator in his fellowship proposal.

“I’m delighted to serve as Ethan Mendes’ fellowship advisor,” Ritter said. “He is an exceptionally strong researcher, and I’m excited to see his work recognized through the Microsoft Research Fellowship.”

Through the fellowship, Ritter and Mendes will design AI systems that better support collaboration and decision-making within organizations. 

“The goal is to move beyond AI as a tool for a single user and instead study how AI can help groups make more informed, transparent, and coordinated decisions,” Ritter said. “We will focus on methods that bring together information from many different sources, help people reason under uncertainty, and generate analyses that support collective problem-solving in complex work settings.”

Professor Named to Sustainability Cohort

The Purple Mai’a Foundation has selected Associate Professor Josiah Hester to join its Eahou Global Immersion Cohort.

The Purple Mai’a Foundation is a technology education nonprofit headquartered in Aiea, Hawaii, that teaches coding and computer science to Native Hawaiian students.

The 29 members of the Eahou Global Immersion Cohort from 15 countries are leaders from indigenous communities recognized for their contributions to sustainability.

Hester is a Native Hawaiian whose research centers on sustainable and battery-free technology.

The cohort will gather on O’ahu May 1-3 for Eahou Fest, where they will share stories and solutions from research around the world.

“I’m honored to be selected for the Eahou Global Immersion Cohort and to learn alongside such an inspiring group of resilience leaders who come from around the globe,” Hester said. 

“Participants are selected for their significant leadership over the past decade and their ability to bring what they learn back to their communities and integrate it into ongoing work and partnerships. I’m excited to connect these experiences with my work and bring these lessons back into research and teaching at Georgia Tech.”

Jill Watson Creator Receives AAAI Lecture Award

Professor Ashok Goel received one of the most distinguished awards from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Goel was selected as the 20th recipient of the AAAI Robert S. Engel Memorial Lecture Award. Established in 2003, the award is given to those who have demonstrated excellence in AI scholarship, outstanding applications of AI, and extraordinary service to AAAI and the AI community.

Goel received the award in January during the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Singapore. According to the awards program, Goel was recognized for contributions to biologically inspired design, case-based reasoning, and application of AI in virtual teaching.

Goel is the inventor of Jill Watson, one of the first AI virtual teaching assistants used in higher education classrooms.

AAAI is also the publisher of AI Magazine, which Goel served as editor-in-chief from 2016 to 2021.

“I am both honored and humbled to receive AAAI's Robert Engelmore Award,” Goel said. “Bob was a long-time editor of AAAI's AI Magazine, and many years after he retired, I became the editor of the magazine. This makes the Engelmore Award special to me.”

Building upon a multifaceted relationship, the two are bringing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and fueling infrastructure to campus — turning Georgia Tech into one of the nation’s most prominent campus-based examples for hydrogen mobility.

“Hyundai Motor Group is proud to strengthen our collaboration with Georgia Tech as we work together to accelerate the future of clean mobility. Georgia Tech’s leadership in innovation and its commitment to developing the next generation of problem-solvers make it a natural partner in advancing technologies,” said Ken Ramírez, executive vice president and head of Global Energy and Hydrogen Business at Hyundai Motor Group. “By combining the university’s excellent research with Hyundai’s global experience, we are creating the foundation for real-world solutions that will help drive the energy transition and inspire future mobility leaders.” 

Ramírez is also a 1991 Georgia Tech graduate and a member of the Georgia Tech Advisory Board. 

“It’s very fulfilling to donate a handful of our NEXO fuel cell SUVs as part of our expanding relationship with Georgia Tech. Hydrogen-powered NEXO fuel cell vehicles will immediately serve to expand the clean mobility footprint on campus while providing real-world experiences with the cutting edge of zero-emissions transportation technology,” said Randy Parker, president and CEO, Hyundai Motor North America.

“Georgia Tech has a long history of working with industry to move breakthrough technologies from the lab into the real world. By expanding our work with Hyundai, we’re advancing hydrogen research, reducing emissions on our campus, and strengthening Georgia’s role in the future of clean mobility," Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera said.

How the Partnership Drives Hydrogen Innovation and Research

The partnership includes the donation of four Hyundai NEXO fuel cell electric SUVs by Hyundai Motor North America and a hydrogen electrolyzer project, which will be installed at Georgia Tech’s North Avenue Research Area, positioning Tech as one of the most visible real-world test beds for hydrogen mobility in the U.S.

The vehicles and infrastructure will support campus operations and interdisciplinary research. Key areas of focus include:

• Engineering: Exploring hydrogen-based systems and mobility solutions.
• Sustainability: Assessing the environmental benefits of hydrogen technologies.
• Energy systems: Understanding the integration of hydrogen fuel cells into current infrastructure.
• Public policy: Evaluating the regulatory and social implications of hydrogen adoption.

This initiative connects Georgia Tech’s research enterprise with campus operations, using the Institute as a living laboratory for clean transportation technologies. Faculty and students will study:

• Real-world performance of hydrogen technology.
• Infrastructure requirements for large-scale deployment.
• Environmental impacts of hydrogen energy systems.

Insights gathered from this initiative aim to inform and accelerate the widespread use of hydrogen technology in campuses, fleets, cities, and freight corridors. The initiative also supports Georgia Tech’s strategic plan, which includes the goal of expanding the use of zero-emissions vehicles powered by sustainable energy sources.

Why Is the Partnership with Georgia Tech Key to Hyundai Motor Group’s Vision? 

The collaboration between Hyundai and Georgia Tech is a testament to the power of aligning academic expertise with corporate innovation. Beyond hydrogen energy, the partnership seeks to advance innovation in the areas of:

• Autonomous driving
• Electric vehicle (EV) batteries
• Charging infrastructure
• Materials science
• Cybersecurity

In addition, Hyundai’s presence in Georgia underscores its commitment to the region. Georgia is home to the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America and also serves as a hub for zero-emissions transportation through HTWO Logistics, a clean logistics partnership that operates Hyundai XCIENT fuel cell heavy-duty trucks in logistics operations near Savannah. The collaboration with Georgia Tech builds on this regional foundation, reinforcing the link between education, research, and Hyundai's long-term goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2045.

What’s Next for the Partnership?

The partnership between Hyundai and Georgia Tech represents more than an investment in research. It’s a shared effort to lead the next generation of mobility advancements. Additional announcements about the partnership’s research projects, educational programs, and vehicle deployment are expected in the coming months.