“Smart Wire” technology developed at Georgia Tech can help control the flow of power on transmission lines. The devices, the silver cylinders shown in the photograph, can be applied to existing transmission lines like these. (Click image to download a high-resolution version. Credit: Frank Lambert, NEETRAC)

All told, 50 million customers lost power for up to two days in the biggest blackout in North American history. For many, this blackout served as a wake-up call signaling the fragility of our electric energy grid.

Almost 10 years later, our electric power system continues to be challenged, by increasing demands of a digital society, the need to accommodate renewable energy generation, growing threats to infrastructure security and concerns over global climate change. The technology for a smart grid – with a two-way flow of electricity and information between utilities and consumers – could help address these challenges, but technical, regulatory and financial obstacles have slowed its deployment.

Researchers at Georgia Tech are helping advance the smart grid. They are developing technologies, creating methodologies and analyzing policies that will allow for integration of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles into the grid, with dynamic electricity pricing, and improved assessment and monitoring of the grid and its components. The researchers are supported by research resources that include the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI).

SEI provides the infrastructure and environment for research initiatives that improve the sustainability, affordability and reliability of the entire energy cycle – from generation to distribution to use.

“Sustainable and reliable electric energy provided at reasonable cost is essential to the economic future of our state, region and nation,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive director of SEI. “In collaboration with our industry partners, Georgia Tech is helping advance smart grid and related technologies that will help address the challenges of meeting this demand.”

Integrating Renewables into the Grid

The electricity grid is a large, complex system of power generation, transmission and distribution. High-voltage transmission lines carry power from large power plants to load centers hundreds of miles away. Next, lower-voltage distribution systems draw electricity from the transmission lines and distribute it to individual customers. This long-standing electricity paradigm is being challenged as the grid becomes equipped with advanced sensing, communication, and control systems, and as an increasing quantity of power is generated by renewable sources.

Wind and sunshine constantly ebb and flow with the slightest weather shifts, creating a variable supply. So even when the renewables are going strong, conventional power plants must always be ready to step in and carry the load. Renewable energy sources – wind, sun, water, wood, organic waste and geothermal – generated about 12 percent of the electricity in the United States in 2012. Increasing that percentage will require redesign of the power grid control architecture, scheduling framework and market mechanisms to balance supply and demand in the presence of these energy sources.

Integrating renewable electricity into the grid requires a transition by the electric industry from a centralized control architecture to a more distributed and flexible one that allows many actors to participate. To help accomplish that, Georgia Tech researchers in 2012 received a three-year, $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop and demonstrate a distributed control architecture and technologies for the electric power grid that would support high levels of renewable energy generation and storage.

The architecture is based on the emerging concept of electricity “prosumers” – a combination of the words “consumer” and “producer” – which are economically motivated small-scale energy ecosystems that can consume, produce and store electricity. For example, prosumers could include homeowners who consume energy from the grid while also producing power onsite from solar panels on their homes’ roofs that feeds back into the grid.

“The power network, from generation to transmission and distribution to consumption, needs to undergo the same kind of architectural transformation that computing and the communications network have gone through in the past few decades,” said Santiago Grijalva, associate director for electricity at SEI and Georgia Power Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We are taking one step toward that transformation by developing a reliable architecture that will allow the electricity industry to operate with characteristics similar to the Internet – distributed, flat, layered and scalable.”

To develop the architecture, Grijalva is collaborating with Marilyn Wolf, the Farmer Distinguished Chair in Embedded Computing Systems and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Magnus Egerstedt, the Schlumberger Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and an expert in networked robotics; and Shabbir Ahmed, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The system will be backward compatible with the current electricity industry model, deployable by incrementally enabling prosumer services and interoperable with emerging smart grid technologies.

The system relies on a computational cyber infrastructure and an autonomous, secure prosumer energy scheduler that allows small-scale producers to offer energy and grid services based on their capabilities and desire to achieve their sustainability, efficiency, reliability, and economic objectives, while contributing to systemwide reliability and efficiency goals. The researchers have teamed with industry partners OSISoft, PJM, Midwest ISO, and Duke Energy to demonstrate the architecture and software using realistic utility datasets. They are also exploring commercialization opportunities for the technology.

Craig Tovey, the David M. McKenney Family Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is taking an inverse optimization approach to determining the least expensive way for a utility company to produce, store and use electricity to meet demand in an area that contains prosumers. Tovey and Tanguy Hubert, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student advised by Grijalva, are developing a computational model to determine what prices to offer small-scale producers to provide enough incentive that they will make production, storage and use choices consistent with the utility company’s optimal production plan.

“To solve this real-world inverse optimization problem, we need to decide what action we want the prosumers to take so that the overall goal is achieved and then determine what price to offer so that when they minimize their own costs, they will select the action that is optimal for the general welfare,” said Tovey.

The addition of renewable energy to the grid also affects the day-ahead auction process used to determine the price of electricity in regions of the United States with wholesale markets. In a day-ahead electricity auction, participants bid today for electricity that they want to buy or sell the following day. Then, independent system operators find the equilibrium price based on the submitted bids. They also create a day-ahead schedule detailing which generators will be turned on and how much electricity each generator will produce the following day, a practice referred to as the unit commitment process. Higher use of renewable generation resources introduces challenges of uncertainty and intermittency into these processes.

As part of the Georgia Tech-led National Science Foundation Sustainable Infrastructure for Energy and Water Systems project, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Miroslav Begovic is designing methodologies to determine how uncertainty and large swings in production could be met by other power plants. With this information, he will evaluate how much solar photovoltaic plant capacity can be safely installed in the U.S. power system without jeopardizing the reliability of the supply.

Andy Sun, an assistant professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been collaborating with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ISO New England to create an adaptive optimization model that makes robust unit commitment decisions and ensures system reliability, while considering real-time uncertainty from renewable energy.

“Wind and solar energy sources are intermittent and uncertain because they are greatly impacted by slight changes in weather and because predicting wind or sunshine amounts a day ahead can be difficult,” said Sun. “Unlike coal or natural gas plants, when a wind farm is scheduled to generate 100 megawatts of electricity at 7 a.m., there is no guarantee that amount of power will be produced.”

With support from ISO New England, the team tested its model on the large-scale system operated by the organization and compared its model with the current approach of over-committing generators to create a “just-in-case” reserve. Reserves can be expensive to maintain and inefficient due to the mismatch of supply and demand. The adaptive model demonstrated sizable savings on average operating and total costs and significantly reduced the volatility of the operating cost. A paper on the model was published in the February 2013 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.

In Europe, power exchanges run the day-ahead auctions, rather than independent system operators, but the exchanges consider network constraints regarding system feasibility and reliability provided by the system operators. Sebastian Pokutta, an assistant professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and researchers from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, created a model of the European electricity market, with support from the German Stock Exchange “Deutsche Börse Frankfurt.”

Determining the price of power in Europe has recently become more difficult with power market coupling, an initiative to integrate transmission allocation and power trading across national borders so that cheaper electricity generation in one country can meet demand and reduce prices in another country.

“While market coupling creates a more efficient market because of a strong interaction between price zones, it creates a very challenging real-world optimization problem that needs to be solved daily,” said Pokutta. “The market coupling optimization problem involves demand and supply orders of different exchanges that need to be matched to maximize the total gains from trade.”

Pokutta and his colleagues analyzed optimization techniques for determining the price of electricity that would maximize the financial surplus of all participants, while considering quantity and price constraints. The algorithms matched energy demand and supply for 24 hours and calculated all market prices, net positions and cross-border flows at the same time.

Members of the European Union aim to deliver 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources, which is based on a target in the European Renewables Directive of 2008. The increase in renewable generation will require an intraday market that will allow for adjustments after the closure of the day-ahead market. Pokutta plans to create an intraday market model and combine the market models he has developed with atmospheric models to consider air quality, sustainability and energy generation together.

Examining the Effect of Electric Vehicles on the Grid

Electric vehicles could make it easier and cheaper to have renewables – particularly wind energy – on the grid and make it easier to manage electricity with its peaks at high demand times, according to the preliminary findings of a new study. The study was conducted by Valerie Thomas, an associate professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the School of Public Policy; Deepak Divan, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and their graduate students Dong Gu Choi and Frank Kreikebaum.

The researchers modeled the electricity system in six eastern and midwestern regions of the United States and are examining the interplay among the use, availability and cost of different energy sources in those regions and electric vehicle adoption levels, electric vehicle charging methods, fuel economy standards, and renewable portfolio standards. Initial results from the study show how the time of day that users charge their electric vehicles affects how much electricity must be generated and the sources and costs of that power.

“Our preliminary findings indicate that controlled charging of electric vehicles reduces cost and makes it significantly less expensive to have large amounts of renewables in the electric system,” said Thomas, who is the Anderson Interface Associate Professor of Natural Systems. “The main cost saving is from reduced electric system capacity requirements.”

Controlled charging occurs when a driver plugs in a vehicle after completing the last trip of the day, but charging doesn’t begin until off-peak nighttime or early-morning hours when the cost of electricity is lowest. This contrasts with uncontrolled charging, when charging commences immediately upon plugging in the vehicle. Additional findings of the study detail the effects of electric vehicle adoption levels, electric vehicle charging methods, fuel economy standards, and renewable portfolio standards on gasoline consumption, electricity cost, greenhouse gas emissions, and consumer cost. The study is supported by the Intelligent Power Infrastructure Consortium, a university-industry-utility consortium that fosters and accelerates the development and adoption of early-stage, high-risk and high-impact technologies in power applications.

Bert Bras, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, is collaborating with Ford Motor Company to examine how to optimize the driving and charging habits of people using Ford’s C-MAX Energi plug-in hybrids. To complete his assessment, Bras will use data from Ford’s MyFord Mobile app that provides real-time battery charge status and automatically schedules recharging at lower-cost, off-peak times.

Earlier research by Bras found that charging electric vehicles when renewables are online would be beneficial to the water supply because generating power from wind and solar sources requires significantly less water than traditional coal or nuclear power plants. This study was published in the December 2012 issue of the journal Energy Policy and was supported by the National Science Foundation and Georgia Tech’s University Transportation Center.

Bras is also collaborating with Ford on its MyEnergi Lifestyle initiative. The project, which launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2013, showcases how combining renewable energy generation with time-flexible loads optimizes energy consumption in homes with plug-in vehicles and smarter, more-efficient home appliances. Bras, School of Mechanical Engineering professor Chris Paredis and School of Architecture professor Godfried Augenbroe created a computer model that calculates the electricity use of a typical family in their home for one year.

The researchers’ model predicted a 60 percent reduction in energy costs and a 55 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from a single home by exchanging a gasoline car for an electric vehicle, adding a small photovoltaic array, and shifting activities – such as charging a plug-in vehicle or running a dishwasher – to off-peak nighttime or early-morning hours.

Assessing the Condition and Security of the Grid

The recent prolonged power outages in New York and New Jersey caused by Hurricane Sandy have shown how vulnerable America can be to losing its lights. In the United States, 149 power outages affecting at least 50,000 customers occurred between 2000 and 2004, a number that rose to 349 from 2005 to 2009. Heading off large-scale failures requires a view of grid operations that utility companies cannot currently get. Utilities receive a snapshot of what’s happening in the system every several minutes, which frequently is not quick enough when potentially catastrophic events can develop in a second.

Real-time measurement and management of grid components, both utility- and customer-owned, will help to accomplish the goal of optimally and securely operating the power grid. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor A.P. Sakis Meliopoulos and visiting professor George Cokkinides have developed a real-time monitoring system to protect, control, optimize and stabilize the power grid.

“Our approach for an autonomous, plug-and-play distributed control system is to use dynamic state estimation to continuously monitor the condition of grid components and use this information to determine if any action should be taken,” said Meliopoulos, who is also a Georgia Power Distinguished Professor and site director for the Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSERC), a National Science Foundation Industry-University Cooperative Research Center.

In the infrastructure they have proposed, grid components are equipped with a universal monitoring, protection and control data acquisition unit. The unit is constructed from a phasor measurement unit, a complex number that represents both the magnitude and phase angle of the sine waves found in electricity. The technology collects the measurements that are location- and time-tagged and transmits them via local area network to create a real-time model of the system and estimate the system’s operating condition, a process called dynamic state estimation. Because the relaying and recording equipment available today contains phasor measurement units, the proposed distributed state estimation system can be implemented in any modern substation.

In August 2012, the researchers demonstrated their distributed dynamic state estimation system on the Water and Power Authority’s five-substation system in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and achieved a dynamic state estimation rate of 60 times per second. They also recently installed their system in Pacific Gas and Electric’s (PG&E) Midway and Vaca-Dixon Substations and in Southern Company’s Klondike and Scherer Substations. At the New York Power Authority’s Blenheim-Gilboa Power Project, the researchers are using state estimation results to monitor the system and predict imminent instabilities.

This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy; New York Power Authority; PG&E; GE Energy; U.S. Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority; NEC; Southern Company, and the PSERC.

Miroslav Begovic, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, analyzes a phenomenon called voltage collapse, which can afflict transmission networks and cause a blackout when the demand reaches a critical level, even if there is sufficient power generation to meet the demand. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 led utilities and the government to team up to install a phasor network throughout the United States. The North American SynchroPhasor Initiative expects that approximately 1,000 phasor measurement units will be in place and networked by the end of 2014.

By placing phasor measurement units at critical points in the network, such as in certain substations, operators can assess system stress by measuring voltage and current phasors. Begovic worked with industry to develop a methodology that uses the data collected from phasor measurement units to quickly assess the state of the power system and determine in real time whether it is in danger of a blackout.

“The uniqueness of the methodology is that it only relies on a single measurement point in a single location to gain knowledge of what’s happening across the entire system,” said Begovic. “While the accuracy of the methodology is reduced, our ability to monitor the state of the system and quickly employ corrective actions to avoid a collapse is increased.”

This research is supported by ABB through its membership in the National Electric Energy Testing Research and Applications Center (NEETRAC). NEETRAC provides an array of analytical, engineering, research and testing services to help improve electric grid reliability and efficiency. Part of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NEETRAC is supported by 40 equipment manufacturers and utility companies that serve more than 60 percent of U.S. electric customers.

NEETRAC and the U.S. Department of Energy supported a project aimed at understanding how to effectively use diagnostic technologies to establish the condition of underground cable circuits and locate degradation that may cause cables to fail. Cable systems are designed to have a lifetime of 30 to 40 years with high reliability, but many underground cable systems installed in the United States are reaching the end of their design lives.

“We did not want to develop our own diagnostic testing technology and compete with the equipment already on the market,” said Rick Hartlein, director of NEETRAC. “We wanted to use our neutral perspective and highly analytical capabilities to analyze commercial devices and determine whether their measurements were providing a true indication of the condition of a cable circuit.”

NEETRAC research engineers Nigel Hampton and Joshua Perkel collected dielectric loss and partial discharge measurements at different voltages and frequencies within cable insulation systems to develop decision tools for utilities to use to determine whether a circuit needed to be repaired or replaced. Their methodology for testing the condition of underground cables was incorporated into an IEEE industry standard.

Steve Potter, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and Ronald Harley, a Regents’ professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are studying how neural networks integrate and respond to complex information. They expect this work to inspire new methods for managing the country’s ever-changing power supply and demand.

In collaboration with Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy, Duke Energy Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University, the researchers have trained a network of rat cortical neurons in a petri dish to recognize and respond to voltage and speed signals from a simulated power grid. They are using the results from these experiments to develop bio-inspired artificial neural networks that will control synchronous generators connected to a power system. This project is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Predicting the degradation and remaining useful life of generators, transformers and transmission lines could also significantly improve the performance of the grid and reduce maintenance costs. Nagi Gebraeel, an associate professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is developing methods for monitoring the degradation of power grid components and predicting their remaining lifetimes.

“Recent advances in sensor technology and wireless communication have enabled us to develop innovative methods for indirectly monitoring the health of different engineering systems and using that information in decision-making processes,” said Gebraeel.

Gebraeel has developed models that use data from real-time sensor measurements – such as vibration, temperature, insulation degradation and partial discharge – to calculate and continuously revise the amount of remaining useful life of mechanical systems based on their current condition.

“We want to ensure the power grid remains reliable,” said Gebraeel. “Power utilities can no longer rely on time- or usage-based maintenance policies for generators or transformers. They need to be able to monitor the units in operation for up-to-date information on their condition and functionality to avoid unexpected failure.”

In addition to asset management concerns, utilities are also worried about cyber threats. A National Research Council report, completed in 2007 but declassified by the Department of Homeland Security last November, warned that a coordinated strike on the electric grid could have devastating effects on the American economy. Researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and NEETRAC are investigating potential cybersecurity gaps in utility substation devices.

“Many older pieces of equipment in utility substations were not built with security in mind,” said Andrew Howard, a GTRI research scientist. “This equipment is now becoming Internet-enabled as part of the smart grid, and this presents a lot of security concerns.”

Howard, GTRI research engineer David Huggins and NEETRAC research engineer Carson Day are developing strategies for testing and evaluating security vulnerabilities in intelligent electronic devices, which receive data from sensors and can issue control commands, such as tripping circuit breakers or changing voltage levels. In laboratory tests, the researchers uncovered security vulnerabilities in which some devices could be turned off, potentially by persons without privileged access to them.

“We found a way that we could flood the devices with certain types of information so that they would turn themselves off,” said Huggins. “If someone did that in the real world, he or she could knock out a substation and the power could go down.”

GTRI researchers have helped secure and protect devices that are deployed throughout U.S. government and corporate networks for years. They are leveraging their experience in network device security and applying the techniques, tactics and procedures they learned from the Internet world to the power grid and the energy community.

Analyzing State, National and International Energy Policies

In recent years, a number of U.S. states, the federal government and other countries have adopted or are considering energy-related laws, regulations, programs, and voluntary or mandatory requirements aimed at improving and enhancing power systems. This includes programs that promote renewable energy development or energy efficiency, policies that support development and deployment of smart grid technologies, and laws mandating renewable portfolio standards. Researchers in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and School of Economics have analyzed these policies and uncovered their similarities and differences.

Japan was resistant to adopting smart grid technologies for years. Because 10 regional utilities held a monopoly on the power supply, there was little discussion of the smart grid. Then came Fukushima in March 2011. Following a major earthquake, a tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident. Because only two of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors are currently operating, the country must now rely more heavily on renewable energy sources – and that requires a smart grid.

Brian Woodall, an associate professor in the School of International Affairs, has studied energy policy in Japan dating back to the 1950s. Now, he’s analyzing Japanese energy strategy and the policies that will foster the development of a smart grid and the effective and sustained use of renewable energy in Japan. Collaborating with Woodall on this work are School of International Affairs associate professor Adam Stulberg, associate professor Mark Zachary Taylor, senior research associate William Foster and graduate student Liz Dallas; School of Mechanical Engineering professor Glenn Sjoden; and School of Industrial and Systems Engineering associate professor Valerie Thomas.

In the 1980s and 90s, Japan’s “Rooftop Program,” which subsidized consumers who put solar panels on their homes, became the world’s first large-scale development of photovoltaic technology and demonstrated its feasibility as an energy source. Today, the government is encouraging the creation of large-scale solar farms and geothermal energy. In 2012, the Japanese government lifted its decades-old ban to allow geothermal projects in national parks and monuments and earmarked $67 million for a program to aid geothermal power developers through capital injections and debt guarantees. By 2030, the Japanese government aims to triple renewable energy sources, which today make up about 10 percent of the country’s power supply.

“To achieve this goal, the government will likely need to increase its support for the introduction of new renewable technologies through tax reductions, subsidies, and support for research and development,” said Woodall. “Japan may also need to create new energy policies that promote the development of smart cities and the installation of smart meters and other energy management systems.”

Professor Marilyn Brown recently analyzed smart grid policies in several countries and found that government is still the key player in smart grid investments. (Click image to download high-resolution version. Credit: Gary Meek)

School of Public Policy professor Marilyn Brown and graduate student Shan Zhou recently analyzed smart grid policies in Great Britain, Italy, China, Japan, South Korea and the United States. In a study published in the March/April 2013 issue of the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment, they found that governments have overcome various financial, regulatory and technical barriers to facilitate grid modernization.

“Currently, government is still the key player in smart grid investments. Our research suggests the need for a policy framework that attracts private capital investment, especially from renewable project developers and communication and information technology companies,” said Brown.

The study also revealed growing worldwide consensus that smart meters are an essential enabler of grid modernization. A smart meter can measure real-time electricity consumption and communicate the information to the utility and the consumer. Britain, Italy and South Korea expect full adoption of smart meters by 2020. In the United States, many utilities used Smart Grid Investment Grants (with a total public investment of about $4 billion) to pay up to 50 percent of costs to install advanced metering infrastructures.

South Korea’s Smart Grid Road Map 2030 plans to spend $25 billion to facilitate the development and construction of smart grid technologies for the power grid, vehicles, and renewables. In contrast, China’s 2012 plan for its smart grid emphasizes power generation and transmission, reflecting its relatively underdeveloped power distribution system and the challenge the Chinese electricity market faces in developing effective interaction mechanisms between customers and utility companies.

Feed-in tariffs, which pay a premium to small-scale renewable electricity producers for the purchase of their renewable energy, are popular worldwide for encouraging renewable electricity generation. Britain introduced feed-in tariffs for small low-carbon electricity generation facilities through its 2008 Energy Act. Japan, China and Italy have feed-in tariffs to develop domestic markets for solar power. A few utilities in the United States also offer feed-in tariffs for solar power purchases.

Although smart grid policies vary across the United States, Brown and Zhou found that most states have implemented interconnection standards and net metering policies, although constraining limits also exist in some states. Net metering allows customers to connect the power they generate to utility grids to offset their electricity consumption and sell excess generation to the utility. Dynamic pricing programs, which provide real-time prices to customers and let them decide when to consume electricity based on cost, are also widely used in industrial and commercial sectors of the United States, but are just beginning to become available to residential customers.

Daniel Matisoff, an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy, is examining the factors that drive states to adopt policies promoting renewable energy development or energy efficiency. Because the vast majority of literature suggests that states either learn from each other or compete with each other, Matisoff and graduate student Jason Edwards are currently investigating two competing theories about what drives renewable energy policy adoption at the state level: the internal characteristics of the state or the fact that other states have already adopted the policy. The researchers are assessing three highly competitive policies aimed at economic development and five low-competition policies.

“Our preliminary findings show that states do not tailor their policies to match their geographic characteristics,” said Matisoff. “More than anything else, renewable energy policy and energy development appear to be outcomes of a political market.”

States with larger numbers of carbon intensive industries are less likely to adopt renewable energy programs, while states with more liberal populations and stronger environmental interest groups are more likely to adopt programs. In addition, states with more liberal populations, higher levels of air pollutants, more renewable potential and a less carbon dioxide-intensive industry make more attempts to adopt renewable energy policies.

Renewable portfolio standards have become a popular tool for state governments to promote renewable electricity generation and to decrease carbon dioxide emissions. A renewable portfolio standard is a mandate that retail electricity providers purchase a specified fraction of their electricity sales from renewable sources. By March 2013, 29 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Mariana Islands had passed mandatory renewable portfolio standards; and eight states, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands had passed voluntary renewable portfolio standards.

Erik Johnson, an assistant professor in the School of Economics, is estimating the long-run price elasticity of supply of renewable electricity generation. This is a measure of the responsiveness of the quantity of renewables supplied to a change in its price. It gives the percentage change in quantity demanded in response to a one percent change in price. The price elasticity is an important parameter for policymakers to determine the cost of carbon abatement from these policies relative to other methods of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Johnson’s preliminary findings suggest that renewable portfolio standards are an expensive way to decrease carbon dioxide emissions, costing more than six times more than a cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2.5 percent. In a cap-and-trade program, emissions allowances are allotted to polluters, and companies whose emissions exceed their allocations must either obtain extra allowances or buy credits from projects that cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Georgia Tech supports multidisciplinary research teams that are developing technologies and methodologies to improve the efficiency, performance and reliability of the power system. Researchers are also analyzing the policies that will promote the path toward creating the next generation of the electric utility grid. Together, they are all contributing to finding ways to keep the lights on.

The research described in this article has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under contracts EFR-0836046 (Sustainable Infrastructures for Energy and Water Supply) and EEC-0080012 (Power Systems Engineering Research Center) and by the Department of Energy (DOE) through contracts DE-OE0000117 (National Energy Technology Laboratory); DE-FC02-04CH11237 and DE-AR0000225. The conclusions and recommendations contained in the article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the NSF or DOE.

John Bartholdi, a professor who leads the project, decided to test the system during the busy holiday season by sending packages to Santa Claus Village in Lapland, Finland.

See the final results of the 2013 race > 

Original story: A Delivery For Santa >

The Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica is one of the few places where land sits atop the portion of a subduction zone where the Earth’s greatest earthquakes take place. Costa Rica’s location therefore makes it the perfect spot for learning how large earthquakes rupture. Because earthquakes greater than about magnitude 7.5 have occurred in this region roughly every 50 years, with the previous event striking in 1950, scientists have been preparing for this earthquake through a number of geophysical studies. The most recent study used GPS to map out the area along the fault storing energy for release in a large earthquake. 

“This is the first place where we’ve been able to map out the likely extent of an earthquake rupture along the subduction megathrust beforehand,” said Andrew Newman, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

The study was published online Dec. 22, 2013, in the journal Nature Geoscience. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and was a collaboration of researchers from Georgia Tech, the Costa Rica Volcanological and Seismological Observatory (OVSICORI) at Universidad Nacional, University California, Santa Cruz, the University of South Florida, Cal Poly Pomona, and JPL.

Subduction zones are locations where one tectonic plate is forced under another one. The collision of tectonic plates during this process can unleash devastating earthquakes, and sometimes devastating tsunamis. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan in 2011 was due to just such a subduction zone eaerthquake. The Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest is capable of unleashing a similarly sized quake. Damage from the Nicoya earthquake was not as bad as might be expected from a magnitude 7.6 quake.

“Fortunately there was very little damage considering the earthquake’s size,” said Marino Protti of OVSICORI and the study’s lead author. “The historical pattern of earthquakes not only allowed us to get our instruments ready, it also allowed Costa Ricans to upgrade their buildings to be earthquake safe.” 

Plate tectonics are the driving force for subduction zones. As tectonic plates converge, strain temporarily accumulates across the plate boundary when portions of the interface between these tectonic plates, called a megathrust, become locked together. The strain can accumulate to dangerous levels before eventually being released as a massive earthquake. 

"The Nicoya Peninsula is an ideal natural lab for studying these events, because the coastline geometry uniquely allows us to get our equipment close to the zone of active strain accumulation,” said Susan Schwartz, professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a co-author of the study.

Through a series of studies starting in the early 1990s using land-based tools, the researchers mapped regions where tectonic plates were completely locked along the subduction interface. Detailed geophysical observations of the region allowed the researchers to create an image of where the faults had locked.

The researchers published a study a few months before the earthquake, describing the particular locked patch with the clearest potential for the next large earthquake in the region. The team projected the total amount of energy that could have developed across that region and forecasted that if the locking remained similar since the last major earthquake in 1950, then there is presently enough energy for an earthquake on the order of magnitude 7.8 there. 

Because of limits in technology and scientific understanding about processes controlling fault locking and release, scientists cannot say much about precisely where or when earthquakes will occur. However, earthquakes in Nicoya have occurred about every 50 years, so seismologists had been anticipating another one around 2000, give or take 20 years, Newman said. The earthquake occurred in September of 2012 as a magnitude 7.6 quake.

“It occurred right in the area we determined to be locked and it had almost the size we expected,” Newman said.

The researchers hope to apply what they’ve learned in Costa Rica to other environments. Virtually every damaging subduction zone earthquake occurs far offshore. 

“Nicoya is the only place on Earth where we’ve actually been able to get a very accurate image of the locked patch because it occurs directly under land,” Newman said. “If we really want to understand the seismic potential for most of the world, we have to go offshore.”

Scientists have been able to reasonably map portions of these locked areas offshore using data on land, but the resolution is poor, particularly in the regions that are most responsible for generating tsunamis, Newman said. He hopes that his group’s work in Nicoya will be a driver for geodetic studies on the seafloor to observe such Earth deformation. These seafloor geodetic studies are rare and expensive today.

“If we want to understand the potential for large earthquakes, then we really need to start doing more seafloor observations,” Newman said. “It’s a growing push in our community and this study highlights the type of results that one might be able to obtain for most other dangerous environments, including offshore the Pacific Northwest.”

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award numbers 0847382, 1140261, 0948312 and 1262267. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF. 

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Study Contact: Andrew Newman (anewman@gatech.edu)

Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel

Today, genetic information is stored in DNA. RNA is created from DNA to put that information into action. RNA can direct the creation of proteins and perform other essential functions of life that DNA can’t do. RNA’s versatility is one reason that scientists think this polymer came first, with DNA evolving later as a better way to store genetic information for the long haul. But like DNA, RNA also could be a product of evolution, scientists theorize.

Chemists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown how molecules that may have been present on early Earth can self-assemble into structures that could represent a starting point of RNA. The spontaneous formation of RNA building blocks is seen as a crucial step in the origin of life, but one that scientists have struggled with for decades.

“In our study, we demonstrate a reaction that we see as important for the formation of the earliest RNA-like molecules,” said Nicholas Hud, professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech, where he’s also the director of the Center for Chemical Evolution.

The study was published Dec. 14 online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

RNA is perfect for the roles it plays in life today, Hud said, but chemically it’s extraordinarily difficult to make. This suggests that RNA evolved from simpler chemical couplings. As life became more chemically complex and enzymes were born, evolutionary pressures would have driven pre-RNA into the more refined modern RNA.

RNA is made of three chemical components: the sugar ribose, the bases and phosphate. A ribose-base-phosphate unit links together with other ribose-base-phosphate units to form an RNA polymer. Figuring out how the bond between the bases and ribose first formed has been a difficult problem to address in the origins of life field, Hud said.

In the study, Hud’s team investigated bases that are chemically related to the bases of modern RNA, but that might be able to spontaneously bond with ribose and assemble with other bases through the same interactions that enable DNA and RNA to store information. They homed in on a molecule called triaminopyrimidine (TAP).

The researchers mixed TAP with ribose under conditions meant to mimic a drying pond on early Earth. TAP and ribose reacted together in high yield, with up to 80 percent of TAP being converted into nucleosides, which is the name for the ribose-base unit of RNA. Previous attempts to form a ribose-base bond with the current RNA bases in similar reactions had either failed or produced nucleosides in very low yields.

“This study is important in showing a feasible step for how we get the start of an RNA-like molecule, but also how the building blocks of the first RNA-like polymers could have found each other and self-assembled in what would have been a very complex mixture of chemicals,” Hud said.

The researchers demonstrated this property of the TAP nucleosides by adding another molecule to their reaction mixture, called cyanuric acid, which is known to interact with TAP. Even in the unpurified reaction mixture, noncovalent polymers formed with thousands of paired nucleosides.

“It is amazing that these nucleosides and bases actually assemble on their own, as life today requires complex enzymes to bring together RNA building blocks and to spatially order them prior to polymerization,”said Brian Cafferty, a graduate student at Georgia Tech and co-author of the study

The study demonstrated one possible way that the building blocks for an ancestor of RNA could have come together on early Earth. TAP is an intriguing candidate for one of the first bases that eventually led to modern RNA molecules, but there are certainly others, Hud said.
Future work, in Hud’s lab and by other laboratories in the Center for Chemical Evolution, will investigate the origins of RNA’s phosphate backbone, as well as other pathways toward modern RNA.

“We’re looking for a simple, robust chemistry that can explain the earliest origin of RNA or its ancestor,” Hud said.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Chemical Evolution under award number CHE-1004570, and the NASA Exobiology Program under award number NNX13AIO2G. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel

A new technique for studying the structure of the RSV virion and the activity of RSV in living cells could help researchers unlock the secrets of the virus, including how it enters cells, how it replicates, how many genomes it inserts into its hosts – and perhaps why certain lung cells escape the infection relatively unscathed. That could provide scientists information they need to develop new antiviral drugs and perhaps even a vaccine to prevent severe RSV infections.

“We want to develop tools that would allow us to get at how the virus really works,” said Philip Santangelo, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We really need to be able to follow the infection in a single living cell without affecting how the virus infects its hosts, and this technology should allow us to do that.”

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences and published online ahead of print in the journal ACS Nano on December 30, 2013. While RSV will be the first target for the work, the researchers believe the imaging technique they developed could be used to study other RNA viruses, including influenza and Ebola.

“We’ve shown that we can tag the genome using our probes,” explained Santangelo. “What we’ve learned from this is that the genome does get incorporated into the virion, and that the virus particles created are infectious. We were able to characterize some aspects of the virus particle itself at super-resolution, down to 20 nanometers, using direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM) imaging.”

RSV can be difficult to study. For one thing, the infectious particle can take different forms, ranging from 10-micron filaments to ordinary spheres. The virus can insert more than one genome into the host cells and the RNA orientation and structure are disordered, which makes it difficult to characterize.

The research team, which included scientists from Vanderbilt University and Emory University, used a probe technology that quickly attaches to RNA within cells. The probe uses multiple fluorophores to indicate the presence of the viral RNA, allowing the researchers to see where it goes in host cells – and to watch as infectious particles leave the cells to spread the infection.

“Being able to see the genome and the progeny RNA that comes from the genome with the probes we use really give us much more insight into the replication cycle,” Santangelo said. “This gives us much more information about what the virus is really doing. If we can visualize the entry, assembly and replication of the virus, that would allow us to decide what to go after to fight the virus.”

The research depended on a new method for labelling RNA viruses using multiply-labeled tetravalent RNA imaging probes (MTRIPS). The probes consist of a chimeric combination of DNA and RNA oligonucleotide labeled internally with fluorophores tetravelently complexed to neutravidin. The chimeric combination was used to help the probes evade cellular defenses.

“There are lots of sensors in the cell that look for foreign RNA and foreign DNA, but to the cell, this probe doesn’t look like anything,” Santangelo explained. “The cell doesn’t see the nucleic acid as foreign.”

Introduced into cells, the probes quickly diffuse through a cell infected with RSV and bind to the virus’s RNA. Though binding tightly, the probe doesn’t affect the normal activities of the virus and allows researchers to follow the activity for days using standard microscopy techniques. The MTRIPS can be used to complement other probe technology, such as GFP and gold nanoparticles.

Work done by graduate student Eric Alonas to concentrate the virus was essential to the project, Santangelo said. The concentration had to be done without adversely affecting the infectivity of the virus, which would have impacted its ability to enter host cells.

“It took quite a bit of work to get the right techniques to concentrate the RSV,” he said. “Now we can make lots of infectious virus that’s labelled and can be stored so we can use it when we want to.”

To study the infection’s progress in individual cells, the researchers faced another challenge: living cells move around, and following them complicates the research. To address that movement, the laboratory of Thomas Barker – also in the Coulter Department – used micro-patterned fibronectin on glass to create 50-micron “islands” that contained the cells during the study.

Among the mysteries that the researchers would like to tackle is why certain lung cells are severely infected – while others appear to escape ill effects.

“If you look at a field of cells, you see huge differences from cell to cell, and that is something that’s not understood at all,” Santangelo said. “If we can figure out why some cells are exploding with virus while others are not, perhaps we can figure out a way to help the bad ones look more like the good ones.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included James Crowe, professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University; Elizabeth Wright, assistant professor in the School of Medicine at Emory University; Daryll Vanover, Jeenah Jung, Chiara Zurla, Jonathan Kirschman, Vincent Fiore, and Alison Douglas from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; Aaron Lifland and Manasa Gudheti from Vutara Inc. in Salt Lake City, and Hong Yi from the Emory University School of Medicine.

One of the challenges of studying RSV is maintaining its activity in the laboratory setting – a problem parents of young children don’t share.

“When you handle this virus in the lab, you have to always be careful about it losing infectivity,” Santangelo noted. “But if you take a room full of children who have not been infected and let one infected child into the room, 15 minutes later all of the children will be infected.”

The research described here was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under contract R01 GM094198-01. Any conclusions or opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

CITATION: Eric Alonas, et al., “Combining Single RNA Sensitive Probes with Subdiffraction-Limited and Live-Cell Imaging Enables the Characterization of Virus Dynamics in Cells,” (ACS Nano, December 2013). (http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nn405998v).

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986) or Brett Israel (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) (404-385-1933).

Writer: John Toon

With antennas made from conventional materials like copper, communication between low-power nanomachines would be virtually impossible. But by taking advantage of the unique electronic properties of the material known as graphene, researchers now believe they’re on track to connect devices powered by small amounts of scavenged energy.

Based on a honeycomb network of carbon atoms, graphene could generate a type of electronic surface wave that would allow antennas just one micron long and 10 to 100 nanometers wide to do the work of much larger antennas. While operating graphene nano-antennas have yet to be demonstrated, the researchers say their modeling and simulations show that nano-networks using the new approach are feasible with the alternative material.

“We are exploiting the peculiar propagation of electrons in graphene to make a very small antenna that can radiate at much lower frequencies than classical metallic antennas of the same size,” said Ian Akyildiz, a Ken Byers Chair professor in Telecommunications in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We believe that this is just the beginning of a new networking and communications paradigm based on the use of graphene.”

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the research is scheduled to be reported in the journal IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications (IEEE JSAC). In addition to the nanoscale antennas, the researchers are also working on graphene-based nanoscale transceivers and the transmission protocols that would be necessary for communication between nanomachines.

The communications challenge is that at the micron scale, metallic antennas would have to operate at frequencies of hundreds of terahertz. While those frequencies might offer advantages in communication speed, their range would be limited by propagation losses to just a few micrometers. And they’d require lots of power – more power than nanomachines are likely to have.

Akyildiz has studied nanonetworks since the late 1990s, and had concluded that traditional electromagnetic communication between these machines might not be possible. But then he and his Ph.D. student, Josep Jornet – who graduated in August 2013 and is now an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo – began reading about the amazing properties of graphene. They were especially interested in how electrons behave in single-layer sheets of the material.

“When electrons in graphene are excited by an incoming electromagnetic wave, for instance, they start moving back and forth,” explained Akyildiz. “Because of the unique properties of the graphene, this global oscillation of electrical charge results in a confined electromagnetic wave on top of the graphene layer.”

Known technically as a surface plasmon polariton (SPP) wave, the effect will allow the nano-antennas to operate at the low end of the terahertz frequency range, between 0.1 and 10 terahertz – instead of at 150 terahertz required by traditional copper antennas at nanoscale sizes. For transmitting, the SPP waves can be created by injecting electrons into the dielectric layer beneath the graphene sheet.

Materials such as gold, silver and other noble metals also can support the propagation of SPP waves, but only at much higher frequencies than graphene. Conventional materials such as copper don’t support the waves.

By allowing electromagnetic propagation at lower terahertz frequencies, the SPP waves require less power – putting them within range of what might be feasible for nanomachines operated by energy harvesting technology pioneered by Zhong Lin Wang, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering.

“With this antenna, we can cut the frequency by two orders of magnitude and cut the power needs by four orders of magnitude,” said Jornet. “Using this antenna, we believe the energy-harvesting techniques developed by Dr. Wang would give us enough power to create a communications link between nanomachines.”

The nanomachines in the network that Akyildiz and Jornet envision would include several integrated components. In addition to the energy-harvesting nanogenerators, there would be nanoscale sensing, processing and memory, technologies that are under development by other groups. The nanoscale antenna and transceiver work being done at Georgia Tech would allow the devices to communicate the information they sense and process to the outside world.

“Each one of these components would have a nanoscale measurement, but in total we would have a machine measuring a few micrometers,” said Jornet. “There would be lots of tradeoffs in energy use and size.”

Beyond giving nanomachines the ability to communicate, hundreds or thousands of graphene antenna-transceiver sets might be combined to help full-size cellular phones and Internet-connected laptops communicate faster.

“The terahertz band can boost current data rates in wireless networks by more than two orders of magnitude,” Akyildiz noted. “The data rates in current cellular systems are up to one gigabit-per-second in LTE advanced networks or 10 gigabits-per-second in the so-called millimeter wave or 60 gigahertz systems. We expect data rates on the order of terabits-per-second in the terahertz band.”

The unique properties of graphene, Akyildiz says, are critical to this antenna – and other future electronic devices.  

“Graphene is a very powerful nanomaterial that will dominate our lives in the next half-century,” he said. “The European community will be supporting a very large consortium involving many universities and companies with an investment of one billion euros to conduct research into this material.”

The researchers have so far evaluated numerous nano-antenna designs using modeling and simulation techniques in their laboratory. The next step will be to actually fabricate a graphene nano-antenna and operate it using a transceiver also based on graphene.

“Our project shows that the concept of graphene-based nano-antennas is feasible, especially when taking into account very accurate models of electron transport in graphene,” said Akyildiz. “Many challenges remain open, but this is a first step toward creating advanced nanomachines with many applications in the biomedical, environmental, industrial and military fields.”

The research described here was supported by the National Science Foundation under award number CCF-1349828. Any opinions or conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the NSF.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986) or Brett Israel (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) (404-385-1933).

Writer: John Toon

Dressing to impress can be expensive, and many students cannot afford to purchase a new suit when they’ve yet to be hired for a job. With the success of their peers in mind, a group of students has established Campus Closet and, in partnership with the Georgia Tech Center for Career Discovery and Development, is holding an inaugural Jackets for Jackets drive.

“Some companies will not even consider you for a position if they find your attire inappropriate or too casual,” said Brandie Banner, one of the student organizers. “Being underdressed for an interview adds another level of unneeded stress and insecurity to an already nerve-wracking process.”

The idea for the program was conceived during conversations earlier this year about student mental health and the stress that financial constraints can create for students. Campus Closet organizers had observed students attending campus career and internship fairs dressed inappropriately, and realized that, for some, it was simply because they could not afford a suit.

Through Campus Closet, students will be able to borrow a suit for up to a week at a time to wear for their job search activities. They’ll be responsible for returning the suit with proof of dry cleaning, and will also receive a Georgia Tech pin to adorn the lapel.

Lauren McDow, who teaches a career development course in the Scheller College of Business, has helped suit up students on a smaller scale in the past. In telling her students that they needed to get a suit for their job search, she added that if it was not possible in their personal budgets, students should come talk to her in private.

McDow successfully connected two students with suits by posting a note on Facebook asking friends if they have clothes to loan or hand down that match the size and gender of the student in need. 

"People are so willing to help if they know the student is working hard and just doesn't have the resources," she said. "For each of those students who were willing to come forward, there must be dozens who need help but didn’t hear about the chance or didn’t feel comfortable asking."

Students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to donate professional clothing in good condition to Campus Closet. With the annual Internship and Co-Op Fair approaching at the end of January, the Center for Career Discovery and Development hopes to compile a sizeable suit collection in the coming weeks.

“For me, dress has always been about confidence,” said Sangita Sharma, another of the student organizers. “I would hate for anyone to miss out on any opportunities simply because they don’t have the right clothes for the occasion."

Specifically, Campus Closet seeks both men’s and women’s suits of all sizes, preferably in navy blue, dark gray, or black. Donors are also invited to include a note of encouragement or any job search advice, which will be shared with the students who borrow that suit. Student organizers plan to track who uses which suits and potentially let students share success stories of the suits with donors. 

Suits can be donated at the Center for Career Discovery and Development, the newly formed joint office of Career Services and the Division of Professional Practice, on the second floor of the Bill Moore Student Success Center, or in Suite 322 of the Scheller College of Business. 

The HomeLab initiative expands Georgia Tech’s product evaluation capabilities in testing health, wellness, and aging-at-home technologies. HomeLab participants test and use these technologies in their homes, assisting manufacturers in design and usability and supporting the aging-in-place paradigm.

“Georgia Tech handles all of the recruitment, technology infrastructure, and protocol development associated with consumer testing so that companies can quickly react to the needs of the market and test new potential solutions as rapidly as possible,” said HomeLab Director Brad Fain.

GTRI Research Associate Renita Folds and the HomeLab team have worked to increase consumer participation in and around the metro Atlanta area.

“As of Nov. 18, we have more than 550 people in both rural and urban areas,” Folds said. “Our goal was to establish a network of 500 in the metro Atlanta area by the end of 2013, so we’re ahead of schedule.”

The secure database allows participants to be anonymously selected according to multiple data points, such as “living with arthritis” or “people with asthma.” Research partners set the parameters for testing, and HomeLab will provide the participants. Current projects include behavioral acceptance of activity monitors and gaming for health. Past projects include a packaging survey, remote health monitoring, smart mirror and voting accessibility survey.

HomeLab participants already are assisting in product evaluation, so 2014 will focus more on testing and boosting studies with current partners, while pushing the lab’s services to researchers, starting with faculty at Georgia Tech.

HomeLab is no longer actively recruiting any more partners from metro Atlanta, Folds said, but they are still hoping to expand, both in resources and in partnerships. “We will begin searching for participants in the Macon and Warner Robins area,” she said.

In November, HomeLab entered into a collaborative partnership agreement with Innovate LTC, located in Louisville, Ky., and the Institute for the Ages, located in Sarasota, Fla. The three organizations will share expertise and interest in a memorandum of understanding that highlights their complementary research missions.

In addition, the group is working to expand its industry partnerships, meeting with various organizations and groups. “We also recently met with a delegation representing French companies,” she said. The group was introduced to HomeLab at a Health Information Technology Showcase at Technology Square, on the Georgia Tech campus. “Additionally, other prospective partners have approached us.”

Added Fain: “HomeLab has built the necessary infrastructure that enables companies to focus on the things that truly matter such as measuring product effectiveness and performing research that will lead to solutions that enhances the lives of older adults.”

Georgia Tech Research Institute

Writer: Robert Nesmith

Election as a fellow of AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. Fellows are recognized for meritorious efforts to advance science or its applications.

New fellows include:

• School of Interactive Computing Professor Henrik Christensen, cited “for contributions to applied estimation methods in mapping, robot localization, visual tracking and recognition, as well as national-level leadership of the robotics community.”
• School of Biology Professor Mark Hay, cited “for distinguished contributions in ecology, particularly for developing marine chemical ecology and for elucidating how chemical cues and signals structure populations, communities, and ecosystems.”
• School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Hang Lu, cited “for distinguished contributions to the field of engineering systems for high-throughput quantitative and systems biology, particularly for microfluidics, automation, image-based science, and phenomics.”
• School of Aerospace Engineering Professor Suresh Menon, cited “for distinguished and innovative contributions to the field of multi-scale computational simulation and modeling of turbulent combustion in power and propulsion systems.”

The victim, a student, was walking on Ferst Drive around 7 p.m. when she was approached from behind by a man who grabbed the victim’s shoulder bag and ran to a waiting car. A parent who was leaving the CRC noticed the car and remembered the vehicle’s license plate, which gave Georgia Tech police the information they needed to canvass the area quickly, locate the car and obtain a search warrant. The police found the victim’s possessions inside the vehicle, along with items gained through additional crimes outside the campus. The two suspects were taken into custody and transported to Fulton County Jail without incident. The quick action by our officers cleared our case as well as two open cases for the Atlanta Police Department.

“This is a great of example of what can happen here at Georgia Tech — the victim notified us, and a witness came forward right away, so our officers could take action quickly,” said GTPD Deputy Chief Rob Connolly. “We plan to recognize the witness for a job well done. Everyone has a role to play in campus safety. Remember, if you see something and say something, GTPD will do something.”

With that in mind, many buildings and services will operate at an altered or reduced schedule over the next few weeks.

Library and Clough Commons

• Both buildings will close Friday, Dec. 20, at 6 p.m. and reopen Monday, Dec. 30, at 7:30 a.m. They will close that day at 6 p.m. and reopen Thursday, Jan. 2, at 7:30 a.m. Neither building will open on Jan. 1.

Barnes & Noble @ Georgia Tech

• Dec. 16-20: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Dec. 21–22: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Dec. 23: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Dec. 24: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. 
• Dec. 25: Closed
• Dec. 26: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Dec. 27: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Dec. 28–29: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Dec. 30: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Dec. 31 – Jan. 1: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Jan. 2–3: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Jan. 4–5: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Campus Recreation Center

• Dec. 20: 5:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
• Dec. 21–29: Closed
• Dec. 30: 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.
• Dec. 31: 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.
• Jan 1: Closed
• Jan. 2–5: Closing at 10 p.m.

Dining

Chick-fil-A

• Dec. 16–20: 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Dec. 21–29: Closed
• Dec. 30–31: 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Jan. 1: Closed
• Jan. 2–3: 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Jan. 4–5: Closed

Student Center Food Court

• Dec. 14 – Jan. 5: Closed for renovation

Dunkin’ Donuts

• Dec. 14 – Jan. 5: Closed for renovation

Ferst Place Restaurant

• Dec. 16–20: Open 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. 
• Dec. 23 – Jan. 3: Closed

Pizza Hut

• Dec. 13 – Jan. 5: Closed 

Subway (Student Center Commons)

• Dec. 14–15: Closed
• Dec. 16–20: 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. 
• Dec. 21 – Jan. 1: Closed
• Jan. 2–3: 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Jan. 4–5: Closed 

Taco Bell (Student Center Commons)

• Dec. 13 – Jan. 5: Closed

H₂O Café (Campus Recreation Center)

• Dec. 13 – Jan. 5: Closed

Starbucks (Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons)

• Dec. 13: Closing at 3 p.m. 
• Dec.16–20: 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Dec. 21–29: Closed
• Dec. 30–31: 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Jan. 1: Closed
• Jan. 2–3: 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Jan. 4: Closed
• Jan. 5: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.  

Woodruff Dining Hall

• Dec. 13: Closing at 3 p.m.
• Dec. 14 – Jan. 2: Closed
• Jan. 3: 4 to 8 p.m.
• Jan. 4: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; 5 to 8 p.m.

North Ave Dining Hall

• Dec. 14 – Jan. 2: Closed
• Jan. 3: 4 to 8 p.m.
• Jan. 4: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; 5 to 8 p.m.

Brittain Dining Hall

• Dec. 13: Closing at 3 p.m.
• Dec. 14 – Jan. 4: Closed
• Jan. 5: 4 to 8 p.m.

Westside Market

• Dec. 13 – Jan. 5: Closed

Burger Bytes

• Dec. 13 – Jan. 5: Closed 

Highland Bakery

• Dec. 14–15: Closed 
• Dec. 16–20: 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 
• Dec. 21 – Jan. 1: Closed 
• Dec. 30–31: 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 
• Jan. 1: Closed 
• Jan. 2–3: 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 
• Jan. 4–5: Closed 

The Colony Bistro/Lab (BioTech Quad)

• Dec. 21 – Jan. 5: Closed 

Parking and Transportation Services

Parking and Transportation’s new portal for citation payments and appeals, carpool permit applications, and vehicle management, The Driver's Seat, will open on Monday, Dec. 16, at 8 a.m. Customers may also purchase new parking permits in this portal. To learn more about The Driver’s Seat, visit www.pts.gatech.edu. The Driver’s Seat replaces the My Parking Account portal.

The Parking and Transportation Services office will be closed from Saturday, Dec. 21, through Sunday, Dec. 29, and Wednesday, Jan. 1. On Dec. 30–31, the office will be open from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The office will resume normal operation, along with enforcement of all parking regulations, on Thursday, Jan. 2.

As you prepare to leave campus for the winter break, please be mindful of parking instructions for leaving vehicles on campus and the reduced transit schedule: 

Parking

Parking permit customers who plan to leave their vehicles on campus during the break are welcome to park in their assigned zones. Customers can also park in ungated E or W areas, W25 (GTPD), WR29 (Woodruff parking lot), WR30 (Curran parking deck) or E52 (Peters parking deck).

Please do not leave vehicles in E63, E65, ER51 (Fowler Street), W23 or E81, even if you have a permit for those areas.

Please be sure to remove all valuables from your vehicles, raise all windows and lock all doors for security during the break. Normal parking accommodations will resume on Monday, Dec. 30. 

Transit

• Dec. 16–22: Trolleys and Stingers will operate on a reduced schedule. Midnight Rambler will not operate. Emory Shuttle and Stingerette will operate using regular schedules, with service ending at 10 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 22. Grocery shuttle will not operate during weekend. 
• Dec. 23–27: Trolleys, Stingers, Midnight Rambler, Stingerette, Grocery Shuttle, and Emory Shuttle will not operate.
• Dec. 28–29: Trolleys will operate on a reduced schedule. Stingerette will operate on regular schedule. Midnight Rambler and Grocery Shuttle will not operate. 
• Dec. 30-31: Trolleys and Stingers will operate on a reduced schedule. Emory Shuttle and Stingerette will operate using regular schedule, with Stingerette service ending at 10 p.m. Tuesday. Midnight Rambler will not operate.
• Jan. 1: Trolleys, Stingers, Midnight Rambler, Stingerette, Grocery Shuttle, and Emory Shuttle will not operate.
• Jan. 2–5: Trolleys and Stingers will operate on a reduced schedule. Emory Shuttle and Stingerette will operate using normal schedule. Grocery Shuttle and Midnight Rambler will resume normal schedules on Saturday, Jan. 4. 

Stamps Health Services

• Dec. 21–29: Closed
• Dec. 30–31: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Jan. 1: Closed
• Jan. 2: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 
• Jan. 3: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

Student Center

Common areas and postal mailboxes are accessible by Georgia Tech students 24/7 with a valid BuzzCard. The building will be accessible by BuzzCard only at the following times: 

• Dec. 14, after 11 p.m. 
• Dec. 15–20, after 6 p.m. 
• Dec. 21–29, all day
• Dec. 30–31, after 6 p.m. 
• Jan. 1, all day
• Jan. 2–4, after 6 p.m.

Student Center Guest Services

• Dec. 21–29: Closed 
• Dec. 30 – Jan. 5: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends
• Jan. 1: Closed 

Kaplan

• Dec. 24, 25, 30, 31: Closed

Copy Center

• Dec. 17 – Jan. 6: Closed

Paper and Clay (Craft Center)

• Dec. 21 – Jan. 1: Closed

Information Desk

• Dec. 22–30: Closed
• Dec. 31 – Jan. 4: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Post Office

• Dec. 21–27: Closed
• Dec. 30–31: 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Jan. 1: Closed 
• Faculty and staff may pick up departmental mail with BuzzCard on Dec. 23, 24, 26, and 27 from 8 a.m. to noon at 711 Marietta Street. 

Tech Square

• Dec. 16–20: Closing at 3 p.m.
• Dec. 21 – Jan. 2: Closed

Ray's Pizza

• Dec. 24: Closed for dinner
• Dec. 25: Closed
• Dec. 31: Closed for dinner
• Jan. 1: Closed 

Barrelhouse

• Dec. 24–25: Closed

GameStop

• Dec. 25: Closed
• Jan. 1: Closed

Great Clips

• Dec. 24: Closing at 3 p.m.
• Dec. 25: Closed

Tin Drum

• Dec. 24: Closing at 6 p.m.
• Dec. 25: Closed

Waffle House

• Never closes

The block is part of IceCube, an observatory built in one of the most inhospitable parts of the world to study neutrinos zipping through the Earth from outer space. These subatomic particles normally pass through the Earth as easily as light passes through a pane of glass.But a few of them crash into the ultra-clear ice of IceCube. When they do, they produce secondary particles that can create a faint bluish light called Cherenkov radiation.

Scientists like Ignacio Taboada, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics, are using information from that glow to learn more about these neutrinos – including, perhaps, where in the universe they came from. Using data collected between May 2010 and May 2012, IceCube has measured 28 neutrinos that likely originated outside our solar system, the first time such very-high-energy cosmic neutrinos have been observed.

As the IceCube Neutrino Observatory celebrates the third anniversary of the end of construction on Dec. 18th, it is receiving the “Breakthrough of the Year” award from the British journal Physics World for observing these cosmic visitors.

“We now know that neutrinos from outside our planet are there, and we saw roughly as many as we had expected,” said Taboada, who has been part of the IceCube Collaboration team for 14 years and was a co-author of the Nov. 22 paper in the journal Science that reported the neutrino findings. “We have learned some things about neutrinos, but there are still other things that we still don’t understand.”

The centerpiece of IceCube is a matrix of 86 strings of basketball-sized optical detectors placed one and a half kilometers beneath the Antarctic snow. Each string includes 60 optical detectors that are so sensitive they can register a single photon. Dug into the ice by a special hot-water drill, the strings are arranged in a pattern designed to use the Cherenkov radiation to map the path of neutrinos through the ice.

By observing the path of the particles through the ice block, scientists had hoped to learn where the particles originated in space. But from the 28 neutrino events observed, that hasn’t yet been possible.

“So far, we are not seeing individual sources for the neutrinos,” said Taboada. “We are not seeing any place in the sky that we can point to and say that we see even three or four of the neutrinos coming from. It is very diffuse. It may be that the sources are very weak, or that we have a detector that is not large enough.”

Neutrinos are nearly-massless particles that carry no electrical charge and originate from a variety of sources, including radioactive decay, our own Sun, cosmic rays and events such as exploding stars. From May 2010 to May 2012, IceCube recorded 28 neutrinos with very high energy levels – above 30 trillion electron volts – suggesting they were from beyond our own solar system.

One challenge for the nearly 300 scientists involved in the program is separating cosmic neutrinos from those that originate on Earth. Cosmic neutrinos tend to have much higher energy levels, which can be measured by the amount of light they produce in the ice. Their direction also gives a clue; only cosmic neutrinos can pass through the Earth into the ice.

Built with funds from the National Science Foundation and scientific organizations from three European countries, IceCube was also designed to measure cosmic rays, which accompany the formation of neutrinos. The existence of cosmic rays has been known for more than a hundred years, but their sources are also unknown.

“This is essentially the birth of a new branch of astrophysics,” said Taboada. “We’ve observed the universe with photons, and now we can observe using neutrinos.”

IceCube is also facilitating Taboada’s own research on gamma-ray bursts, which is being conducted with Ph.D. students James Casey and Jacob Daughhetee.

“Gamma ray bursts are gigantic explosions that last for only a few seconds,” Taboada said. “Over those few seconds, they are so bright that they can outshine the rest of the universe combined. They are brief, but they are very powerful while they last.”

Scientists believe that there are at least two kinds of gamma ray bursts: those associated with supernovas that eject jets of matter and radiation, and neutron stars that spiral together and eventually merge. Neutrinos from gamma ray bursts can also be detected by IceCube.

IceCube was built at the South Pole to take advantage of the very clear ice available there and the darkness within the ice. “We used Antarctic ice because we needed a highly transparent material to observe the Cherenkov radiation,” explained Taboada. “The ice allows us to see evidence of these secondary particles.”

But that transparency has a cost. The South Pole experiences extremely cold temperatures, and everything used there must be flown in. Taboada has been to the South Pole three times, each time for a month during the Antarctic summer – when temperatures can still be as low as 45 degrees below zero Celsius (minus 49 degrees Fahrenheit).

“It’s a very work-oriented place,” he said. “Because it is so difficult to get there, you work every day, 12 and 15 hours a day. At the end of a month, you are exhausted.”

During the summer – November through February – as many as 150 people work at the South Pole facilities, known officially as the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. During the Antarctic winter, only 50 or 60 people work there, and aircraft don’t land except in extreme emergencies.

While space is tight, the station does have a music room, gymnasium and basketball court, along with a greenhouse for growing fresh vegetables. Water is precious because it is obtained by melting ice, so researchers are limited to two two-minute showers per week.

Construction of IceCube began in 2005, and the facility – now managed by the University of Wisconsin – was turned on in December 2010. With participation from 41 institutions in 12 countries, IceCube is expected to operate for at least ten years. Already, however, there is discussion about enhancing its capabilities – and perhaps expanding it to capture more neutrinos.

Basic science done in facilities like IceCube is really all about human curiosity – which often ends up having a more practical benefit.

“Basic science is not always about finding a cure for cancer,” Taboada said. “But if you look at the last 400 years of basic scientific discovery, research and basic science have time and again resulted in a better life for humans. Satisfying that human curiosity often turns out to be a very long-term, very high-risk and very high payoff investment. That’s a basic reason to do science.”

Research News

Georgia Institute of Technology

177 North Avenue

Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu)(404-894-6986) or Brett Israel (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu)(404-385-1933).

Writer: John Toon

The Army ROTC program has scholarship openings for upperclassmen and graduate students pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, Chinese, and other languages and who plan to graduate in 2016. 

Students are encouraged to apply to attend the Leader’s Training Course (LTC), a 30-day paid summer program at Fort Knox, Ky. A student who successfully completes the LTC will be placed into the Military Science program as a junior Army ROTC cadet and earn a two-year academic scholarship.

To qualify for the LTC, students must have a GPA of 2.7 or higher and successfully complete a standard Army Physical Fitness Test.

Those interested in applying to the LTC should contact Georgia Tech’s Recruiting Operations Officer, Michael Ward, at michael.ward@rotc.gatech.edu, with their name, major, date of graduation, and phone number.

The application deadline is Tuesday, July 1, 2014. Students can learn more about Tech’s Army ROTC program at armyrotc.gatech.edu. Those participating in the Chinese Language Flagship Program should also apply.

Thankfully, there are plenty of budget-friendly activities in and around Atlanta in the coming weeks, including music, theater, crafts, and ice skating. Here are just a few of the wintery events happening this month:

Coming up soon

• Tuba Christmas: Annual Christmas-themed tuba concert at Underground Atlanta. (Dec. 6, free)

• The Children’s Christmas Parade: Annual parade through Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. (Dec. 7, free)

• Larry, Carols and Mo!: A chance to enjoy carols, “A Christmas Story,” and “mo” at the Fox Theatre. (Dec. 9, $2.50)
• Cocoa and Caroling: Hot cocoa and a caroling singalong at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center. (Dec. 11, free)
• Santa’s Favorite Chamber Music: Performance of holiday-themed chamber music at Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. (Dec. 15, free)

Throughout the month

• Madeline’s Christmas: The beloved, precocious French book character has her own holiday revue at the Horizon Theatre. ($15)

• Winter Wonderland at Fernbank: Celebrate all winter observances and cultures at this Fernbank exhibit. Free with museum admission. ($16.50 with student ID, $17.50 for adults)

• Invasion: Christmas Carol: A twist on the classic, with plenty of adult humor injected, by the Dad’s Garage theater company. ($15-25)
• Santaland Diaries: A stage version of the David Sedaris story. Another that features plenty of adult humor. ($25 and up)
• ICE Pop-up Shop: Get something crafted with care for everyone on your shopping list at this seasonal Candler Park shop. (Free)
• Spruill Gallery Holiday Artists Market: Locally crafted gifts, décor, ceramics, and more, located near Perimeter Mall. (Free)
• Atlanta Ballet Nutcracker: A dreamy Christmas tale showing at the Fox Theatre. ($27 and up)
• Life University Lights: More than a million lights in a mile, depicting a Christmas tree, nativity, menorah, and animated displays. ($5/car)
• Pink Pig: An Atlanta tradition that dates back to the 1960s, this little piggy is located at Lenox Square Mall. ($3/ride)
• A Christmas Carol: A theatrical adaptation of the Dickens classic, presented by the Alliance Theatre, and the last time Atlanta theatrical legend Chris Kayser will play Scrooge (a role he’s held for 16 years). ($17.50 and up)
• Christmas with the ASO: Use your GT Woodruff Arts Student pass, or buy one for $20, which is less than the cost of a ticket. ($29 and up) 

Ice Skating Rinks

• Atlantic Station
• Park Tavern
• Centennial Olympic Park

Scientists believe Europa is one of the planetary bodies in our solar system most likely to have conditions that could sustain life, an idea reinforced by magnetometer readings from the Galileo spacecraft detecting signs of a salty, global ocean below the moon’s icy shell.

Without direct measurements of the ocean, scientists have to rely on magnetometer data and observations of the moon’s icy surface to account for oceanic conditions below the ice.

Regions of disrupted ice on the surface, known as chaos terrains, are one of Europa’s most prominent features. As lead author Krista Soderlund and colleagues explain in this week’s online edition of the journal Nature Geosciences, the chaos terrains, which are concentrated in Europa’s equatorial region, could result from convection in Europa's ice shell, accelerated by heat from the ocean. The heat transfer and possible marine ice formation may be helping form diapirs, or warm compositionally buoyant plumes of ice that rise through the shell.

In a numerical model of Europa’s ocean circulation, the researchers found that warm rising ocean currents near the equator and subsiding currents in latitudes closer to the poles could account for the location of chaos terrains and other features of Europa’s surface. Such a pattern coupled with regionally more vigorous turbulence intensifies heat transfer near the equator, which could help initiate upwelling ice pulses that create features such as the chaos terrains.

“The processes we are modeling on Europa remind us of processes on Earth,” says Soderlund. A similar process has been observed in the patterns creating marine ice in parts of Antarctica.

The current patterns modeled for Europa contrast with the patterns observed on Jupiter and Saturn, where bands of storms form because of the way their atmospheres rotate. The physics of Europa’s ocean appear to have more in common with the oceans of the “ice giants” Uranus and Neptune, which show signs of three-dimensional convection.

“This tells us foundational aspects of ocean physics,” notes co-author Britney Schmidt, assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. More importantly, adds Schmidt, if the study’s hypothesis is correct, it shows that Europa’s oceans are very important as a controlling influence on the surface ice shell, offering proof of the concept that ice-ocean interactions are important to Europa.

“That means more evidence that the ocean is there, that it’s active, and there are interesting interactions between the ocean and ice shell,” says Schmidt, “all of which makes us think about the possibility of life on Europa.”

Soderlund, who has studied icy satellites throughout her science career, looks forward to the chance to test her hypothesis through future missions to the Jovian system. The European Space Agency’s JUICE mission (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) will give a tantalizing glimpse into the characteristics of the ocean and ice shell through two flyby observations. NASA’s Europa Clipper mission concept, under study, would complement the view with global measurements.

Soderlund says she appreciates the chance “to make a prediction about Europa’s subsurface currents that we might know the answer to in our lifetimes — that’s pretty exciting.”

Research funding was provided by the Institute for Geophysics, part of the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences.
Written by J.B. Bird, Jackson School of Geosciences, the University of Texas at Austin

Among his many titles, Nerem is the founding director of Georgia Tech’s Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. He has been a bioengineer for more than 35 years. Nerem knew how important Coulter was to the field, but the man he met in Miami gave no hint of scientific or business celebrity.

“He was a fascinating individual, very humble in nature,” Nerem said. “As the CEO of an important company, he did not believe in an executive dining room. So he hosted me for lunch in the cafeteria where all the other employees were. That was just his style.”

The connection made then and maintained through the years was instrumental in the formation of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

"Walter H. Coulter's life and approach to work are an inspiration to us all and we try to honor his memory every day in the way we approach our educational and research activities," said Steve Cross, Georgia Tech’s Executive Vice President for Research.

This year, Wallace Coulter would have turned 100, and to celebrate the life and scientific legacy of Coulter, his namesake department is hosting a celebration on Dec. 5-6 at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“I have heard many wonderful stories about Wallace’s deep commitment to his team and his people and employees,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, who holds a Wallace H. Coulter Chair in the department. “I’d like to think that the Coulter Department has a similar environment of a team and a family.”

Coulter studied electronics as a student at Georgia Tech in the early 1930s. The Coulter Foundation, through its philanthropy, helped establish the innovative academic department operated jointly by Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“There’s no question that the major gift by the Coulter Foundation was extremely important in building the biomedical engineering department to propel itself in a very short time to being a leading department in the country,” said Don Giddens, the founding chair of the Coulter Department and former dean of the College of Engineering.

The biomedical research conducted today might not be possible without the invention of the Coulter Counter. The Coulter Counter transformed diagnostics in hospitals by allowing rapid counting of blood cells. As cells of different sizes go through the counter, the cells change the current that flows through the device. That change in current is used to very rapidly count blood cells, providing information that helps spot illnesses in patients.

The invention of the Coulter Counter was the foundation for the successful, multi-national Coulter Corporation. Wallace Counter also held 85 patents and positioned the Coulter Corporation as a leader in the diagnostics technology industry. In October 1997, the Coulter Corporation was acquired by Beckman Instruments, Inc. and the company is now known as Beckman Coulter, Inc.

“I will always remember the Coulter Counter as the best way to count cells without having to do it by eye and on a microscope that can be prone with many different errors,” said Manu Platt, an assistant professor and GRA Distinguished Cancer Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, who also earned his PhD in the Coulter Department. “For it now to be so routinely done in hospitals has allowed for greater processing of a large number of patient blood draws.”

Analysis of blood work revolutionized the detection of cancer and many kinds of blood-related diseases. Tests that once took several days took just minutes with the Coulter Counter.

“Wallace Coulter firmly believed that technology and engineering can change medicine for the better,” Bellamkonda said. “That is entirely our focus here in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.”

Outside of biology, the Coulter Counter has had commercial impacts in other fields such as manufacturing. For example, the Coulter Counter is used in paint manufacturing to quickly measure particle size and number.

The Coulter Counter was based on the Coulter Principle, which says that when cells are passed through microchannels separating electrolyte solutions, a transient current drop is proportional to the particle volume.

The Coulter Principle is one of the precursors to microfluidic studies that are commonly used today, Platt said.These studies are now at the forefront of how to miniaturize or “nano-ize” diagnostic detection devices for cheaper, faster and better assays, which are directly applicable to  environments like those in developing countries, such as in rural Africa where Platt does fieldwork studying HIV/AIDS.

Microfluidic studies, such as Assistant Professor Todd Sulchek’s work sorting cells by stiffness to spot disease, are a modern legacy of the Coulter Counter.

“That principle — the idea of making a very small aperture or very small hole — is a foundation for microfluidics,” said Sulchek, who works in both the Coulter Department and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “People realized that if you make very small dimensions, on the scale of individual cells, you can utilize new mechanisms for detection. That idea underpins almost all of microfluidics.”

Coulter was driven to innovate, something that the Coulter Department also strives for. Many of the Coulter Department’s faculty members have created startups and are interested in taking their ideas further. They are not satisfied with just publishing a study, Bellamkonda said. Embedded in the DNA of the Coulter Department is a drive to move technologies to patients as fast as possible, he said.

Just one example of this drive is found in the Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics lab of Ajit Yoganathan, the Associate Chair for Translational Research, Regents Professor and the Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering. His lab has a rich history of translational research over the past 34 years, working closely with cardiologists and cardiac surgeons, both adult and pediatric, to identify the important questions and challenges that the clinicians face and how the lab’s research could help clinical care.

Yoganathan’s lab has developed a repair technology for the mitral valve that is currently licensed for commercialization to a major heart valve company, and the lab has also developed a minimal blood loss access port into the left ventricle, which is in clinical trials in partnership with his startup company Apica Cardiovascular.

“The ideas came from basic research that was going on in the lab and having the Coulter funding allowed us to take it to the next level,” Yoganathan said.

Helping improve the lives of patients through commercializing biomedical research is a modern-day Coulter principle.

“The old Coulter principle is how to count particles. The new Coulter principle, pioneered with single-minded focus by the Coulter Foundation, is helping us take engineering innovations from the lab and successfully commercialize them,” Bellamkonda said. “Wallace’s legacy vibrantly lives on through the work of his foundation.”

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel

A professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Wang is using what’s technically known as the triboelectric effect to create surprising amounts of electric power by rubbing or touching two different materials together. He believes the discovery can provide a new way to power mobile devices such as sensors and smartphones by capturing the otherwise wasted mechanical energy from such sources as walking, the wind blowing, vibration, ocean waves or even cars driving by.

Beyond generating power, the technology could also provide a new type of self-powered sensor, allowing detection of vibrations, motion, water leaks, explosions – or even rain falling. The research has been supported by a variety of sponsors, including the National Science Foundation; U.S. Department of Energy; MANA, part of the National Institute for Materials in Japan; Korean corporation Samsung and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The research has been reported in journals including ACS Nano, Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, Energy and Environmental Sciences, Nano Energy and Nano Letters.

“We are able to deliver small amounts of portable power for today’s mobile and sensor applications,” said Wang, a Regents professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. “This opens up a source of energy by harvesting power from activities of all kinds.”

In its simplest form, the triboelectric generator uses two sheets of dissimilar materials, one an electron donor, the other an electron acceptor. When the materials are in contact, electrons flow from one material to the other. If the sheets are then separated, one sheet holds an electrical charge isolated by the gap between them. If an electrical load is then connected to two electrodes placed at the outer edges of the two surfaces, a small current will flow to equalize the charges.

By continuously repeating the process, an alternating current can be produced. In a variation of the technique, the materials – most commonly inexpensive flexible polymers – produce current if they are rubbed together before being separated. Generators producing DC current have also been built.

“The fact that an electric charge can be produced through triboelectrification is well known,” Wang explained. “What we have introduced is a gap separation technique that produces a voltage drop, which leads to a current flow in the external load, allowing the charge to be used. This generator can convert random mechanical energy from our environment into electric energy.”

Since their first publication on the research, Wang and his research team have increased the power output density of their triboelectric generator by a factor of 100,000 – reporting that a square meter of single-layer material can now produce as much as 300 watts. They have found that the volume power density reaches more than 400 kilowatts per cubic meter at an efficiency of more than 50 percent. The researchers have expanded the range of energy-gathering techniques from “power shirts” containing pockets of the generating material to shoe inserts, whistles, foot pedals, floor mats, backpacks and floats bobbing on ocean waves.

They have learned to increase the power output by applying micron-scale patterns to the polymer sheets. The patterning effectively increases the contact area and thereby increases the effectiveness of the charge transfer.

Wang and his team accidentally discovered the power generating potential of the triboelectric effect while working on piezoelectric generators, which use a different technology. The output from one piezoelectric device was much larger than expected, and the cause of the higher output was traced to incorrect assembly that allowed two polymer surfaces to rub together. Six months of development led to the first journal paper on the triboelectric generator in 2012.

“When two materials are in physical contact, the triboelectrification occurs,” said Wang, who holds the Hightower Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. “When they are moved apart, there is a gap distance created. To equalize the local charge, electrons have to flow. We are getting surprisingly high voltage and current flow from this. As of now, we have discovered four basic modes of triboelectric generators.”

Since their initial realization of the possibilities for this effect, Wang’s team has expanded applications. They can now produce current from contact between water – sea water, tap water and even distilled water – and a patterned polymer surface. Their latest paper, published in the journal ACS Nano in November, described harvesting energy from the touch pad of a laptop computer.

They are now using a wide range of materials, including polymers, fabrics and even papers. The materials are inexpensive, and can include such sources as recycled drink bottles. The generators can be made from nearly-transparent polymers, allowing their use in touch pads and screens.

Beyond its use as a power source, Wang is also using the triboelectric effect for sensing without an external power source. Because the generators produce current when they are perturbed, they could be used to measure changes in flow rates, sudden movement, or even falling raindrops.

“If a mechanical force is applied to these generators, they will produce an electrical current and voltage,” he said. “We can measure that current and voltage as electrical signals to determine the extent of the mechanical agitation. Such sensors could be used for monitoring in traffic, security, environmental science, health care and infrastructure applications.”

For the future, Wang and his research team plan to continue studying the generators and sensors to improve their output and sensitivity. The size of the material can be scaled up, and multiple layers can boost power output.

“Everybody has seen this effect, but we have been able to find practical applications for it,” said Wang. “It’s very simple, and there is much more we can do with this.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under award DE-FG02-07ER46394; by the National Science Foundation under award CMMI-0946418, by MANA, part of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan; by Samsung, and by the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under award KJCX2-YW-M13. Any conclusions or recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring organizations.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu)(404-894-6986) or Brett Israel (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu)(404-385-1933).

Writer: John Toon

“Students do great things that can be quite invisible,” said Ellen Zegura, a professor in the School of Computer Science who taught a Computing for Good (C4G) course this semester. The expo will focus on projects students have done this semester in a number of colleges and schools and will also include participants in this semester’s C4G courses, which in the past presented at their own expo.

Andy Pruett, who’s pursuing a master’s in human-computer interaction, will be there with his team, which created Food Mapper, an open and accessible platform that lets users map food sources in places where they are scarce (sometimes called “food deserts”). Tackling the project from a service learning perspective served as a motivating factor in several ways.

“When the project hits challenging spots, knowing that you are working to serve and volunteer can be a source of pride and drive,” Pruett said. “The clients for these service learning projects can be emotionally dedicated to their work, and it’s rewarding to know simple solutions can often make a significant difference for nonprofits and service providers.”

The expo is the first event organized by the newly formed Service Learning and Community Engagement Council (SLCE), a group convened as part of the Strategic Plan Service Learning and Legacy Project, for which Zegura is a co-chair. It aims to build on current service learning activities on campus and promote social entrepreneurship and civic engagement in the Tech curriculum. 

Efforts have an emphasis on undergraduate education but also affect the graduate experience, particularly in the case of cross-listed courses such as C4G that may be taken by both undergraduates and graduates. The SLCE plans to pursue a course designation for service learning course offerings. Around 10-15 courses have already been identified, and others would likely be added in the coming years.

In the meantime, the expo is intended to showcase what’s already being done and the momentum that exists for this type of learning.

“Outreach by Tech students to the surrounding communities is important for the profile of the university,” Pruett said. “Knowing that the quality of the end result matters beyond the scope of the course is a positive and compelling reminder that details matter, decisions matter, communication matters, and execution matters. This soaks through the team, makes work more enjoyable, and makes small wins very rewarding.”

In addition to the expo, the SLCE is working on a concept paper as part of the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for Georgia Tech’s Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) reaccreditation. The QEP is intended to have broad application that enhances student learning or the learning environment. Tech’s International Plan and Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program were both part of the QEP in Tech’s last reaccreditation.

Around 30 projects will be on display, with their creators, at the Tech4Good expo this Wednesday, Dec. 4, from 4–6 p.m. on the first floor of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons.

The two-hour event will showcase 10 students who will discuss their own ideas related to the TED theme of “ideas worth spreading.”

“TEDxStudent was born from the idea that each and every student on this campus has a story,” said Sameera Omar, one of the event organizers. “We wanted to create an environment that allowed students to voice these passions and thought-provoking insights to their own peers in the hopes of building a more connected and empathetic culture.”

TED (short for technology, entertainment and design) has gained traction internationally through conferences featuring short, engaging presentations by leaders in a variety of fields. Videos of the “TED Talks” are then made available online for the masses. The TEDx program is designed to bring the TED experience to more narrowly defined communities and enable them to organize events that emulate the global and national conferences.

Omar hopes the student talks leave attendees feeling “fuller than when they entered.”

“The application process was really competitive, and the presenters have come a long way in refining and enhancing their talks," she said. “Everyone has a passion and an idea for something — whether it's been recognized or not — but students often forget the sheer amount of power they embody to inspire those around them.”

TEDxStudent, sponsored by TEDxGeorgiaTech and SEED Initiative, begins at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday at the Student Center Theater. It is free and open to all members of the campus community and beyond.

As many on campus know, Georgia Tech offers a variety of commute options and incentives, including a bus and trolley system around campus, connectivity to the Midtown MARTA station, discounted or free Zipcar and carpool matching systems, and a pre-tax payroll deduction option for monthly MARTA passes.   

"We are extremely honored with the PACE award, but our department can't take all the credit,” said Lance Lunsway, senior director for Parking and Transportation Services. “It really is a collaborative community achievement award for Georgia Tech and Midtown Alliance. Without those campus individuals using alternative transportation and without our partner, Midtown Transportation, we wouldn't be successful."

Aside from its motor vehicle options, Tech’s biking infrastructure may have been what put the department over the top as an award candidate. New bike racks and lanes and the Cycle Atlanta app developed by researchers in Civil and Environmental Engineering helped the campus earn recognition as a Silver-level Bicycle Friendly University by the League of American Cyclists, a distinction that was cited in the award nomination.

To explore Tech’s various transportation options, visit the Parking and Transportation Services website. 

By taking advantage of the native pollen grain shape and a non-natural oxide chemistry, this work provides a unique demonstration of tunable, bio-enabled multimodal adhesion. The spikes inherited from the sunflower pollen provide short range adhesion – over nanoscale distances – while the oxide chemistry provides an adhesion mode that operates over much longer distances – up to one millimeter.

The work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and has been accepted for publication in the journal Chemistry of Materials. A “just-accepted” version of the manuscript has appeared online.

“Pollen grains are inexpensive and sustainable templates that are readily available in large quantities,” said Ken Sandhage, a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Because pollen grains are already designed by nature for adhesion, we thought that it would be interesting to try to augment such natural behavior with an additional, non-natural mode of adhesion.”

Sandhage and graduate student Brandon Goodwin began by examining the microscopic shapes of several types of pollen – including ragweed, pecan and dandelion – before choosing particles from the sunflower (Helianthus annuus). The sunflower pollen grains are nearly spherical, but covered with spikes that can entangle with the hairs on bees’ legs, or adhere to surfaces via van der Waals forces at nanometer-scale distances, Sandhage explained.

The researchers washed the burr-like pollen particles with chloroform, methanol, hydrochloric acid and water to clean the surfaces and expose hydroxyl groups for chemically attaching their coating. They then applied iron oxide using an automated, layer-by-layer surface sol-gel process they had developed earlier for coating diatom shells made of silica. Reaction of the iron oxide precursor with the hydroxyl groups on the surface of the pollen particles resulted in a highly-conformal coatings.

The sol-gel process used alternating cycles of exposure to an iron (III) isopropoxide precursor solution and water to apply 30 thin layers of hematite (Fe₂O₃) onto the pollen. Heating the particles to 600 degrees Celsius then burned out the organic material from the original pollen grains and crystallized the iron oxide, leaving hollow 3D particles. The shells were then heated again in a controlled oxygen atmosphere to convert the hematite into magnetite (Fe₃O₄), which is more strongly magnetic.

“We examined individual pollen grains before and after firing, and we could see that the shape and surface features were well preserved,” said Sandhage, who is the B. Mifflin Hood Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. “The conformal nature of the coating process allowed us to generate ceramic replicas that retained even tiny surface features on the starting pollen grains.”

The adhesion properties of the magnetic pollen-shaped particles were then analyzed by graduate student Ismael Gomez and professor Carson Meredith, both from Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Gomez and Meredith used an atomic force microscope (AFM) tip to press the replicas onto a variety of surfaces, then measured the force required to remove them from the surfaces. They studied replica pollen adhesion to polyvinyl alcohol, polyvinyl acetate, polystyrene, silicon, nickel and neodymium-iron-boron – and compared the adhesion properties to those of the original sunflower pollen grains.

“We found that we achieved multimodal adhesion by retaining short-range van der Waals attraction, as exhibited by the native pollen, and gaining magnetic adhesion,” Sandhage said.

The layer-by-layer nature of the coating process allowed for control of the amount of magnetic material, and the magnetic properties of the pollen replicas. The researchers chose to apply 30 layers to achieve sufficient long-range magnetic behavior while retaining high-aspect-ratio, sharp spikes that provide for short-range van der Waals forces.

“Reproducibly generating large quantities of such cheap microparticles possessing high-aspect surface features over their entire particle surfaces would be quite challenging using synthetic top-down methods,” Sandhage said.

The Air Force Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) that funded the work is aimed at both understanding adhesion in natural systems and controllably tailoring such adhesion.  In future research supported by the MURI, Sandhage and Meredith plan to study other oxide materials and explore the variety of shapes available in pollen particles.

“Now that we know how to generate such particle replicas, there is certainly more chemical tailoring that we can explore for adhesion,” said Sandhage, who also holds an adjunct position in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.  “Through the proper combination of pollen shape, synthetic chemistry and thermal treatments, we can significantly expand the range of properties of these pollen replicas.”

This research was supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research through award number FA9550-10-1-0555. Any conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Air Force.

CITATION: William Brandon Goodwin, Ismael J. Gomez, Carson Meredith and Kenneth H. Sandhage, “Conversion of Pollen Particles into Three-Dimensional Ceramic Replicas Tailored for Multimodal Adhesion.” (Chemistry of Materials, 2013): http:// dx.doi.org/10.1021/cm402226w

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu)(404-894-6986) or Brett Israel (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu)(404-385-1933).

Writer: John Toon

The Counseling Center

The Counseling Center is collaborating with the Library, the Campus Recreation Center, and the Office of Health Promotion to host a special program called "Stressbuzzters" on Wednesday, Dec. 4, beginning at 7 p.m. During this program, stress-reduction tips, brochures, and other giveaways will be provided to students in the Library.

Students who experience extreme test anxiety or other stress-induced emergencies should consider visiting the Counseling Center. In addition to regular appointments, the Counseling Center will offer walk-in hours for emergencies only between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. during Dead Week and finals week.

For emergencies that occur outside of Counseling Center business hours, the Center has a counselor on-call 24 hours a day, 7 days week, who can be reached by calling 404-894-2575.

The Library

When it comes time to study, you may realize that you lack some essential materials — perhaps even one of your textbooks. Chances are there’s a copy of your required text at the Library. Check with the Library Services Desk.

The library also offers extended hours during Dead Week and finals week to accommodate student study schedules. It will be open 24/7 beginning Dec. 1 at midnight and ending Dec. 13 at 6 p.m.

The Center for Academic Success

After you have made your study guides and started working practice problems, schedule time to meet with a tutor to clarify any questions you may have about the material you’re studying (but not to teach you an entire semester of material).

The Center for Academic Success also offers Success Workshops on preparing for final exams and managing test anxiety during the weeks leading up to finals. 1-to-1 Tutoring closes for the semester on Dec. 6.

The Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons and the College of Business

When planning your study schedule, don’t forget to make time to meet with study groups. The Clough Commons and College of Business are home to some of the best breakout rooms and collaborative spaces on campus, but study space disappears quickly. Plan ahead and schedule your group meeting using Tech’s online space reservation system.

The Campus Recreation Center

We’ve all heard that exercise can help you manage stress. If you already have a fitness routine, don’t let finals get in the way of this healthy habit. If you don’t normally work out, you don’t have to hit the weight floor to experience the benefits of exercise. You can incorporate exercise in your finals week routine by using other areas in the CRC such as the pools, basketball courts, and indoor track. The CRC will maintain regular operating hours during Dead Week and finals week.

North Avenue Dining Hall

Maintaining a healthy diet is another important habit to pay special attention to while studying for and taking exams. Soda, chips, and other junk foods are easy to reach for during long hours of studying, but they can negatively impact your attention span, motivation, and moods. When you’re up late, look to dining halls like the North Avenue Dining Hall to help you eat balanced, healthy meals.

Your Dorm

When studying, it’s best to get out of your dorm to avoid distractions such as video games and friends, but your dorm room does serve an important purpose during the last two weeks of the semester — it’s where you sleep.

Tech students are known for staying up all night to make the grade, but studies show that sleep deprivation can do your studying more harm than good. Check out this article from the Huffington Post for more information and for some tips to help you sleep well. Getting enough sleep is also at the top of this Tech reddit thread devoted to advice to survive finals week.

Tec Rec

Incentivizing your studying and taking breaks from study materials is an important part of staying motivated during Dead Week and finals week. Experts say that students should take a single 10–15 minute break for every 50 minutes that they spend studying.

You can incentivize your studying by planning longer study breaks and spending time with friends. Visit Tech Rec to unwind with a quick game of bowling or billiards and stay close to your favorite study spots. 

 A research team is attempting to engineer an injectable therapy for the shoulder’s supraspinatus tendon, a rotator cuff tendon that is commonly torn in sports. When the tendon is damaged, the body makes things worse by activating enzymes that further break down the tendon. The scientists hope to develop an injectable compound that would deliver an inhibitor capable of blocking these enzymes, thereby reducing the severity of the injury or even healing the tissue.

“Normally people focus on treating tendon injuries after the tear has occurred, but we’re focusing on a much earlier stage in the disease,” said Johnna Temenoff, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “This is the first time that an injectable therapy specifically designed to interact with tissue at an early disease state has been attempted for this particular tendon injury.”

Temenoff’s work is supported by a $1 million grant from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) for five years of research, which began in September 2013. Collaborating on the research is Manu Platt, an assistant professor in the same department. Temenoff’s previous work on tendon injuries, which focused on quarterbacks in football, was sponsored by the NFL Charities.

Shoulder tendon injuries are common overuse injuries for athletes and also for industrial workers whose repetitive overhead motion put them at risk. The rotator cuff is a collation of four tendons, and the tendons are made of collagen. Overuse of the tendons damages the collagen, and people feel stiff and sore in their shoulders as the area becomes weaker.

Once a tendon is damaged, the body accelerates the damage by activating enzymes that eat at the tendon, worsening the condition over time.

“The interesting thing about this disease is that we don’t know exactly what causes it,” Temenoff said. “We’re studying enzymes that are known to chew up the collagen, and we’re looking at then delivering inhibitors to those enzymes in a local injection in the tendon to try to stop the degradation.”

In their research, the team will use an animal model to characterize when these collagen-destroying enzymes are the most active. This will give researchers a good idea of when to inject inhibitors.

So that patients won’t need multiple shots, the scientists are working on a drug delivery material that will release the inhibitors over time once inside the body. One idea is to control the interactions between the inhibitors and small amounts of the blood thinner heparin. The team will also study the histology and mechanics of the tendons after healing.

Temenoff said that the injectable therapy could, in theory, work on other kinds of tendon injuries, not just in the shoulder.

“We’re studying the disease in the shoulder, but it’s the same disease that causes tennis elbow, Achilles injuries, and jumper’s knee,” Temenoff said. “It’s the same process, just in different tendons in the body.”

This research is supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) under award1R01AR063692-01A1. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIAMS.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel

The award is bestowed annually to intellectually distinguished students from the United States pursuing post-secondary education in the U.K. Picon, who currently serves as president of the undergraduate Student Government Association (SGA), will spend two years overseas, split between studying autonomous vehicle dynamics and control at Cranfield University and international conflict at King’s College London.

“The degrees are exactly what I want to do,” Picon said. “King’s College has a great War Studies department, and I’ve been really excited since the first time I looked it up.”

Picon has long held interests in both aerospace and international affairs. His original fascinations had him wanting to be an astronaut, and as a first-generation American, he traveled often throughout childhood, eventually spending four weeks exploring Europe with the Oxford Study Abroad Program. At Tech, he complemented his major with undergraduate research and work experience at Rolls-Royce and Boeing. He spent six weeks studying in Oxford, England, and he also participated in an international fraternity conference in Greece and an Engineers Without Borders project in Honduras.

His desire to apply aerospace skills on an international level led him to pursue opportunities in the policy arena.

“Working at Boeing I got to see both how vulnerable and how well-protected our country is,” Picon said. “Being SGA president, I realized how much I enjoyed talking to people, and that I wanted to find something where I could use my analytical mindset but also interface with people.”

Through the Marshall experience, Picon will be on track to do just that, spending two years studying with peers in the U.K. with potentially similar goals in their country and experiencing both sides of U.S. and U.K. relations.

“I think the real benefit of the Marshall versus just studying public policy here in the states will be sitting in classes, talking about how the world views the U.S. military-industrial complex,” he said.

The duality of Picon’s studies came as no surprise to Marilyn Smith, professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering and his academic advisor in AE, who heartily recommended Picon for the Marshall.

“I have complete confidence that he will complete this proposed program at the top of his class,” Smith said. “I am impressed by this young man’s integrity and passion to help others. I would vote for him in any political election, and many of our current politicians could learn from him a great deal about the ideals of public service.”

Long-term, Picon plans to focus on international conflict and the prevention of war, aspiring to Winston Churchill’s challenge to “make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone.”

In addition to his studies, Picon hopes to carry over other interests while spending two years abroad, including playing lacrosse and participating in another Engineers Without Borders project. In his recommendation letters, both his athletic prowess and civic engagement were cited repeatedly as assets that made him an ideal Marshall Scholar. Picon, fluent in both English and Spanish, is also working on adding a third language to his repertoire by taking online Mandarin courses.

Juggling multiple activities won’t be a change of pace for Picon, who in addition to his SGA involvement has held leadership positions in Sigma Phi Epsilon, President’s Council Governing Board, and Triple Helix Society, on top of being a Georgia Tech Ambassador, member of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and member of the men’s lacrosse team. Meanwhile, he has maintained a 3.92 GPA in his major courses as a Stamps Scholar, the highest scholarship awarded to incoming freshman students.

“He is an amazing young man who epitomizes what students can achieve if they take advantage of all of the opportunities Tech has to offer,” Smith said.

Georgia Tech’s Fellowships Office aids students in the process of applying for prestigious awards such as the Marshall. Staff work with students on their applications, read drafts of essays, and arrange mock interviews for those who make it to the interview stage. Often, fellowships present the opportunity to craft a more tailored experience than one might get in traditional graduate school.

“Marshall allows you to choose your graduate programs in the U.K., so Nick was able to put together two grad programs that were just the perfect fit for the intersection he's exploring in his graduate work,” said Kathryn Meehan, director of the Fellowships Office.

Thanks to a close network of Tech alumni who have earned Marshall scholarships, and already-extensive research about life in the U.K., Picon eagerly anticipates the stint abroad.

“I have this very specific thing I want to do, and Marshall is great because it lets me use all of the U.K. to figure out how to do it.”

Picon will continue in his role as SGA president through the spring, graduate in May, and begin his Marshall studies in October 2014.  

“I’ve always had an idea in my mind of what a Rhodes Scholar should be and I don’t feel like I fit that mold, so I’ve somewhat been in a state of shock since they told me I won,” she said.

The Rhodes Scholarship is widely recognized as the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship award in the world. McCoy, a native of Dallas, Texas, who earned a bachelor’s in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Georgia Tech in May 2012, will pursue a Master of Science in Environmental and Chemical Engineering by Research at Oxford University.

McCoy’s trajectory over the past five years has been slowly building to this pinnacle fellowship. She came into Tech as a President’s Scholar, where she created a mentoring program that she then served in for three years. She was a leader in AIESEC and, after working abroad, returned to Tech to truly begin her social entrepreneurship endeavors by founding Enterprise to Empower (En2Em).

Dori Pap, assistant director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ILE), got to know McCoy through En2Em. “As their faculty advisor I had the opportunity to witness up close Melissa’s genuine ability to inspire and rally people in support of an important cause, and secure the necessary resources to deliver results,” she said.  

From there, it was only a matter of time before McCoy began launching ventures outside of campus. With three other Tech students and alumni, she founded Tubing Operations for Humanitarian Logistics (TOHL) in 2011, which developed an efficient, economically viable solution for getting water to remote places, particularly during disaster relief.

“After living through the 2010 Chilean earthquake and seeing communities go without water for weeks, I appreciated the need for water solutions that quickly service large communities for sustained time periods,” McCoy said in her Rhodes application.

TOHL went on to earn $40,000 from the Chilean government to participate in Startup Chile in 2012, as well as second place in Georgia Tech’s Ideas to SERVE competition. At the same time, McCoy competed for TOHL in Village Capital, a 10-week, $50,000 social enterprise incubator competition. TOHL also recently earned $75,000 at the Tech Awards gala in Silicon Valley.

Aside from TOHL, McCoy’s global reach has included serving as a consultant to Partners in Performance, where she’s currently working on an assignment in Mexico City to reduce costs and optimize the supply chain at a gold company, as well as with Zamrize, a Zambian venture founded by fellow Tech alumna and Rhodes Scholar Joy Buolamwini last year.

Stateside, McCoy has worked in engineering for both BP and Shell Oil Company, and received a certificate in Entrepreneurship and Technology from Singularity University, a competitive Silicon Valley post-graduate educational opportunity focused on empowering leaders to address humanity’s grand challenges. There, she helped develop Authentise, a patented software platform that lets users access proprietary 3D printing designs and earned 100,000 GBP from the U.K. Intellectual Proprietary Office.

The combination of all these experiences, especially zeroing in on social enterprise, led to McCoy’s decision to pursue a graduate degree in engineering.

“I felt that things would have been a ton easier if I had a stronger technical skillset and product development experience,” she said.

Still, McCoy has been acknowledged by numerous campus entities for her entrepreneurial spirit and drive. She’s been recognized by the Student Government Association, Society of Women Engineers, and Omicron Delta Kappa, to name a few.

Even the Rhodes Trust has had its eye on McCoy before — she first interviewed as a finalist two years ago.

“I didn’t have as strong of a sense then as I do now of who I am and what direction I want to take with my life,” she said. “I’m actually glad I wasn’t chosen then because there was a lot I needed to explore about myself and the real world.”

Personal growth is typical for students aspiring to attain awards such as the Rhodes scholarship, whether or not they ultimately win.

“Working on an application for a national award is a process that requires a student to look inward as well as ahead,” said Karen Adams, associate director of the Fellowships Office. “Students do not know what they will do the rest of their lives, but they do need to have a plan for what they will do during the award and afterward. They need to look ahead at the ‘first chapter of life’ since that process is easier than trying to plan the rest of life.”

McCoy will continue the next part of that “first chapter” when she relocates to Oxford next fall. She’ll work on a research project focused on problems with water management and purification, with the goal of removing heavy metals from water, and hopes to expand the scope to include additional mechanical and electrical engineering themes, finally combining many of her passions in one project.

“I’ve felt for so long that I’ve been torn between classes and work, and entrepreneurial and tech creation projects, and now I can combine them,” she said. “I’m blessed that I’m coming into this program with enhanced perspective on the world and what I can do to change it.”

It’s at this intersection of cutting-edge technology and international service where McCoy thrives.

“Melissa’s aspiration is to use her passion for improving the human condition, pair it with her outstanding education, and with her ability to lead and inspire people, to create and deliver much-needed solutions for the developing world,” Pap said.

This is the second straight year the Rhodes Trust has awarded one of its prestigious scholarships to a member of the Georgia Tech community, which has had four Rhodes scholars since 2002. McCoy is one of only six from public institutions to earn the award this year.

The following buildings or services on campus will have altered hours during the week of Thanksgiving. Service hours are as follows:

Barnes & Noble @ Georgia Tech 

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 8 a.m. – 8 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving Day): Closed 
• Friday, Nov. 29: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
• Saturday, Nov. 30: 8 a.m. – 10 p.m.
• Sunday, Dec. 1: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

BuzzCard Center (2nd Floor of Barnes & Noble @ Georgia Tech)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed

Dining

Chick-fil-A (Student Center Commons)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 7 a.m – 5 p.m
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed 

Student Center Food Court

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 7 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed

Dunkin' Donuts (Student Center Food Court)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 7 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed 

Ferst Place Restaurant (Student Center)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed

Pizza Hut (Student Center)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed 

Subway (Student Center Commons)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 10:30 a.m. – 4 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed  

Taco Bell (Student Center Commons)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 10:30 a.m. – 4 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed 

Burger Bytes (Student Center Commons)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed 

H2O Cafe (Campus Recreation Center)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed  

Starbucks (Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons)

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 7 a.m. – 3 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Saturday, Nov. 30: Closed 
• Reopens Sunday, Dec. 1, at 4 p.m. 

Woodruff Dining Hall 

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 7 a.m. – 3 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Saturday, Nov. 30: Closed
• Reopens Sunday, Dec. 1, at 10 a.m.

North Ave Dining Hall

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 7 a.m. – 3 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Saturday, Nov. 30: Closed 
• Reopens Sunday, Dec. 1, at 10 a.m.

Brittain Dining Hall

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: 7 a.m. – 3 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed 
• Reopens Monday, Dec. 2, at 7 a.m.

WestSide Market

• Wednesday, Nov. 27 – Sunday, Dec 1: Closed 
• Reopens Monday, Dec. 2, at 4 p.m.

BarrelHouse, GameStop, Great Clips, Ray's Pizza, Tin Drum

• Thursday, Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving Day): Closed  

Chuck’s Famous

• Closed Wednesday, Nov. 27 – Saturday, Nov. 30

Waffle House

• Never closes.

Student Center Retail

Kaplan, Famous Hair

• Thursday, Nov. 28: Closed 

Post Office

• Thursday, Nov 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed 

   

Parking and Transportation Services 

Parking

Customers who have permits in parking areas that must be vacated for the football game may relocate their vehicles before leaving campus for Thanksgiving starting Monday, Nov. 25. Specific instructions are available on the Parking and Transportation website. 

Transit 

Wednesday, Nov. 27:

• Midnight Rambler will operate from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m.
• Stingerette Nighttime Shuttle will operate from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m.
• Trolley, Stingers, Emory Shuttle, and Stingerette Daytime/Paratransit will operate their normal schedules and routes.

Thursday, Nov. 28, and Friday, Nov. 29

• Trolley, Stingers, Emory Shuttle, Midnight Rambler, and Stingerette will be out of service. 

Saturday, Nov. 30

• Weekend Grocery Shuttle will not be running.
• Stingerette Nighttime Shuttle will begin operations one (1) hour after the football game ends.
• Tech Trolley will operate on its normal schedule (10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.). Expect delays in service due to gameday traffic.
• The Midnight Rambler will operate its normal schedule (9 p.m. to 3 a.m.).

Stamps Health Services

• Wednesday, Nov. 27:  8 a.m. – 5 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Sunday, Dec. 1: Closed 

Library

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: Closed at 5 p.m. 
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Saturday, Nov. 30: Closed 
• Sunday, Dec. 1: Opens at Noon

Clough Commons

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: Closes at 5 p.m.
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Saturday, Nov. 30: Closed
• Sunday, Dec. 1: Opens at 7:30 a.m.

Campus Recreation Center

• Wednesday, Nov. 27: Closes at 7 p.m. 
• Thursday, Nov. 28 – Saturday. Nov. 30: Closed 
• Sunday, Dec. 1: Opens at noon

In the study, individuals with paralysis were able to use a tongue-controlled technology to access computers and execute commands for their wheelchairs at speeds that were significantly faster than those recorded in sip-and-puff wheelchairs, but with equal accuracy. This study is the first to show that the wireless and wearable Tongue Drive System outperforms sip-and-puff in controlling wheelchairs. Sip-and-puff is the most popular assistive technology for controlling a wheelchair.

The Tongue Drive System is controlled by the position of the user’s tongue. A magnetic tongue stud lets them use their tongue as a joystick to drive the wheelchair. Sensors in the tongue stud relay the tongue’s position to a headset, which then executes up to six commands based on the tongue position.

The Tongue Drive System holds promise for patients who have lost the use of their arms and legs, a condition known as tetraplegia or quadriplegia.

“It’s really easy to understand what the Tongue Drive System can do and what it is good for,” said Maysam Ghovanloo, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a study co-author and principal investigator. “Now, we have solid proof that people with disabilities can potentially benefit from it.”

The study was published on Nov. 27 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and the National Science Foundation funded the research. Scientists from Shepherd Center in Atlanta, and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago were also involved in the study. Jeonghee Kim and Hangue Park, who are working on the Tongue Drive System as graduate students at Georgia Tech, are co-authors of the study.

“The Tongue Drive System is a novel technology that empowers people with disability to achieve maximum independence at home and in the community by enabling them to drive a power wheelchair and control their environment in a smoother and more intuitive way,” said

Northwestern co-lead investigator Elliot Roth, M.D, chair of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Feinberg and the medical director of the patient recovery unit at Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. “The opportunity to use this high-tech innovation to improve the quality of life among people with mobility limitations is very exciting.”

The research team had subjects complete a set of tasks commonly used in similar clinical trials. Subjects in the trials were either able-bodied or people with tetraplegia.

“By the end of the trials, everybody preferred the Tongue Drive System over their current assistive technology,” said Joy Bruce, manager of Shepherd Center’s Spinal Cord Injury Lab and co-author of the study. “It allows them to engage their environment in a way that is otherwise not possible for them.”

Researchers compared how able-bodied subjects were able to execute commands either with the Tongue Drive System or with a keypad and mouse. For example, targets randomly appeared on a computer screen and the subjects had to move the cursor to click on the target. Scientists are able to calculate how much information is transferred from a person’s brain to the computer as they perform a point-and-click task. The performance gap narrowed throughout the trial between the keypad and mouse and the Tongue Drive System.

For the first time, the research team showed that people with tetraplegia can maneuver a wheelchair better with the Tongue Drive System than with the sip-and-puff system. On average, the performance of 11 subjects with tetraplegia using the Tongue Drive System was three times faster than their performance with the sip-and-puff system, but with the same level of accuracy, even though more than half of the patients had years of daily experience with sip-and-puff technology.

“That was a very exciting finding,” Ghovanloo said. “It attests to how quickly and accurately you can move your tongue.”

The idea for piercing the tongue with the magnet was the inspiration of Anne Laumann, M.D., professor of dermatology at Feinberg and a lead investigator of the Northwestern trial. She had read about an early stage of Tongue Drive System using a glued-on tongue magnet. The problem was the magnet fell off after a few hours and aspiration of the loose magnet was a real danger to these users.

“Tongue piercing put to medical use — who would have thought it? It is needed and it works!” Laumann said.

The experiments were repeated over five weeks for the able-bodied test group, and over six weeks for the tetraplegic group. All of the subjects with tetraplegia were able to complete the trial, which Ghovanloo called an “exciting” and “major finding.”

The tetraplegic group was using the Tongue Drive System just one day each week, but their improvement in performance was dramatic.

“We saw a huge, very significant improvement in their performance from session one to session two,” Ghovanloo said. “That’s an indicator of how quickly people learn this.”

Experiments on the Tongue Drive System to date have been done in the lab or hospital. In future studies, scientists will test how the Tongue Drive System performs outside of the controlled clinical environment. The research team hopes to test how patients maneuver with the Tongue Drive System in their homes and other environments.

The Tongue Drive System isn’t quite ready for commercialization, but Ghovanloo’s startup company, Bionic Sciences, is working with Georgia Tech to move the technology forward.
Ghovanloo is the foundering director of the GT-Bionics Laboratory, where his team is experimenting with other devices to improve the quality of life for individuals with disability.

“All of my projects are related to helping people with disabilities using the latest and greatest technologies,” Ghovanloo said. “That’s my goal in my professional life.”

DiSanto hopes that the one day he’ll be able to use a tongue-powered wheelchair outside of the hospital, which would help him gain some independence he lost after his diving accident.

"The Tongue Drive System will greatly increase my quality of life when I can start using it everywhere I go,” DiSanto said. “With the sip-and-puff system, there is always a straw in front of my face. With the Tongue Drive, people can see you, not just your adaptive equipment."

This research is supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering under award number 1RC1EB010915, and by the National Science Foundation under awards CBET-0828882 and IIS-0803184. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

Dr. Ghovanloo's company, Bionic Sciences, is negotiating with the Georgia Tech Research Corporation for a license to the technologies discussed in this article. If the license is executed, the results of his research on the Tongue Drive System could affect his personal financial status. Dr. Ghovanloo's Conflict of Interest has been reviewed and approved by Georgia Tech in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.

CITATION: J Kim, et al “The Tongue Enables Computer and Wheelchair Control for People with Spinal Cord Injury,” (Science Translational Medicine, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1126/scitranslmed.3006296

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel

For those who’ve had a great experience with a professor this semester, there’s an easy way to say “thanks” even without verbalizing it.

The Student Government Association and the Center for Enhancement of Teaching and Learning give students a way to show gratitude to their professors with Thank a Teacher. Through an online form, students can submit notes to professors throughout the year for actions big or small for which they’re thankful.

“Hearing back from students is more rare than you may think, and the impact that your short note can make is more powerful than you can imagine,” said Ahsan Khan, SGA’s vice president of campus affairs.

These notes are shared with professors in April, when they will also be honored at Dean Griffin Day. This annual event commemorates the legacy of Georgia Tech’s first dean of students, George Griffin, who worked to improve the student experience at Tech.

Notes are collected throughout the year, making the end of the fall semester an ideal time to submit kind words online about professors who you won’t see as much of in the spring. Students can also submit notes for staff, and may even remain anonymous in their submissions, if they choose.

The phonon, like the photon or electron, is a physical particle that travels like waves, representing mechanical vibration. Phonons transmit everyday sound and heat. Recent progress in phononics has led to the development of new ideas and devices that are using phononic properties to control sound and heat, according to a new review in Nature.

One application that has scientists buzzing is the possibility of controlling sound waves by designing and fabricating cloaking shells to guide acoustic waves around a certain object – an entire building, perhaps – so that whatever is inside the shell is invisible to the sound waves.

The future possibilities for phonons might also solve the biggest challenges in energy consumption and buildings today. Understanding and controlling the phononic properties of materials could lead to novel technologies to thermally insulate buildings, reduce environmental noise, transform waste heat into electricity and develop earthquake protection, all by developing new materials to manipulate sound and heat. These ideas are all possible in theory, but to make them a reality, phononics will have to inspire the same level of scientific innovation as electronics, and today that’s not the case.

“People know about electrons because of computers, and electromagnetic waves because of cell phones, but not so much about phonons,” said Martin Maldovan, a research scientist in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Maldovan’s review article appeared online Nov. 13 in the journal Nature. In the article he blends eight different subjects in the field of phononics, describing advances in sonic and thermal diodes, optomechanical crystals, acoustic and thermal cloaking, hypersonic phononic crystals, thermoelectrics and thermocrystals.

These technologies “herald the next technological revolution in phononics,” he said. All of these areas share a common theme: manipulating mechanical vibrations, but at different frequences.

The hottest fields in phononics, Maldovan said, is the development of acoustic and thermal metamaterials. These materials are capable of cloaking sound waves and thermal flows. The phononics approach to cloaking is based on electromagnetic cloaking materials that are already in use for light.

Maldovan, formerly a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also conducts phononics research of his own. This past summer, Maldovan published an article in the journal Physical Review Letters, describing an invention for controlling the conduction of heat through solid objects.

Known as thermocrystals, this new area of phononics research seeks to manage heat waves in a similar manner as sound and light waves, by channeling the flow of heat at certain frequencies. The technology could lead to devices that convert heat into energy, or the thermal equivalent of diodes, which could help data centers solve the problem of massive heat generated by their servers.

“The field of Phononics is relatively new, and when you have something new you don’t know what you will find,” Maldovan said. “You’re always thinking ‘what can I do with that?’”

CITATION: M Maldovan. “Sound and heat revolutions in phononics,” (Nature, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12608

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Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) produced the arrays using unique technology that grows bundles of vertically-aligned nanotubes embedded in silicon chips. In future versions of electrically-powered ion thrusters, electrons emitted from the carbon nanotube tips may be used to ionize a gaseous propellant such as xenon. The ionized gas would then be ejected through a nozzle to provide thrust for moving a satellite in space.

“The mission will characterize how well these field emission electron sources operate in the space environment relative to how well they work on the ground in vacuum chamber,” said Jud Ready, a GTRI principal research engineer. “Launch vibrations and exposure to a space environment that includes atomic oxygen and micrometeorites could have some unusual effects on the arrays. This mission will help us evaluate whether these carbon nanotube electron emitters could be used in ion thrusters.”

Existing ion thrusters rely on thermionic cathodes, which use high temperatures generated by electrical current to produce electrons. These devices require significant amounts of electricity to generate the heat, and must consume a portion of the propellant for their operation.
If the carbon nanotube arrays can be used as electron emitters, they would operate at lower temperatures with less power – and without using the limited on-board propellant. That could allow longer mission times for satellites, or reduce the weight of the micro-propulsion systems.

The carbon nanotube arrays are part of ALICE, a CubeSat micro-satellite developed and built by the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. On a mission scheduled for Dec. 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, ALICE will ride into space on an Atlas V rocket being used to launch a separate and much larger payload. Just 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters in size, ALICE will be part of an array of eight CubeSats – so named because they fit into small modular launchers attached to the main satellite.

The work could lead to improved micro-propulsion systems useful to small spacecraft, said Jonathan Black, director of the Center for Space Research and Assurance at AFIT.

“Technology like the devices being tested on ALICE is essential to our future ability to maneuver micro satellites or change their orbits,” he explained. “Being able to incorporate propulsion into microsatellites like CubeSats increases mission longevity and the types of missions they can perform. Successful demonstrations of advanced technologies like those being flown on ALICE will ultimately lead to smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient propulsion, resulting in decreased launch costs while increasing the performance of all satellites using electric propulsion.”

Utilizing a multi-departmental team, AFIT engineers in the Electrical Engineering Department developed a payload to directly expose the carbon nanotube arrays to the space environment while protecting an identical control array within the satellite. The arrays, which are approximately one centimeter square, will be switched on and off and their behavior studied. The payload experiment utilizes a sensor device known as the Integrated Miniaturized Electromagnetic Analyzer (iMESA), designed by engineers at the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA). The data collected from the satellite will be downloaded and processed at AFIT by students and technicians in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

The carbon nanotube arrays are excellent conductors and their geometry makes them ideal electron emitters.

“We use carbon nanotubes because they have a high aspect ratio and provide a nanoscale point that emits the electrons,” said Graham Sanborn, who worked on the project as part of his Ph.D. thesis in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. “The electric field focuses on the tip so we are able to get electron emission at lower voltages than might be required for other materials.”

GTRI uses a series of deposition and etching steps to fabricate the arrays in clean rooms at Georgia Tech. Each one-centimeter square array contains as many as 50,000 nanotube bundles, and each bundle is grown from a five-micron pit etched into the silicon.

“The design has specific geometry to prevent electrical shorting between electrodes that are very close together,” explained Sanborn.

Spacecraft are launched using chemical rockets that provide large amounts of thrust. Once in orbit, however, the vehicles can use electrically-powered thrusters to change orbits or make other maneuvers.

“Ion thrusters provide very low amounts of thrust,” Sanborn said. “They are just pushing out gas molecules, but they operate very efficiently. Ion thrusters can operate for thousands of hours at a time. Cumulatively, you can achieve a significant velocity change.”

The ALICE acronym is composed of several other acronyms. The “A” represents AFIT, while the “L” is for LEO – the low Earth orbit where the satellite will operate. The “I” represents the iMESA system; the “C” is for the carbon nanotubes, while the “E” represents “Experiment.”

The satellite, the first for AFIT, was designed, tested and integrated by a multi-departmental team of professors, students and technicians. The partnership with GTRI and USAFA provided students in each institution an opportunity to participate in ground-breaking research with the potential to impact numerous future satellites employing electric propulsion.

Other potential applications for Georgia Tech’s CNT-based electron emitters include displays, electrodynamic tethers, vacuum electronics and traveling wave tubes.

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In early 2011, Nolan, along with other passionate and driven students, formed Wreckless, an organization dedicated to redefining what it means to have fun in college.

“Fortunately, I was able to quit, and then wanted to help others who went or were going through similar struggles,” said Nolan, asixth-year mechanical engineering major. “Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to change the drinking culture on campus. Georgia Tech has many great resources and programs to address this issue, but my experience taught me that I needed something different.”

Nolan and his team looked to organizations on other campuses such as the University of Georgia’s Phi Slam and Louisiana State University’s Students on Target for inspiration.

Through their research, they learned that students drink alcohol for a variety of reasons: to celebrate, to relieve stress, out of boredom or habit, and to feel liberated by the temporary loss of inhibitions that alcohol can provide. In recent years, Georgia Tech has seen consistent issues with incidents related to alcohol, manifested in ways including ejections from athletic events and hospitalizations. Nolan's team decided to address this problem by doing what students do best: partying.

With the help of funding from several campus entities, including the Student Government Association, Student Foundation, Office of Greek Affairs, Buzzfunds, and Freshman Experience, Wreckless throws huge theme parties that inspire and remind students what it’s like to play like kids and let their imaginations run wild, despite the stressful nature of life as a Tech student.

“We’re not here to be just another club, nor a social wrist-slapper,” said Dennis Gast, a third-year business administration major and Wreckless’ vice president of public relations. “We want to foster a community of Georgia Tech students who want to have an unforgettable weekend without alcohol, drugs, and the consequences that can sometimes come with them.”

Past Wreckless events include Snow My Gosh, Don’t Worry Beach Happy, Jamazon Rageforest, and Caution: Flannable, a lumberjack-themed party that included eight zorbs (human hamster balls), fake snow, and a disc jockey on Tech Green.

This semester’s Wreckless extravaganza is called “It’s Pasture Bedtime.” The event is farmhouse-themed and will include swing dancing, a live band and DJ, and a mechanical bull. It’s Pasture Bedtime will take place on Saturday, Nov. 16, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Tech Green. 

Brazilian power system generation is dominated by hydroelectric sources using large reservoirs that allow multi-year regulation. As of 2010, the country’s power generation facilities included more than 200 major power plants, of which 141 were hydroelectric. The hydro facilities account for 77 percent of Brazil’s installed generating capacity, and are located in 14 large river basins with their generation interconnected to take advantage of hydrological diversity between the basins.

Because the hydro plants use water stored in reservoirs to generate electricity, operators must decide when to use the water. Since the water inflows depend on rainfall, the amount of water available for future power generation cannot be predicted with high accuracy. Moreover, historical records indicate the possibility of dry periods which place a burden on hydro generation – and may require the use of thermal power plants to meet demand.

ONS uses a complex computer algorithm that models the system to help ensure that electricity generation meets the demand at minimum expected cost, planning the generation of power based on such information as electricity demand forecast and water inflow scenarios based on the historical data. The system also sets the monthly price of power for the country. However, during the early part of this century, power rationing that took place in Brazil called into question the validity of meeting day-to-day needs using a policy based on minimizing the expected cost of power.

To improve the system, ONS decided to develop a methodology for adding a risk aversion criterion to the planning model. Four years ago, it contacted Alexander Shapiro, a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Shapiro is an expert on optimizing systems using stochastic programming, a technique useful for modeling complex systems when not all input parameters can be known.

“The usual criteria used for our planning purposes took a neutral approach to the risk of energy supply failure,” explained Joari Paulo da Costa, a research engineer with the Methodology Development Department of ONS in Rio de Janeiro. “During earlier energy rationing, it turned out that this approach was not sufficient and that some measure of risk aversion had to be taken into account by the planning model. An ad-hoc procedure had been implemented, but only with the results of the risk-averse methodology proposed by Professor Shapiro have we achieved a proper inclusion of these concerns into the methodology and computer program.”

During the course of the project, Shapiro visited Brazil several times to confer with officials of ONS, including da Costa and Murilo Pereira Soares, a senior engineer.

“If they don’t have enough water, they have to use more expensive generation sources,” explained Shapiro. “The algorithm they have been using sometimes produces high prices for electricity, that, although fully justifiable within the mathematical framework, do not conform to the expectations and are not intuitive.”

The system presented a classic optimization challenge concerning the use of a resource whose future availability could not be determined with accuracy.

“The risks in the system are very simple,” Shapiro explained. “When you have water in the reservoirs, you can either use it now, which makes electricity very cheap now, or you can hold onto it. If you use it now, in a few months you might not have enough water to produce the electricity you need.”

Shapiro and former Ph.D. student Wajdi Tekaya  worked with ONS to understand the problem formulation, and suggested some modifications that would reduce the risk of energy supply failures. The changes they made rely on stochastic programming, which is often used for modeling optimization programs that involve uncertainty.

“We developed a methodology for how to control the risk of energy shortages while optimizing the use of water,” he explained. “We also wanted to control the risk of price spikes. It is a very complex system.”

The project also provided a computer implementation of the proposed methodology. This prototype served as a proof of concept which played a fundamental role in validating the proposed methodology.

The new risk-averse methodology developed in the collaboration between Shapiro and ONS has now been integrated into the computer program being used to set operational policy and prices for the Brazilian Interconnected Power System, da Costa said.

The methodology developed by Georgia Tech and ONS could potentially be applied to other power generation systems, as well as to other operations in which uncertain natural resources – such as water supplies – must be used to meet the demand for electricity or other products.

“The approach to managing risk is very general and could be applied in other areas,” Shapiro said. “The approach is a new one that could be used to reasonably control the risk.”
In real-world optimization problems, decision-makers rarely have all the information they want, so decisions must often be made on incomplete data.

“We have to make the best decisions with the information that we have,” said Shapiro. “We all know the past, but we cannot know the future. We have forecasts, but we do not know for sure what will happen.”

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In addition to the president, staff from Facilities, the Georgia Tech Police Department, Student Affairs, Capital Planning and Space Management, Housing, Campus Services, and other administrative units met students from the Student Government Asssociation at dusk and spent nearly two hours walking campus and discussing potential improvements.

A theme of the evening was lighting, and Facilities staff noted where lights needed to be repaired or added, or where pruning or other landscaping could let more light shine. Other items noted included pedestrian sidewalk hazards, transportation or traffic issues, and general safety concerns. Facilities Associate Vice President Chuck Rhode and his staff will review the list monthly as items are completed.

The safety walk takes place each fall to give students an opportunity to voice concerns directly to administrators who manage areas related to safety. Students, faculty, and staff are able to make landscaping and lighting requests 24/7 at facilities.gatech.edu. 

The UJC represents the Judicial Branch of the Student Government Association and consists of 12 justices and one chief justice. The group serves to hear cases of alleged student misconduct, provide a system of checks and balances for the undergraduate SGA if needed, and uphold the Student Code of Conduct.

After the UJC hears a case, justices conduct closed-door deliberations to determine responsibility and, when necessary, sanctioning. The results of these deliberations are then presented to the Dean of Students to either uphold or modify as he deems appropriate. The process is designed to maintain an educational, rather than punitive, nature to help ensure that students will not repeat their mistakes. UJC also looks to protect the integrity of Georgia Tech and the rest of the student body through the enforcement of the Student Code of Conduct.

To be eligible, students must have reached at least sophomore standing and be willing to serve until graduation. Justices must be full-time students in good academic standing at the beginning of each semester; they must remain enrolled in at least six credit hours and may not have disciplinary action taken against them. Students who are co-oping in the area or in their last semester at Tech will not be subject to the credit hours requirement.

More information about requirements and an application are available at the SGA website. Applications are due Friday, Nov. 22, at 11 a.m. Interviews will be held Tuesday, Nov. 26, in the Smithgall Student Services (Flag) Building.

Large amounts of a mineral found in granite, known as feldspar, were found in an ancient Martian volcano. Further, minerals that are common in basalts that are rich in iron and magnesium, ubiquitous on Mars, are nearly completely absent at this location. The location of the feldspar also provides an explanation for how granite could have formed on Mars. Granite, or its eruptive equivalent, rhyolite, is often found on Earth in tectonically active regions such as subduction zones. This is unlikely on Mars, but the research team concluded that prolonged magmatic activity on Mars can also produce these compositions on large scales.

"We're providing the most compelling evidence to date that Mars has granitic rocks," said James Wray, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the study's lead author.

The research was published November 17 in the Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature Geoscience. The work was supported by the NASA Mars Data Analysis Program.

For years Mars was considered geologically simplistic, consisting mostly of one kind of rock, in contrast to the diverse geology of Earth. The rocks that cover most of Mars's surface are dark-colored volcanic rocks, called basalt, a type of rock also found throughout Hawaii for instance.

But earlier this year, the Mars Curiosity rover surprised scientists by discovering soils with a composition similar to granite, a light-colored, common igneous rock. No one knew what to make of the discovery because it was limited to one site on Mars.

The new study bolsters the evidence for granite on Mars by using remote sensing techniques with infrared spectroscopy to survey a large volcano on Mars that was active for billions of years. The volcano is dust-free, making it ideal for the study. Most volcanoes on Mars are blanketed with dust, but this volcano is being sand-blasted by some of the fastest-moving sand dunes on Mars, sweeping away any dust that might fall on the volcano. Inside, the research team found rich deposits of feldspar, which came as a surprise.

"Using the kind of infrared spectroscopic technique we were using, you shouldn't really be able to detect feldspar minerals, unless there's really, really a lot of feldspar and very little of the dark minerals that you get in basalt," Wray said.

The location of the feldspar and absence of dark minerals inside the ancient volcano provides an explanation for how granite could form on Mars. While the magma slowly cools in the subsurface, low density melt separates from dense crystals in a process called fractionation. The cycle is repeated over and over for millennia until granite is formed. This process could happen inside of a volcano that is active over a long period of time, according to the computer simulations run in collaboration with Josef Dufek, who is also an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech.

"We think some of the volcanoes on Mars were sporadically active for billions of years," Wray said. "It seems plausible that in a volcano you could get enough iterations of that reprocessing that you could form something like granite."

This process is sometimes referred to as igneous distillation. In this case the distillation progressively enriches the melt in silica, which makes the melt, and eventual rock, lower density and gives it the physical properties of granite.

"These compositions are roughly similar to those comprising the plutons at Yosemite or erupting magmas at Mount St. Helens, and are dramatically different than the basalts that dominate the rest of the planet," Dufek said.

Another study published in the same edition of Nature Geoscience by a different research team offers another interpretation for the feldspar-rich signature on Mars. That team, from the European Southern Observatory and the University of Paris, found a similar signature elsewhere on Mars, but likens the rocks to anorthosite, which is common on the moon. Wray believes the context of the feldspar minerals inside of the volcano makes a stronger argument for granite. Mars hasn't been known to contain much of either anorthosite or granite, so either way, the findings suggest the Red Planet is more geologically interesting than before.

"We talk about water on Mars all the time, but the history of volcanism on Mars is another thing that we'd like to try to understand," Wray said. "What kinds of rocks have been forming over the planet's history? We thought that it was a pretty easy answer, but we're now joining the emerging chorus saying things may be a little bit more diverse on Mars, as they are on Earth."

This research is supported by the NASA Mars Data Analysis Program under award NNX13AH80G. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: J Wray, et al. "Prolonged magmatic activity on Mars inferred from the detection of felsic rocks." (Nature Geoscience, 2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NGEO1994.

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These two entities in the Division of Student Affairs have joined forces to develop “Healthy Lifestyles for the Mind and Body,” a new program that incorporates physical activity into mental health solutions for some students.

“Various types of depression, anxiety, and stress can be alleviated through physical activity, exercise, and social connections with other students,” said Ruperto Perez, director of the Counseling Center. “Coupled with group or individual counseling, students may receive a combination of benefits — physical, psychological, and social. This program aims to help the whole student.”

Students who visit the Counseling Center may be referred to this program, at which point they meet with Christie Stewart, who oversees healthy lifestyle programs at the CRC. Together, Stewart and the student talk through his or her current activity level, goals, potential barriers, and interests in various CRC offerings.

“We don’t want them to be forced into doing something that isn’t a good fit,” Stewart said. “We just want them to find something that will help them attain a healthy lifestyle. Our goal is to help them find an activity they look forward to doing.”

Students may choose to try personal training, group fitness, or taking a trip with Outdoor Recreation Georgia Tech, among other options. Many don’t know about all the CRC offers until they consult with Stewart, or they think only “athletic” people use the facility and its programs, when in reality there are programs available for students of all skill and fitness levels.

The potential for social interaction is another perk of the program that can help students both academically and emotionally.

“Physical activity and social connection with others have direct effects on brain and body chemistry,” Perez said. “These benefits can allow students who are in counseling to think more clearly about their concerns, to gain a clearer awareness of their circumstances, and to experience relief from their depression, anxiety, or stress.”

The program is still in its infancy, but so far Stewart, Perez, and participating students have voiced positive feedback about the partnership. The program will continue as a pilot throughout the rest of the year. For the future, Perez plans to evaluate and assess its effectiveness for students and their concerns and, long-term, examine what impact it has on quality of life, retention, and graduation.

“We’ll keep the program going as long as it’s helping students,” Stewart said.

What is iGEM?

iGEM stands for International Genetically Engineered Machine. It’s an international competition that began at MIT in 2003 and convenes research universities from around the world to compete with projects related to synthetic biology.

What is Georgia Tech’s iGEM team working on?

We are trying to create what we like to call a "BioBot," which is essentially a biological robot that has the ability to sense and interact with its environment. In order to create our BioBot, we are trying to express a human cell sensor called an integrin on the surface of a bacterial cell for the first time. This would allow the bacteria cell to interact with its environment in a way it hasn't before, and interact with proteins around it.

The specific integrin we are working with can bind to fibrinogen and coagulate blood, but expressing integrins on bacterial cells can have other applications such as localized drug delivery and the detection of cancer cells. 

Who is part of Tech’s iGEM team?

The research team is all undergraduates — six biomedical engineering majors and one chemical engineer. We have three facilitators — two graduate students and one postdoc — who work with us.

What will be funded through Starter?

The funding will most likely cover next year’s competition registration fee. There are two levels of competition: regional jamborees and the World Championship Jamboree. This year, Georgia Tech won gold at its regional championship and competed at the worldwide competition Nov. 1-4. The biggest funding need is travel expenses to the competitions.

Why is participating in this competition important for Georgia Tech? Why should people donate to the Tech iGEM team?

Georgia Tech has had iGEM teams in the past but they haven’t done this well before. iGEM is going to be something big. We want this to carve a path for Georgia Tech as a powerhouse in this competition — we want to be known for being really good in this competition every year. Having Tech as a powerhouse in this competition will make the Institute name more respected internationally and continue its growth in this arena.

Why is it important to grow in this arena?

iGEM was named by the United Nations, as well as the president of the United States, as the premier research competition and frontier for synthetic biology. We are currently in the Electronic and Information era, but by 2030 we are expected to move into the next era of development, which is expected to be the Biological era. Georgia Tech can get a headstart in becoming an internationally recognized university for biology and biological processes, which would be incredibly helpful for its prestige and growth as we enter this new era.

The Interfraternity Council (IFC) determined that Phi Kappa Tau violated the fraternal code of conduct, resulting in social probation through May 4, 2014. IFC also requires the chapter to have at least 70 percent of its members attend multiple events or programs related to sexual violence prevention. In addition, it recommends that the chapter rebuild its internal Standards Boards Processes used to hold chapter members accountable for their individual actions.

The Office of Student Integrity determined that the chapter was responsible for violating the Student Code of Conduct after the investigation revealed that the fraternity likely had knowledge of a brother’s disruptive behavior and failed to take disciplinary measures. This resulted in disciplinary probation until May 4, 2014, during which time the chapter may still recruit members, hold meetings and participate in intramurals and service events. In accordance with this and its social probation, the chapter may not host, co-host or participate in social events.

The chapter must also elect a fresh set of officers to its executive board. No current officers may continue to hold their own or other executive positions after Dec. 13. The chapter’s advisory board issued an action plan to its members outlining specific procedural changes to be made in the near future.

A pair of cooperating microbes on the ocean floor “eats” this methane in a unique way, and a new study provides insights into their surprising nutritional requirements. Learning how these methane-munching organisms make a living in these extreme environments could provide clues about how the deep-sea environment might change in a warming world.

Scientists already understood some details about the basic biochemistry of how these two organisms consume methane, but the details of the process have remained mysterious. The new study revealed that a rare trace metal – tungsten, also used as filaments in light bulbs — could be important in the breakdown of methane.

“This is the first evidence for a microbial tungsten enzyme in low temperature ecosystems,” said Jennifer Glass, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The study was recently published online in the journal Environmental Microbiology. The research was sponsored by the Department of Energy, NASA Astrobiology Institute and the National Science Foundation. Glass conducted the research while working as a NASA Astrobiology post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, in the laboratory of professor Victoria Orphan.

The methane-eating organisms, which live in symbiosis, consume methane and excrete carbon dioxide.

“Essentially, they are eating it,” Glass said. “They are using some of the methane as a carbon source and most of it as an energy source.”

Phylogenetically speaking, one microbial partner belongs to the Bacteria, and the other is in the Archaea, representing two distinct domains of life. The archaea is named ANME, or anaerobic methanotrophic archaea, and the other is a sulfate-utilizing deltaproteobacteria. Together, the organisms form “beautiful bundles,” Glass said.

For a close-up view of the action on the sea floor, the research team used the underwater submersible robot Jason. The robot is an unmanned, remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and can stay underwater for days at a time. The research expedition in which Glass participated was Jason’s longest continuous underwater trip to date, at four consecutive days underwater.

The carbon dioxide excreted by the microbes reacts with minerals in the water to form calcium carbonate. As the researchers saw through Jason’s cameras, calcium carbonate has formed an exotic landscape on the ocean floor over hundreds of years.

“There are giant mountains on the seafloor of calcium carbonate,” Glass said. “They are gorgeous. It looks like a mountain landscape down there.”

While on the seafloor, Jason’s robotic arm collected samples of sediment. Back in the lab, researchers sequenced the genes and proteins in these samples. The collection of genes constitutes the meta-genome of the sediment, or the genes present in a particular environment, and likewise the proteins constitute a metaproteome. The research team discovered evidence that an enzyme used by microbes to “eat” methane may need tungsten to operate.

The enzyme (formylmethanofuran dehydrogenase) is the last in the pathway of converting methane to carbon dioxide, an essential step for methane oxidation.

Microorganisms in low temperature environments typically use molybdenum, which has similar chemical properties to tungsten but is usually much more available (tungsten is directly below molybdenum on the periodic table). Why these archaea appear to use tungsten is unknown. One guess is that tungsten may be in a form that is easier for the organisms to use in methane seeps, but that question will have to be answered in future experiments.

“We don’t know exactly why the organisms seem to be making a protein that binds the rare element tungsten instead of the more commonly used molybdenum,” Glass said.

Glass is currently writing a grant proposal to study a similar process in northern peatlands, which are large expanses of water and dead organic material. These peatlands, found in large expanses of high-latitude Canada, Europe and Russia, are significant sources of methane and that flux may increase with warming temperatures. Glass also plans to expand her research into oxygen-minimum zones, where large amounts of nitrous oxide are produced. Nitrous oxide is an important greenhouse gas and degrades the ozone layer.

“We want to understand on a gene level and on a chemical level, what’s going on in these processes, and then understand how this is going to change in the future with global warming and rising CO2,” Glass said.

This research is supported by the Department of Energy under award number DE-SC0004949, the NASA Astrobiology Institute under award number OCE-0825791, and the National Science Foundation under awards MCB-0348492 and OCE-0825791. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Department of Energy or NASA.

CITATION: JB Glass, et al. 2013 “Geochemical, metagenomic and metaproteomic insights into trace metal utilization by methane-oxidizing microbial consortia in sulfidic marine sediments,”  (Environmental Microbiology, 2013). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1462-2920.12314/abstract

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This article is one in a series of Q&As to introduce the Tech community to the nine IRIs and their leaders. In this installment, Acting Executive Director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) Oliver Brand answers questions about IEN and also talks about its efforts to support Georgia Tech faculty and students. 

Q:   The areas of electronics and nanotechnology encompass a vast number of research topics. How does IEN assist these research endeavors and bring together faculty, staff, and students?

A:   Indeed, electronics and nanotechnology are affecting many disciplines: from medicine and health care to sustainable energy production, from protecting the environment to protecting our country’s infrastructure, from consumer electronic devices to complex systems such as high-speed trains or airplanes, to name a few.

If we look at electronics and nanotechnology research today, we see that it requires a rather broad interdisciplinary approach, bringing together scientists and engineers from various disciplines across campus, as well as – depending on the application – medical personnel or researchers from public policy. We have recently assessed that approximately 25 percent of faculty members at Georgia Tech are involved in electronics and nanotechnology research in some manner.

IEN has several strategies to fuse such interdisciplinary research: First, IEN  supports nine research centers and programs that bring together faculty and students in more focused research areas, such as microelectromechanical systems, optoelectronics and photonics, photovoltaics, next generation semiconductors, devices and systems, high-frequency, broadband, mixed-signal electronic devices, circuits and systems, and micro- and nanoelectronics packaging. Second, IEN maintains state-of-the-art research laboratories in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building and the Pettit Microelectronics Research Building that host research groups from across campus. And, last but not least, IEN-sponsored events, such as the Nano@Tech seminar series, the NanoFANS forum, and an annual user research symposium, facilitate dissemination of on-campus research and stimulate discussion and collaboration.

Q:   Can you tell us a bit about IEN’s cleanroom facilities?

A:  Core facilities providing the necessary high-tech infrastructure are essential to research in the area of electronics and nanotechnology.

Many of the structures and devices that researchers investigate have micrometer or even nanometer dimensions and are often fabricated using complex instrumentation housed in exceptionally clean environments. These cleanrooms require substantial investments in infrastructure, highly skilled maintenance and management personnel, and round-the-clock monitoring.

Georgia Tech has always been a front-runner in this area and opened its first shared-user cleanroom in the Pettit Microelectronics Building in 1988. In 2009, the Marcus Nanotechnology Building opened, featuring a unique combination of inorganic and organic cleanrooms to facilitate research at the intersection of nanotechnology, biosciences, bioengineering, and medicine.

Today, our shared-user cleanrooms and laboratories host more than 200 fabrication and characterization tools, the largest shared-user toolset at any U.S. university. These tools are accessible to Georgia Tech students, researchers, and faculty – as well as to external academic and industry researchers at relatively low costs.

Additionally, IEN is part of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), a program supported by the National Science Foundation. NNIN’s goal is to provide broad access to fabrication and characterization facilities to promote nanoscale science, engineering, and technology. Almost 800 researchers, 600 from this campus and 200 from off campus, have used the IEN cleanrooms and labs in the past 12 months. Skilled IEN staff train new users and assist with processing and characterization needs.

Q: How does IEN support education and outreach?

A:  Most of the users of our cleanrooms are actually Georgia Tech graduate students who gain hands-on experience with techniques such as growing nanostructures in dedicated furnaces and imaging results using high-resolution electron microscopes.

IEN also supports several REU (research experience for undergraduates) programs during the summer that allow undergraduate students from across the U.S. to perform hands-on electronics and nanotechnology research. To support instructional activities, we maintain a special teaching cleanroom, which is used for micro/nanotechnology lab courses taught in three engineering schools: electrical and computer, mechanical, and chemical and biomolecular engineering.

Finally, IEN is the headquarters of the NNIN education and outreach office, which supports many programs targeting K-12 students, teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, and the general public.

Q:   What is on the horizon for IEN?

A:   The most imminent efforts are associated with the build-out of the Marcus Nanotechnology Building. Interdisciplinary research laboratories for biomedical devices, physical devices and systems, and nanomaterials, are either under construction or in the design phases. Additionally, construction is underway for a shared-user imaging and characterization suite in the basement of the Marcus Nanotechnology Building. Upon completion in 2014, this low vibration, low electromagnetic interference (EMI) facility will house a suite of high-resolution scanning and transmission electron microscopes, x-ray tomography systems, and surface characterization tools, as well as ion-beam-based nano-machining systems.

IEN has also initiated a research seed grant program for Georgia Tech faculty and students. The grantees are awarded blocks of access time to IEN cleanrooms to execute new ideas and generate initial results that may lead to funded proposal submissions. A semiannual submission, review, and award process is in place. The next round of grants will be offered in spring 2014.

Finally, IEN is participating in Tech’s efforts to develop an industry membership model, which will enable industry to more easily become familiar with Tech’s research activities in electronics and nanotechnology. The goals are to raise funds to seed new research ideas in a self-sustaining manner, and connect industry with students and faculty to jump-start funded research projects.

Q:   How does IEN connect commercial and government entities to campus faculty and resources and help streamline the collaboration or contracting processes.

A:  First, IEN staff serves on various campus councils where they work collaboratively with other Interdisciplinary Research Institutes and campus development staff. As a result, IEN has been able to develop a prioritized target list of companies needing assistance in the electronics and nanotechnology space. IEN staff then works to connect these companies with the faculty most aligned with their needs.

In addition, IEN works closely with Georgia Tech Research Corporation contracting officers and faculty, bridging the gap between academic and industry needs and accelerating the contracting process. IEN staff also assists faculty with the coordination and proposal writing process.

Kingsbury, a doctoral candidate in physics and researcher in the Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab at Georgia Tech, is working with Associate Professor Daniel Goldman and Stephen Gatesy at Brown University to build a “Robosaur.” The idea is to study how dinosaurs walked, with the goal of using the secrets of the past to enhance the future. Their project is up for funding on Georgia Tech Starter, a new peer-reviewed crowd-funding website.

What is the Robosaur? What are you trying to do with it?

The Robosaur is a mobile robot that lets us study how dinosaurs walked. We’re building this robotic model to be able to analyze how dinosaurs walked from a simple perspective. We have a lot of information about their tracks, but don't yet have a technique for unearthing the information buried within the tracks. (That's where the Robosaur comes in.) 

Why do we want to know how dinosaurs walked?

Understanding how they moved can help us build better robots and improve how they move in different terrain. For example, in the Fukoshima nuclear disaster, we couldn’t send humans into some rescue efforts because it was too dangerous. Robots that can navigate that kind of complex terrain could help with search and rescue or recovery efforts in these kinds of environments.

What material do you use to study how the Robosaur walks?

We use poppy seeds. They behave similarly to natural sand or other terrain, and it’s a nice, light material that’s kind to robots — if the seeds get into the gears, they won’t be harmful like sand or glass could.

Is the Robosaur modeled after a specific dinosaur?

It's actually modeled after a bird, the guinea fowl, which serves as a good model in place of an actual dinosaur. 

What do you hope to see robots be able to do in your lifetime?

I’m interested in advancing robotics in how they interface with humans. For example, when someone who lost a limb could get an prosthetic part to replace what was lost. I think that’s something that’s achievable.

What’s special about fundraising through Starter?

It’s another source of funding at a time when you need a diverse portfolio, but it also lets people invest directly in science. It lets researchers reach out directly to people, who can become a part of science and become more science-literate, which can only lead to good things. The highest level of funding on Starter even gets you invited to our lab to help do some research with us. 

Chaired by Lynn Durham, assistant vice president and chief of staff in the Office of the President, the 13-person group composed of students, faculty, and staff met during the summer to discuss mental health issues, support, and needs in Tech’s student body. Peterson appointed the group as a result of concerns raised by undergraduate and graduate student leaders.

“Our students see mental health issues in others, but not necessarily in themselves,” Durham said. “They are under a great deal of pressure and don’t see the stress points, or the concerning behaviors such as staying up all night multiple nights in a row. They feel invincible and often don’t reach out for the help they need.”

The report reviews current mental health offerings as well as proposed offerings currently under consideration across campus, including an online resource portal, peer counseling program, enhanced orientation for international and transfer students, and programming for students in recovery. One collaborative initiative between the Counseling Center and Campus Recreation Center is already being piloted this semester, created for those who may benefit from healthy lifestyle programs and physical activity.  

The report also makes 11 recommendations spanning issues related to data gathering, program accessibility, dissemination of information, campus spirit, financial aid, graduate student funding, and positive faculty-student interaction. It suggests a GT 1000 class for transfer students and a GT 6000 equivalent for graduate students. An appendix outlines a previously proposed initiative that would be spearheaded by Stamps Health Services but equip staff and faculty across campus with the ability to better direct students in need to campus resources.

“We don’t anticipate that all of this will get done in the next couple months, but by the end of the academic year everything in the report will have been reviewed and addressed in some way,” Durham said.

An underlying theme in task force discussions was the impact of Tech’s challenging and competitive academic environment. Students holding themselves to a high standard, and faculty holding them to one as well, can sometimes result in a high-stress, high-productivity environment. In a 2011 National College Health Assessment, nearly 90 percent of Tech students reported being “very stressed” compared to a national average of around 53 percent. Still, many students don’t realize the way stress may be affecting them.

Peterson will task members of his cabinet with drafting implementation plans for different recommendations of the report that pertain to their areas.

Reporting to Stephen E. Cross, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research, Jones will help strengthen collaborative partnerships between faculty members and all of Georgia Tech’s research sponsors. He will also play a key role in identifying and creating new research opportunities, planning for large proposals and fostering improved communication with faculty and staff.

“Chris has a wealth of experience working with many important federal and industry sponsors,” said Cross. “He also has a keen interest in providing support to researchers from every corner of Georgia Tech. I am looking forward to working with him.”

With degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and California Institute of Technology, Jones joined Georgia Tech in 2000 and is now the New-Vision Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, a position created by an anonymous donor.  Over the past 13 years, he has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator for research projects worth more than $30 million, and has published more than 140 papers.

“My group makes new materials that act as catalysts to promote specific chemical reactions, or that act as mass separating agents, allowing us to remove specific molecules from gas or liquid mixtures,” Jones explained. “We design new materials tuned for specific applications in carbon dioxide capture or catalysis. We try to solve practical societal problems by designing novel materials that can be incorporated into practical and scalable processes.”

The work of his research team has attracted a broad range of industrial sponsors, including Corning, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon-Mobil, Phillips 66, DuPont, GE, Lonza – and even startup company Global Thermostat, which licensed Georgia Tech intellectual property for extracting carbon dioxide from dilute mixtures. Jones says the perception that industrial sponsors only care about near-term product applications isn’t true.

“All sponsors want you to push science and technology forward,” he said. “The industrial sponsors with whom I have worked want an intellectual partner who can work alongside their scientists and engineers to solve practical problems or uncover fundamental aspects about their materials, products or processes. It’s not correct to say that industry only wants to fund practical work because I’ve worked in several collaborations where fundamental scientific knowledge was valued as much as new products or processes.”

The keys to successful industrial collaborations, he said, are to understand the company’s needs and identify how Georgia Tech can contribute to the company’s long-term goals.

As part of his research program, Jones has directed more than 20 Ph.D. students and post-doctoral fellows. He finds that teaching and research complement one another.

“In many ways, teaching and research go hand-in-hand,” he said. “The ability to explain a complex subject to a student in class helps you give clearer descriptions of research results in your papers and lectures at conferences. At the same time, being engaged in the frontier of a research field allows you to better connect the basic concepts taught in class to practical implementations of the ideas in a contemporary context.”

Jones will be cutting back on his research and teaching to accommodate the associate vice president responsibilities. The position is budgeted for 50 percent time, but he’s well aware of the real time demands. Jones said he sees the new responsibilities as an opportunity to learn more about the broader research enterprise at Georgia Tech.

Jones fills a vacancy left by Ravi Bellamkonda, who left the associate vice president position to become chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

While his Georgia Tech responsibilities consume most of his time, Jones does pursue two major outside interests: hockey and auto racing.

Before the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team left Atlanta, he was a season ticket holder. He attended as many as 35 of their games each year, and still tries to see NHL games when he’s visiting other cities that have professional hockey teams. Jones can also be seen driving his cars, including an Audi TT-RS, at road courses around the Southeast, including Road Atlanta.

“This very effectively causes me not to think about my work at Georgia Tech for a while,” he explained. “I am a fairly intense guy, but everybody needs a little downtime.”

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu) or Brett Israel (404-385-1933)(brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

The three-part series will include interviews with leaders in the Student Government Association, Collegiate Panhellenic Council and Student Media.

“We wanted to give listeners a student’s voice on leadership at the Institute,” said Katie Flint, WREK Radio’s news director. “There are plenty of opportunities to get involved here, but in the midst of opportunity and academics, sometimes it’s difficult to find where to start, and how to start.” 

Interviewees include:

• Caroline Freeman, president, Collegiate Panhellenic Council
• J.J. O’Brien, business director, WREK Radio
• Nicholas Picon, president, undergraduate Student Government Association

Flint hopes to make this a recurring series to reinforce the WREK News mission of being a radio news source that’s by and for students.

Interviews will air every day the week of Oct. 28 – Nov. 1, on WREK 91.1FM, as well as stream online, at 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 11 a.m., 2 p.m., and 4 p.m. Full interviews will also be posted online at www.facebook.com/WREKNews.

The Georgia Tech Military Affinity Group (GTMAG) hosted a symposium in Tech Square to let those with a role in student engagement share ideas and begin developing plans for serving both undergraduate and graduate veteran students.

After a brief opening from President G.P. “Bud” Peterson, attendees heard from staff in Student Affairs and the Office of the Registrar, as well as student veterans themselves, all aiming discussions at how to make improvements in veteran integration.

Topics covered throughout the day included military benefits, mental health issues, career transition, social satisfaction, and relationships with faculty and staff. Given that the average age of student veterans is 27 for undergraduates and 34 for graduate students, there are inherent differences that make assimilation to Tech’s environment challenging for these non-traditional students. The symposium provided a forum for around 50 people to begin discussing what can be done to make Georgia Tech a more veteran-friendly campus.

“Veterans initiatives are part of the diversity at Georgia Tech,” said Peterson. “It’s not just about gender or race, but about a diversity of needs and thought, and all about the life experiences they can contribute to the overall fabric of Tech.” 

One challenge in serving student veterans is not knowing how many are on campus and who they are. Georgia Tech’s application for admission now includes an optional question that allows students to self-identify as a veteran, but not all veterans choose to do so. This year, 36 students — eight undergraduates and 28 graduates — did. Based on information from the Office of the Registrar, more than 200 students are currently using benefits from the GI Bill to attend the Institute. 

And some of these veterans may find it jarring to transition from a military to academic culture. Lacy Currie, a staff therapist at the Georgia Tech Counseling Center, noted that the military provides a strong structure and identity with a sense of camaraderie and teamwork. At Georgia Tech, however, activities are less structured and place more emphasis on the individual.

This past spring, the Division of Student Affairs established a Veterans Resource Center to serve Tech’s growing veteran population and, this semester, hired its first director. David Ross, a 20-year Air Force veteran, is located on the second floor of the Smithgall Student Services (Flag) Building. Student Affairs aspires to grow this office into a larger center that can provide a physical space for student veterans to gather and support one another. Ross also plans to provide training to help staff and faculty identify when veterans need assistance and be more in tune with their specific needs as nontraditional students.

The symposium provided a “soft opening” to upcoming events acknowledging Veterans Day on Nov. 11. Today at 4:30 p.m., GTMAG will host a Homecoming reception for all veterans in the Wardlaw Center where guests can hear an overview of military-related research at Tech. Next week, on Nov. 7 at noon, an Employee Resource Group with an emphasis on veterans will hold its first meeting on Nov. 7 at noon in the Piedmont Room of the Student Center. This group hopes to build awareness of the importance of service and the benefits of integrating the experience, knowledge, and values of former and current service members into the Tech culture. GTMAG will also host its monthly "First Thursday" reception on Nov. 7, at 4:30 p.m. in the Wardlaw Center.

Pfizer Inc. confronted these concerns head-on by working with researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to develop an easy-to-open and child-resistant container and cap to dispense one of its rheumatoid arthritis medicines. The square bottle with round, blue closure recently received the ease-of-use commendation from the U.S. Arthritis Foundation.

“A lot of people believe that if a medicine bottle is child resistant, that means it is going to be hard for people with arthritis to open,” said Brad Fain, a GTRI principal research scientist. “With this project, we’ve been able to debunk that notion and demonstrate that we can find a balance between ease of use and child resistance through quality design work.”

GTRI has a history of helping companies evaluate and improve the design of consumer products and currently serves as the independent product testing organization for the U.S. Arthritis Foundation, the Arthritis Society of Canada and Arthritis Australia. For this work, GTRI recruits users to test a variety of consumer products – medicine bottles, beverage containers, office supplies, medical devices, vehicles and cell phones – in its Accessibility Evaluation Facility.  

If a product passes GTRI’s rigorous ease-of-use testing, the company that created the product can use the arthritis organization’s logo in its advertisements and on its packaging. Pfizer previously received the U.S. Arthritis Foundation’s ease-of-use commendation for the easy-open cap used on its 120-count bottles of Advil® tablets, caplets and gel caplets.

Pfizer began working with GTRI in early 2011 to develop a container and closure system that was easy to open, child resistant and able to be manufactured on a high-speed production line. Pfizer asked Fain and his team to suggest design features and materials for the bottle and closure system that would make it easier to open than a typical child-resistant prescription bottle.

“We helped Pfizer understand the consumer aspects of the medicine bottle and closure design and what would work and not work from the perspective of a user with arthritis,” said Fain.

Wearing arthritis simulation gloves designed by GTRI researchers helped packaging engineers at Pfizer understand how arthritis affects a person’s ability to grasp, pinch, turn, lift and twist objects. The gloves reproduce the reduction in functional capacity experienced by persons with arthritis.

When GTRI researchers began proposing bottle and cap possibilities to the company, the cap’s material and the shape of the bottle were important elements to consider, according to Fain. The team suggested coating the cap with a rubber-like thermoplastic elastomer to increase the friction between the cap and hand holding it, and make it easier to grasp and rotate. They also recommended selecting a non-cylindrical container that would be easier to grasp.

“A bottle with flat sides is less likely to rotate in the user’s hand when it’s being grasped, so the user doesn’t need to apply as much force to stabilize the bottle in the hand while turning the cap,” explained Fain.

Next, Fain and his research team instrumented medicine bottles and caps with force sensors and measured the top-down and rotational forces that people with arthritis could comfortably apply. From this data, they determined the maximum allowable force that could be required to push down on the cap and the maximum allowable force that could be required to rotate and remove the cap.

“We collected this data because both of these actions – pushing down on and twisting the cap – play significant roles in how easy it is for someone with arthritis to be able to open a medicine bottle without experiencing significant pain,” said Fain.

Pfizer ultimately selected a square container and round thermoplastic elastomer cap that would meet the force constraints, but still be child resistant. And the data GTRI researchers collected was used as evidence of compliance with the U.S. Arthritis Foundation requirements when Pfizer applied for the ease-of-use commendation.

“This project demonstrates that Georgia Tech can work with industry, plug directly into a company’s commercialization process and quickly provide the necessary data so that the company can launch a product on-time,” added Fain.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu) or Lance Wallace (404-407-7280)(lance.wallace@gtri.gatech.edu).

Writer: Abby Robinson

This year, events begin Wednesday, Oct. 23, and continue through the Homecoming football game against Pittsburgh on Saturday, Nov. 2, at 7 p.m. in Bobby Dodd Stadium. This year’s theme is "Wreck of the Titans."

Here’s a rundown of some of the events happening over the next several days. You can learn more about them at homecoming.gatech.edu or from the 2013 Rulesbook (pdf).

Wednesday, Oct. 23:

• Mr. and Ms. Georgia Tech voting opens: Students can vote at elections.gatech.edu.

Thursday, Oct. 24:

• Student Center Window Display Contest

Friday, Oct. 25:

• Crossing the River Styx
• NPHC Step Show

Saturday, Oct. 26:

• Team BUZZ Day of Service

Sunday, Oct. 27:

• Iron Buzz Tournament
• Powderpuff Cheer and Football
• Chalking begins on Tech Walk
• AASU Presents: Grown and Jazzy

Monday, Oct. 28:

• Poseidon's Showdown begins
• Race to Mount Olympbuzz begins
• Phil's Challenge
• Pandora's Box
• Zero to Hero
• Tech Trivia
• Traditions Tour

Tuesday, Oct. 29:

• Bringing the Torch to Tech
• SAA Alumni Letter Writing
• Tech's Next Top Muse Talent Show

Wednesday, Oct. 30:

• Mock Rock
• Can-Struction
• Mr. and Ms. Georgia Tech voting ends

Thursday, Oct. 31:

• Speaker and Reception featuring Roger Krone
• Homecoming Concert featuring Dev and Turquoise Jeep

Friday, Nov. 1:

• Mini 500
• Library Archives Open House
• Tradition Tours
• Homecoming Pomp Display Contest at Greek houses
• President's Update

Saturday, Nov. 2:

• Freshman Cake Race
• Ramblin’ Reck Parade 
• Ramblin' Wreck Rally Tailgate
• Homecoming football game v. Pittsburgh

Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are currently assessing the usability of electronic flight bags by Air National Guard pilots. Electronic flight bags could improve safety, operational effectiveness and efficiency for crew members, plus save paper and printing costs. The Federal Aviation Administration has already approved in-flight use of Apple iPads as electronic flight bags by commercial pilots.

“The Air National Guard asked us to conduct an operational utility evaluation of various tablet computers to determine whether they were feasible as electronic flight bags and whether  standardized hardware and software platforms could be selected for use by all of their squadrons,” said Byron Coker, a GTRI principal research engineer who is leading the project.

This work is supported by the Air National Guard Air Force Reserve Command Test Center in Tucson, Ariz. Coker’s collaborators on this project include research engineer Thomas Glimmerveen and student Joshua Fordham, who are based in GTRI’s Warner Robins, Ga. Field Office, and research engineer Thomas Norris, who is based in GTRI’s Tucson, Ariz. Field Office.

“Air Combat Command requested that we execute an operational test of the electronic flight bag due to some critical paper flight products that will no longer be printed in 2015,” said Lt. Col. Rogelio Maldonado of the Air National Guard Air Force Reserve Command Test Center. “The electronic flight bag has shown great promise and is likely to revolutionize cockpit management by consolidating flight products and providing the means for quickly navigating all resources.”

With GTRI’s assistance, pilots of A-10 and F-16 aircraft have executed flight simulator missions to test and evaluate two commercially-available tablets loaded with a software app developed by GTRI researchers called “QuickTOs” and commercially available flight planning apps. The flight simulator missions include emergencies, such as a cockpit fire or engine failure, which require the pilot to refer to the “QuickTOs” app that that enables quick access to technical orders.

“Technical orders can contain several hundred pages of safety procedures, technical information and instructions pertaining to the aircraft that need to be flipped through quickly in an emergency to find the relevant information and checklists,” explained Coker. “We electronically formatted the publications for our app and added links so that the documents could be easily and quickly organized, navigated and read on a tablet.”

The flight simulator missions also include executing landing approaches in simulated weather conditions that require the pilot to use instrument approach procedure charts. These charts are frequently updated due to the constantly changing environment around airports and must be reprinted and distributed to pilots each time a new version becomes available. Using electronic approach charts could greatly reduce paper and printing costs and increase the ease and speed of obtaining up-to-date charts. To date, more than a half-dozen multi-hour flight simulator missions have been conducted, each with several emergency procedures performed.

Before the flight simulator tests began, the GTRI researchers conducted a market survey of tablets that could be used as electronic flight bags. They evaluated 24 touch-screen devices commercially available based on the following criteria: battery life, weight, ruggedness, night-vision goggle compatibility, glove compatibility, performance, physical size, screen size and software compatibility. They evaluated devices that operated on Android, Apple iOS and Hewlett-Packard operating systems.

Air National Guard pilots then evaluated the tablets that scored highest against the criteria and judged each device’s ease-of-use and functionality as an electronic flight bag. The pilots judged whether each device functioned better, the same or less well than the standard paper publications and whether each device would support the basic requirements for flight and possibly even provide information not previously available.

As a result of the evaluations, two tablet computers were selected for flight simulator testing. Future work on this project will include additional flight simulations, followed by electromagnetic interference tests and real flight testing of the devices.

“Once we get the necessary approvals to begin flight tests, we will conduct them for about a year to gather enough data so that we can provide our recommendation for how the Air National Guard should move forward with fielding electronic flight bags,” said Coker.

Based on the initial simulator missions, Coker believes the electronic flight bag could be integrated as part of the pilot’s kneeboard – a clipboard strapped to the pilot’s knee that keeps flight-pertinent information, such as charts, maps and approach plates, close at hand during flight.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181

Media Relations Contacts: Lance Wallace (404-407-7280)(lance.wallace@gtri.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Abby Robinson

Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Mike Stilman is the general chair for the conference.

“This is a very exciting event both for the history of robotics worldwide and for education in engineering for all kids excited about new technology,” he said.

The demonstrations include Rethink Robotics’ Baxter robot, NAO from Aldebaran and South Korea’s Robotis.

Georgia Tech’s Ronald Arkin, a Regents Professor in the College of Computing, is hosting one of the conference’s three plenary sessions. He will focus on the ethical questions surrounding the potential creation of robotic platforms with lethal autonomy during a presentation titled “How to Not Build a Terminator.”

“Given the present pace, direction and funding of humanoid technological development, it seems that the science fiction vision of a Terminator robot is becoming more of a reality,” Arkin said. “Many researchers, perhaps unknowingly or unwittingly, are providing the capabilities to achieve such a platform.”

Other plenary sessions will discuss how to transfer human skills to robots and structuring robotic thought and action through language in a new form of dialogue.

This is the first time in three years the annual event has been held in the United States, and the first-ever time in Atlanta. The week will conclude with DARPA’s Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials Preview Meeting on Friday, October 18, which will provide further details on the DRC Trials in December.

“This is a very special year for humanoid robotics across the world,” Stilman said. “The Robotics Challenge is leading robots that function as first responders to enter dangerous situations, such as Hurricane Katrina and Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Humanoids with human and super-human capabilities will assist in future rescue missions, saving the lives of both disaster victims and rescue workers.”

“Students think that they need to have an amazing idea before they can become an entrepreneur, but that isn’t true,” said Paul Freet, principal at VentureLab and a member of the Startup Gauntlet teaching team. “You don’t need an idea or an invention to be an entrepreneur. You just need a passion.”

Whether through student organizations such as the Scheller Society for Entrepreneurs (SSOE) and Startup Exchange; administration efforts such as the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ILE) and VentureLab; or on-campus incubators and competitions such as Flashpoint and the InVenture Prize, students across campus are parlaying their passions into entrepreneurial enterprises more than ever before.

No matter where students are in the entrepreneurial process, Tech has a campus organization, program, or competition to support them and their venture.

Identifying Opportunities

For students who want to explore their options and meet other would-be entrepreneurs, there’s the interdisciplinary Startup Exchange, a kind of “supergroup” for supporting ventures with a social mission. Startup Exchange maintains an open co-working space in the Library called The Exchange, and organizes and sponsors programs such as Hack@Tech, StartupChicks and Startup Semester, one of the first student-run pre-incubator programs in the world

Of all Startup Exchange programs, Startup Semester is considered the most rigorous.

“Startup Semester aims to take in students with teams and an idea and turn them into entrepreneurs,” said Chintan Parikh, a computer science major and director of Startup Exchange. Students can expect a clearly defined curriculum, weekly meetings, and a competitive environment. Its last cohort had teams go on to win the Georgia Tech InVenture Prize, interview at YCombinator, present at Startup Riot, and join the StartEngine incubator in Los Angeles.

And while many student entrepreneurial ventures involve an innovative product design or hands-on engineering process, students in the College of Business are equally as engaged, honing their start-up savvy through the Scheller Society of Entrepreneurs (SSOE), where networking is emphasized.

“I decided to start SSOE because of the need for an entrepreneurship organization within the College of Business, and because of the questions I had heard from my peers regarding how to find internships and networking,” said founder Christine Proctor, a fourth-year business administration student. “I also wanted to bring students together that shared a passion for innovation and hard work to discuss their dreams and hear helpful advice from local successful entrepreneurs.”

SSOE is open to undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, professionals, and faculty of all majors and industries. It’s designed for anyone who is interested in entrepreneurship, has started their own business, wants to start their own business, or wants to work for a startup or in an entrepreneurial niche of a larger company.

Preparing to Take Action

Both SSOE and Startup Exchange seek to help students identify opportunities for entrepreneurship regardless of whether they already have an idea or not. Other campus programs help students develop innovative ideas or promising opportunities into actionable ventures.

VentureLab, recently ranked second worldwide among university incubators, serves budding entrepreneurs by offering startup support for projects initiated through Georgia Tech research, the Georgia Tech Startup Competition, and Startup Gauntlet.

Open to all students, Startup Gauntlet is a bootcamp for those who want to develop a business model based on prospective customers’ needs, a useful exercise before launching a business.

“Startup Gauntlet is looking for students that are motivated, want to be entrepreneurial, and want to learn,” said Freet.

Participants in the six-week course are encouraged to make assumptions about how the consumer thinks and behaves and then test those assumptions on at least 10 potential customers every week. They must then analyze the results and create a business model that matches their customers’ needs and wants.

Launching Your Venture 

For ventures that are ready for launch, campus competitions offer students a unique avenue through which to acquire funding, develop relationships with entrepreneurial mentors, and learn more about the final phases of the commercialization or implementation process. 

But it’s not just about making money. Entrepreneurship at Georgia Tech is also about improving the human condition.

The Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ILE) was created in the Scheller College of Business in 2006 to support entrepreneurship and encourage members of the Tech community to take the economical, social, and environmental impacts of their actions into consideration when making business decisions.

ILE offers a number of programs to support this mission, but its most visible is the Ideas to SERVE competition (I2S), which takes place every spring semester and is open to all students who have an early-stage product or service idea that is geared toward social entrepreneurship.

Kristen Daniel won Best Domestic Solution at this year’s I2S competition for her idea for The Pentorship Program, which connects inmates interested in entrepreneurship with successful entrepreneurs.

“I figured since inmates didn’t have access to the Internet, I could recruit seasoned entrepreneurs to become pen pal mentors,” said Daniel, who's pursuing a master's of business administration, of her Pentorship Program. She believes that providing entrepreneurial resources to inmates can help them make the transition upon release.

Other campus competitions include the Georgia Tech Startup Competition and InVenture Prize, both of which take place spring semester. At InVenture Prize, undergraduates compete for thousands of dollars, free patent filing, and a spot with Georgia Tech’s Flashpoint startup accelerator program. 

Additional Resources

On a campus where an entrepreneurial spirit thrives, and where a strategic goal is for graduates to possess that spirit, new opportunities to innovate and collaborate come up every week. A list of opportunities is available at startup.gatech.edu. 

Students interested in learning more about how universities nationwide are promoting entrepreneurship can read this report by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which mentions Tech’s Flashpoint program for facilitating university-industry collaboration.

Other resources include Entrepreneurship Magazine and Entrepreneur.com.

The first sign of trouble started with the plugin used by high school counselors and teachers to submit materials to accompany student applications. Hearing about these glitches, Admission extended the deadline for supporting documents to Nov. 1.

Technical issues continued to plague the Common App the weekend of Oct. 12, primarily with users experiencing slowness, login issues and payment difficulty. On Oct. 14, the day before Tech’s initial Early Action deadline — and a historically high-volume day for incoming applications — the decision was made to extend Early Action by one week to Oct. 21.

Despite these issues, Director of Undergraduate Admission Rick Clark is confident all prospective students will have the same review and attention they have had in previous years.

“While this is certainly a challenge, it’s not a crisis,” he said. “We’re committed to ensuring that all students are able to apply by the new deadline and will be fully and comprehensively reviewed for admission." 

That committment extends outside the walls of the Office of Undergraduate Admission.

“Debbie Rice in Enrollment Services and Rich Loftus and his team in the Office of Information Technology and Enterprise Innovation Systems have done herculean work in recent weeks and months to ensure our staff has all the necessary information we need," Clark said.

He hopes members of the campus community can be a megaphone for this message to any friends and family who may have a student applying to Tech. The main thing he wants families to hear is: Don’t worry.

“Our staff and students are calm, and we’re reassuring people that we’re working to ensure that all normal procedures continue,” he said.

Clark even took the opportunity to share his thoughts about how Tech was responding through a National Association for College Admission Counseling listserv.

“Many thanks for your clear, supportive approach, and the gentle tone used to communicate,” replied Patrick O’Connor, associate dean of college counseling at a high school in Michigan.

“If anyone has come out of this mess smelling like a rose, it is Georgia Tech,” said Steve Peifer, associate director of college counseling at a school in West Palm Beach. “Thank you for your leadership and grace under pressure.”

This is Georgia Tech’s first year with the Common Application, an online standardized application used by more than 500 colleges and universities to make it easier and less time-consuming for students to apply to more schools at once.

More information about current admission deadlines is available at the Office of Undergraduate Admission website.

Research into the stiffness of diseased cells is lacking, in part due to limits in technology. Researchers have developed a new technology to sort human cells according to their stiffness, which might one day help doctors identify certain diseases in patients, according to a new study.

The research team, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, hopes that their technology might one day aid doctors in the field to rapidly and more accurately diagnose disease.

The new technology is being tested in a small device, about 1 inch wide by 1.5 inches long. Cells are injected into a microfluidic channel on one side of the device. As the cells move through the channel, they are forced to squeeze over a series of ridges that are fabricated at an angle to the channel. If the cells are very flexible, they will easily squeeze over the ridges and follow the fluid stream. But if the cells are stiffer, when they hit a ridge, they will slide along the angled ridge before squeezing over, causing the cells to move to one side, separating them from the softer cells. These ridges eventually separate a single stream of cells into two streams depending on the cells’ stiffness, which in some cases can be an indicator of a disease.

“If you imagine a microfluidic channel that is focusing a stream of cells, you’ll push the cells in different directions based on their mechanical properties,” said study co-author Todd Sulchek, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Sulchek specializes in studying the mechanical properties of cells.

The new research was published Oct. 16 in the journal PLOS ONE. The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The researchers also have a patent on this technology.

“There are no real techniques to sort cells by stiffness right now in large numbers,” said Alexander Alexeev, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Alexeev is an expert in fluid mechanics and a co-author on the study

A few other research groups are working on microfluidic approaches to sorting cells by stiffness, but Sulchek and Alexeev believe their technology will be quite sensitive.

“There are several microfluidic approaches, but there’s not a real device yet,” Alexeev said. “The main problem is how to sort cells very rapidly because if we are looking at cancer cells, there are very, very few of them. So we need to look at thousands of millions of cells to capture maybe a hundred cancer cells.”

Their technology can sort cells at speeds similar to other cell sorting devices, such as a fluorescently activated cell sorter machine, which is a commonly device used in research labs.
To show that their device can successfully sort cells based on stiffness, the researchers made some cells artificially soft, then labeled them with a different color so they could find them later. After running the cells through their device and analyzing the separated cells by color, they found that the artificially soft cells were separated from the other cells. Then the researchers used atomic force microscopy to probe the cells’ mechanical properties to make sure they were actually different.

“We show that we separate by stiffness, not by other factors,” Sulchek said.

The researchers tested four different commercially available cell lines. White blood cells sort by stiffness particularly well, the researchers reported.

The research team will now work on using their device to separate cancer cells, malaria-infected cells, and sickle cells, and to sort stem cells.

“We’re assured the device is very sensitive to say that the soft cells are all soft, but what we don’t know is whether all the disease cells are soft,” Sulchek said.

Aside from testing for disease, the cell stiffness sorter could also be used in as a method for purifying and enriching an undifferentiated stem cell population from the differentiated cells, which would be useful for laboratory scientists.

“This is also a useful tool for just basic research and understanding what the effect of specific disease is on cell mechanics,” Alexeev said.

Gonghao Wang, a PhD student in Sulchek’s lab, is the first author of the study.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award CBET-0932510. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: G Wang, et al., “Stiffness Dependent Separation of Cells in a Microfluidic Device,” (PLOS ONE, 2013). http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0075901

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Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel

About a year ago, GTPD created a profile and began posting in the Georgia Tech subreddit. Since then, it has developed a presence that’s been both useful in policing and lauded by many of the more than 4,500 users.

“Is it okay to say that I love you guys?” one user commented to a post by GTPD earlier this month.

Crime Prevention Officer Preston Moss, the primary voice behind the GTPD Reddit account, said the forum provides an opportunity for more lighthearted communication with students.

“We’re much more whimsical on Reddit,” he said. “We don’t want to be lecturing people there.”

Though he tries not to “spam,” Moss sometimes posts about upcoming GTPD events. Earlier this month, he posted that October is Crime Prevention Month, with a simple reminder about the “See Something? Say Something?” motto the department has adopted from the Department of Homeland Security. In the spring, he posted a brief note that officers would be tabling outside Clough Commons during final exams, with treats as well as safety tips for those studying late at night. One commenter took the opportunity to give a commendation.

“I have so much respect for the GTPD,” the user said. “You are always looking out for us. I know it’s your job, but your incredible commitment to the task is enormously commendable.”

A few officers and a student assistant help monitor the account, with Moss being the primary poster. He’s found that people speak more directly when they have anonymity, creating a sort of pressure relief valve for campus and providing an opportunity for police to chime in and provide additional information when possible.

Lately, while doing in-person presentations, Moss has noticed students asking questions based on Reddit threads. Students often will post descriptions of situations playing out on campus, asking others for more information.

Most posts are related to general questions or issues, but more serious issues bubble up as well. In a situation where a student was posting about potentially harming himself, Moss reached out through a private message, to which the student responded, enabling Moss to refer him to campus resources where he could get help.

In general, the Reddit community has been a goldmine of information for GTPD about the goings-on around campus.

“It helps us find out about things we otherwise may not see,” Moss said. Though many Reddit users thrive on anonymity, Moss doesn’t mind it being known that he’s the one at the keyboard; he likes students to have an idea of who they’re talking to.

The Crime Prevention unit oversees all of GTPD’s social media accounts and shares relevant information with the rest of the department. The training unit keeps in close contact for access to knowledge that could be beneficial in training new officers. They consider Reddit a way to read the “pulse” of campus.

With new federal budget deadlines set three months out, Georgia Tech is viewing the actions taken in Washington, D.C., as positive, but temporary measures, and is planning accordingly. The working group appointed by President Bud Peterson will continue to monitor the situation, develop scenarios based on the latest data and provide recommendations to help mitigate any operational impact, in the event of a full or partial shutdown in January.

"Because of the steps taken over the course of the past several weeks, we do not expect our federally funded research to suffer any significant long-term effects," said Peterson. "But to be safe, we will continue to carefully monitor the situation to ensure that we can continue to fulfill our educational, research and service missions to the best of our ability."

All these items involved in solar installations are collectively known as the “balance of systems” in industry terminology. In 2011, Georgia Tech and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) were awarded a Department of Energy grant to achieve extreme cost reduction in balance of systems. A handful of industry partners are collaborating with students and faculty. The goal is to slash the cost of solar to $1 per watt on a utility scale, which would make the price of solar power-generated electricity competitive with the cost of electricity from coal or fossil fuels.

Step onto the roof of CNES and you’ll see that the building is a demonstration project of solar power. The roof is covered with a crystalline photovoltaic array that will generate 388,000 kilowatt-hours per year of electricity, helping offset the building’s energy needs.

“The idea for CNES was to have a building bringing together people working on low carbon energy. Added on top of that was to make the building itself a demonstrator for low carbon,” said Tim Lieuwen, director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute. The building was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The CNES ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony was held on Oct. 17. The lab is the latest addition to the North Avenue Research Area (NARA) complex, on the southwestern edge of campus. The mission of CNES is to bring together a diverse mix of experts to solve some of the big technological problems in clean energy and partner with industry to bring these solutions to the market. So far, solar research at CNES, with numerous projects, patents and industry partnerships, is a shining example of things to come.

“Solar is one of the areas where Georgia Tech has really differentiated itself nationally,” Lieuwen said. "Whether it’s converting solar energy directly into electricity, into heat, or into fuels, Georgia Tech is actively working in all of these facets of solar energy.”

But solar research is just one area of expertise at CNES. The building also houses research on hydrocarbons, alternative fuels, including fuels derived from algae or using solar energy to split water, carbon capture and clean combustion, among other programs, which require large scale (high-bay) and intermediate scale (mid-bay) capabilities.

“CNES is a hub for the applied energy research on campus,” said Kevin Caravati, a senior research scientist at (GTRI), which is leading the balance of systems work with researchers from the College of Architecture and the College of Engineering.

The building itself is somewhat of a living lab with an innovative “no frills” design and net-zero carbon emissions. The 42,000-square-foot facility is intended to set a new standard for sustainable design for buildings of its type by optimizing passive energy technologies, reducing electricity loads and maximizing the use of renewable energy.

The building’s office space has large windows to reduce the need for internal lighting. Crystalline photovoltaic panels are on the roof (140 kW), exterior building walls (49 kW) and atop the parking canopy (107 kW). Inside the high bay are two huge fans that circulate air in the building. The pavement in the parking lot is permeable to rainwater, and a bio-retention basin and cistern onsite help conserve water. 

Inside the labs at CNES, the mission is to bring clean energy technologies to a 90-percent commercialization level. Then industries can license the technologies and bring them to the market.

“We can take ideas at the design stage and push them all the way through the prototyping and testing stages.” Caravati said. “I think that’s a great win for all of us.”

For example, the balance of systems project, led by GTRI Principal Investigator Joseph Goodman, started with more than 100 concept designs that researchers have narrowed to a “Final Four” that are moving to the patent application stage. Industry partners involved include

The Rocky Mountain Institute, Intertek, Florida International University, Silicon Energy, and Georgia companies Radiance Solar, Suniva, and Jamestown Properties, developers of the Ponce City Market mixed-use development along the Atlanta Beltline.

Research at CNES is not just focused on the energy sources of the future, but also on cleaning up pollution from the fossil fuels of the past and present. In the laboratory of Chris Jones, New-Vision Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the new Associate Vice President for Research at Georgia Tech, researchers are developing materials and technologies to efficiently and cheaply separate carbon dioxide from power plants’ emissions, or from ambient air, and lock away the greenhouse gas underground.

“One of my favorite aspects of this building is that my students and post-doctoral researchers, who are working in our laboratory, are able to work alongside mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers and other people, cross-pollinating ideas and developing more effective collaborations,” Jones said.

The building’s open floor plan encourages collaboration between faculty and students from a mix of disciplines including the College of Sciences, the College of Architecture, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Aerospace Engineering and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Industry experts regularly advise on projects.

“We have a good mix of diverse thinking combined with industry expertise and faculty members from GTRI and Georgia Tech,” Caravati said.

Jones agreed, saying, “This building has been a great advance for Georgia Tech in that it allows researchers in different programs on campus to be housed together working on strategic energy related issues.”

The Carbon-Neutral Energy Solutions Lab was supported by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST). Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

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Writer: Brett Israel

“I noticed the big difference between college classes and high school classes,” DeAndre said afterwards.

DeAndre was one of approximately 30 metro Atlanta area high school students who participated in Shadow Day on October 18. The event was hosted by FirstGen, a Georgia Tech, student-run organization that focuses on first-generation students (students who are the first members of their family to attend college). The organization was created in 2012 to help current and future first generation college students make the transition from high school, provide extra tutoring and offer support to help the students succeed.

Shadow Day began with information sessions about admissions, major decisions and a student panel. The high school students then followed a Georgia Tech student to a lecture and around campus on a tour. DeAndre was led by Cassee Cain, a second-year chemical engineering student. The two attended a class in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, checked out the view on its roof and visited the biomedical quad on the north side of campus.

“The main reason I came to Tech was because a student showed me around,” said Cain. “I enjoyed the personal experience I received and want to share this same experience with a prospective student.”

FirstGen, which includes nearly 150 student volunteers, plans to continue expanding its programs and will host future Shadow Days. Alice Lee organized the event and wants to see high school students of all ages participate.

“I think freshmen are a good population to reach out to,” said Lee, a second-year student. “They can use their experiences from Shadow Day to plan the rest of their four years in high school.”

That includes DeAndre. His life will return to normal this week when he returns to Langston Hughes High. He’s only a freshman but is already evaluating colleges. He says Georgia Tech is now his top choice.  

“The campus is beautiful, the students are nice and the classes are great,” he said. “I look forward to the independence that college offers.”

Written by Institute Communications Student Assistant Meghan Feeney

Known as focused electron beam induced deposition (FEBID), the technique delivers a tightly-focused beam of high energy electrons and an energetic jet of thermally excited precursor gases – both confined to the same spot on a substrate. Secondary electrons generated when the electron beam strikes the substrate cause decomposition of the precursor molecules, forming nanoscale 3D structures whose size, shape and location can be precisely controlled. This gas-jet assisted FEBID technique allows fabrication of high-purity nanoscale structures using a wide range of materials and combination of materials.

By allowing the rapid atom-by-atom “direct writing” of materials with controlled shape and topology, the work could lead to a nanoscale version of the 3D printing processes now revolutionizing fabrication of structures at the macro scale. The technique could be used to produce nano-electromechanical sensors and actuators, to modify the morphology and composition of nanostructured optical and magnetic materials to yield unique properties, and to engineer high performance interconnect interfaces for graphene and carbon nanotube-based electronic devices.

"This unique nanofabrication approach opens up new opportunities for on-demand growth of structures with high aspect ratios made from high-purity materials," said Andrei Fedorov, the project’s leader and a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "By providing truly nanoscale control of geometries, it will impact a broad range of applications in nanoelectronics and biosensing."

Researchers have demonstrated the feasibility of the technique, and expect the three-year $660,000 grant to help them develop a fundamental understanding of how the process works, accelerate the rate of materials growth and provide improved control over the process. The research will include both theoretical modeling and experimental evaluation. Proof of principle for using thermally-energized gas jets as part of the FEBID technique was reported by Fedorov’s group in the journal Applied Physics Letters in 2011.

"Wherever electrons strike the surface, you can grow the deposit," explained Fedorov. "That provides a tool for growing complex three-dimensional structures from a variety of materials with resolution at the tens of nanometers. Electron beam induced deposition is much like inkjet printing, except that it uses electrons and precursor molecules in a vacuum chamber."

Two major challenges lie ahead for using the technique to manufacture 3D nanostructures: increasing the rate of deposition and eliminating the unwanted deposits of carbon that are formed as part of the process. To address these challenges, Fedorov and his team are using energetic jets of inert argon gas to clean substrate surfaces and carefully tune the energy of the desired molecules delivered in another jet to enhance the rate at which the precursor sticks to the substrate.

"If the energy of the jet is sufficiently high, the inert gas molecules striking the surface can knock away the adsorbed hydrocarbon contamination so that there is no parasitic carbon co-deposition," he said. "We can also tune the properties of the precursor molecules so they stick more effectively to the surface. We have shown that we can increase the rate of growth by an order of magnitude or more while maintaining a high aspect ratio of deposited nanostructures."

Overall, about two dozen materials have been successfully deposited using FEBID on different substrates, including semiconductors, dielectrics, metals and even plastics. The researchers also plan to create nanostructures containing more than one material, allowing them to create unique properties not available in each individual material. Examples might include new types of ferromagnetic materials and photonic bandgap structures with unique properties.

Fedorov’s group has used FEBID to fabricate low-resistance contacts to carbon nanotubes and graphene, a unique carbon-based material with attractive electronic properties.

Major technical challenges for the project include making tightly focused jets of thermally-energized precursor molecules to provide precise control of the fabrication. In operation, precursor molecules enter the reaction chamber from the micron-scale nozzle at sonic speeds, and accelerate in the vacuum environment to even greater speed, forming a molecular beam that impinges on the substrate. To make structures of the desired morphology, researchers will have to control the spreading of the generated molecular beam and its energy state at the point of contract with the substrate.

"We will be growing structures ranging in size from tens to hundreds of nanometers," Fedorov noted. "This means we will not only have to confine electrons to very small regions, but we will also need to confine the precursor molecules to these same domains."

The FEBID technique will likely not be used for high-volume fabrication because the process is difficult to scale up, Fedorov said. Accelerating the deposition rate will allow more rapid fabrication, but the 3D structures will still need to be produced one at a time. A partial solution to the scale-up challenge lies in the use of multiple electron beams and precursor jets operating in parallel.

The new technique will allow researchers to take better advantage of the unique properties of materials at the nanometer scale. Researchers will also have to account for those differences in developing the new manufacturing technique, as the interactions between electrons, precursor materials in the jet and substrate continually change with growth of the deposit.

"This research will open up the potential for some new discoveries in areas we may not be able to predict now," said Fedorov. "We need to understand the basic physics of what is happening. That basic understanding could lead us to some truly unique applied capabilities, and the possibilities are almost limitless."

This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy under Award Number DE-SC0010729. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or any agency thereof.

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Writer: John Toon

Undergraduates who participate in Leading Edge work one-on-one with a coach to explore their leadership potential and develop leadership skills.

At Georgia Tech, we know that leadership is something you “do.” As our now famous Nicholas Selby noted at this year’s New Student Convocation, this is Georgia Tech, and "we can do that." Leading Edge is a program for intentional and focused “doing” of leadership.

"Many of the leadership situations that students find themselves in are hit or miss and often just focused on getting a task accomplished,” said Wes Wynens, director of the LEAD Program. “But in Leading Edge, through careful feedback from trained leadership coaches and feedback from faculty and peers, students will gain insight into their leadership competencies and apply their new insights to a leadership action plan.”

Students are expected to apply their plan in leadership roles on or off campus. The leadership coach and student then discuss how the student has been able to implement their plan and get continued feedback on their practice. "Through this 'double loop' of learning we can accelerate the leadership development of our students,” Wynens said.

“Undergraduates should get involved with Leading Edge because it offers a practical, personal, and meaningful experience that isn't offered anywhere else on campus," said Rachel Bennett, one of Leading Edge’s 16 leadership coaches and a doctoral student in chemistry. “Tech is known for training brilliant scientists and engineers, but Leading Edge can complement that training by developing leadership skills that will make students successful beyond the classroom.”

Wynens encourages students to remember that leadership is often not about being in charge or directing, but about making difficult choices that allow leader, follower, and organization to move forward together. Leading Edge is a way for students to gain insights into that process.

There are 65 spots available for undergraduates in the Spring 2014 session of Leading Edge. Interested students will need to contact an advisor, faculty, or staff member for a nomination. All nominations must be submitted through the LEAD Program's website by Friday, Oct. 25. More information is available on leadership.gatech.edu. 

This article is one in a series of Q&As to introduce the Tech community to the nine IRIs and their leaders. In this installment, Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) Beth Mynatt answers questions about IPaT and also talks about its primary areas of research.

Q: What is the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and what are its core research areas?

A: Focusing on sectors such as health care delivery, education, humanitarian systems, and consumer media, IPaT looks at the potential Georgia Tech’s cutting-edge research has to transform human behavior in areas of great societal interest.

We look at where technology and people come together in powerful ways. For example, we explore novel media technologies that will help motivate healthy behavior and help people manage chronic diseases. We look at new communication technologies to help communities find ways to take care of each other. We examine creative technological approaches for fostering lifelong learning in all its forms. And we invent ways to simulate and model these complex societal systems to help stakeholders understand future possibilities.

Q: What makes IPaT’s approach to addressing complex societal challenges different?

A: We build strong partnerships across academic and applied research with government agencies and industry leaders to understand complex societal challenges and to accelerate implementations of technological solutions.

To facilitate this multidisciplinary approach, we create living laboratories where our researchers, partners, potential users, and consumers can all come together to co-create the future. Because these labs are where the transdisciplinary teams, our partners, and the technology converge, they are a big part of our work. If we didn’t have research grounded in these laboratories, it would be just a lot of talk and possibility. But when everyone can co-create – that’s when the magic happens and ideas become reality.

We consider the labs that we’ve put in place, such as the Interoperability & Integration Innovation Lab (I3L) – which is developing new ways to use and deliver health care and health information – one of our major contributions to the Georgia Tech innovation ecosystem. It’s when grand challenges become grounded in real technology, with real data and real people, that we start to make substantial progress. 

Another thing about our living labs is anytime we create one, a key goal is for students – through coursework and by working with faculty – to be able to access and contribute to research.

Q: Why do companies work with IPaT?

A: The more experience I’ve had as a research administrator, the more I realize that companies want the answers to these questions: What makes people powerful? What makes people trust technology? What changes people’s behavior? Companies have confided that these questions are the ones that really challenge them and that they are looking for technical innovation as part of the larger solution to influencing human behavior. Over the years, we’ve learned to focus our partnerships with companies on these larger questions.

In addition, we make it easy for companies to engage Georgia Tech. They can sponsor theoretical research, or they can contract with us for specific technologies.

Companies also love to work with our students at the Convergence Innovation Competition; in fact, in many ways, when companies come to Tech for innovation, they want to get to the students as quickly as possible because they want that risk-taking spirit and creativity Tech students embody.

And as much as companies love working with our students, they love to work with each other at Tech. Many of our research programs are based on bringing multiple external partners to the same table so they can benefit from an exchange of ideas and collaboration – and enjoy the added advantage of having Tech as a neutral party. Our Nov. 5-6 People & Technology Forum is just one example of bringing external parties together: We invite all of our partners to come and be with us for two days in November. There are talks, panels, and research demos, but equally important are those conversations that take place in the hallways, as companies with specific business interests begin looking to the next opportunities that may present themselves through working with Georgia Tech and each other.

Q: What is your view on the best approach to transforming lives through research and technology?

A: Well, there is a great myth referred to as technological determinism, which suggests that you can just invent the technology and everything falls into place. My experience from two decades in research is that it’s more complicated than that. It’s actually what I’ve described as a dance in which new technology offers an opportunity, people respond – both in anticipated and surprising ways – then technology designers and inventors make adjustments accordingly, people do something different, and the dance continues. Even though we may be fascinated by the new technical inventions we create here at Tech, innovation comes from paying attention to that dance and from anticipating and responding to what makes peoplepowerful, because in the end, it’s not just about technologybeing powerful but about what happens in society as a result of that technology. It’s about empowering people to do what they really want and get what they really need through innovative advances in technology.

Q: What’s next for IPaT?

A: One of our main priorities in the health care sector is growing Tech’s partnership with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to improve the lives of children fighting pediatric asthma. Our role is to coordinate different asthma-related efforts throughout Georgia, using the combined resources of both institutions to provide technology solutions for clinicians and patients.

We’ve also recently established a partnership with Midtown Alliance, and the goal is to turn Midtown Atlanta into one of our living labs. Midtown Alliance and the business community, as a whole, are interested in leveraging mobile technology, smart city concepts, and advances in technology to improve Midtown’s live-work-play experience. We have two main objectives for this Midtown project: The first is creating a platform for innovation in Midtown where we support teams developing startup applications, provide access to new data sources, and invent new services for Midtown. The second is working directly with some of those teams to create prototypes of mobile applications and services that utilize Tech’s research and establish Midtown as a high-tech, powerful local community. It’s about helping Midtown communicate and sustain what makes it such a unique, influential, and strong community. In a sense, the Midtown Atlanta project is our biggest living lab yet. We’ve learned from the ways we’ve experimented on the Tech campus; now we’re taking some of that experience past campus boundaries.

In South Korea, 99.6 percent of young people are active, the highest percentage in the world. The least? The Asian island of Timor Leste with less than 1 percent.  

Those are among the many findings in a study from The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs Assistant Professor Michael Best and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The study is the first attempt to measure, by country, the world’s “digital natives.” The term is typically used to categorize young people born around the same time as when the personal computer was introduced and who have spent their lives connected with technology. 

Nearly 96 percent of American millennials are digital natives. That figure is behind Japan (99.5 percent) and several European countries, including Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

But the percentage Best thinks is most important is the number of digital natives compared to a country’s total population.

“That’s because a country’s future will be defined by today’s young people and by technology,” said Best, who co-led the study and, jointly with ITU, developed the model that calculated the worldwide figures. “Countries with a high proportion of young people who are already online are positioned to define and lead the digital age of tomorrow.” 

The countries with the highest proportion of digital natives among their population are mostly rich nations, which have high levels of overall Internet penetration. Iceland is at the top of the list with 13.9 percent. The United States is sixth (13.1 percent). A big surprise is Malaysia, a middle-income country with one of the highest proportions of digital natives (ranked fourth at 13.4 percent). Malaysia has a strong history of investing in educational technology.  

The countries with the smallest estimated proportion of digital natives are Timor-Leste, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone. The bottom 10 consists entirely of African or Asian nations, many of which are suffering from conflict and/or have very low Internet availability.

However, the report notes that Internet usage has increased significantly in the developing world during the past five years. The ITU believes the digital native population in these regions will more than double by 2017.

Overall, there are approximately 363 million digital natives out of a world population of nearly 7 billion (5.2 percent).

“Youth are transforming our world through the power of information and communication technologies,” said Hamadoun Touré, ITU secretary-general. “The Youth Declaration developed at ITU’s BYND2015 Youth Summit in Costa Rica and presented to the United Nations General Assembly last week by Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla calls for more measurable targets to monitor the digital empowerment of young people at national, regional, and international levels. This first attempt to measure the number of digital natives around the world is a valuable first contribution to this effort.”

The model was developed using data collected by the ITU through surveys conducted around the globe. The study is part of the ITUs Measuring the Information Society 2013 report, which was released on October 7.

Best is a faculty member in The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs with a joint appointment in the College of Computing. His research focuses on information and communication technologies for social, economic, and political development, primarily in low-income countries in Africa and Asia.

“I was pissed at people saying, ‘Why can’t we make things simple?’” the author said in a WREK radio interview on Friday.

Norman, whose Living with Complexity book was this year’s selection for the First-Year Reading Program, visited campus last week and discussed simplicity versus complexity during a brown bag discussion, plenary lecture, panel session, and radio interview.

“I embrace complexity, but I’m against complication or confusion,” Norman said during the radio interview.

In one of his book’s relatable anecdotes, Norman explains desire lines, which occur when people cut across grass and create ruts, communicating their desire to have a specific path not initially incorporated into the landscape design. To Norman, this frowned-upon habit is an essential part of solving a design problem – and decreasing confusion.

“The problem with design is to solve the right problem,” Norman told WREK. In this scenario, landscape architects should see the problem as creating paths where they’ll be most used – not as keeping people from walking on the grass.

In Living with Complexity, Norman, a former Apple vice president, refers to examples such as using an iPhone or learning to drive to explain that something is only complex until you’ve dedicated the time to master it.

“Whether something is simple or confusing is in the head, not in the world,” he said. However, bad design can make a concept more challenging to master than is necessary. He dedicates a great deal of the book to explaining how to improve design of both products and systems.

And, in his WREK interview, he highlighted 3D printing, which goes on nearly 24/7 in Georgia Tech’s Invention Studio, as a new technology that could simplify tasks through its design.

“You could be building a piece of IKEA furniture and find you’re missing a part, then go online and find the plan to print the screw you need,” Norman said. “You can make things just the way you want them. It’s going to be a really empowering event as 3D printers become more available. They’re already changing lots of ways designers work.”

In his book, Norman issues a challenge to readers involved in design of any sort to do their best to make things simple; meanwhile, he says non-designers must take the time to learn and master new skills and processes.

“This year’s First-Year Reading Program book was selected to connect with themes in Georgia Tech’s strategic plan, particularly those around design and innovation,” said Steven Girardot, associate vice provost for undergraduate education. 

Understanding how the shape of nanoparticles affects their transport into cells could be a major boost for the field of nanomedicine by helping scientists to design better therapies for various diseases, such as improving the efficacy and reducing side effects of cancer drugs.

In addition to nanoparticle geometry, the researchers also discovered that different types of cells have different mechanisms to pull in nanoparticles of different sizes, which was previously unknown. The research team also used theoretical models to identify the physical parameters that cells use when taking in nanoparticles.

“This research identified some very novel yet fundamental aspects in which cells interact with the shape of nanoparticles,” said Krishnendu Roy, who recently joined the Wallace H. Coulter

Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Roy conducted this research at The University of Texas at Austin in collaboration with Profs. S. V. Sreenivasan and Li Shi, but is continuing the work at Georgia Tech.

The study was scheduled to be published the week of Oct. 7 in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Roy’s team used a unique approach to making the differently shaped nanoparticles. The researchers adapted an imprinting technology used in the semiconductor industry and rigged it to work with biological molecules, Roy said. This imprinting technique, which they developed at UT-Austin, works like a cookie cutter but on the nanoscale. Drugs are mixed with a polymer solution and dispensed on a silicon wafer. Then a shape is imprinted onto the polymer-drug mixture using a quartz template. The material is then solidified using UV light. Whatever the cookie cutter’s template – triangle, rod, disc – a nanoparticle with that shape is produced.

Another key feature of the nanoparticles is that they are negatively charged and are hydrophilic, attributes that make them relevant for clinical use in drug delivery.

“We have exquisite control over the shapes and sizes,” said Roy, who is a Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow.

His team then used particles of various shapes and sizes to see how different kinds of cultured mammalian cells would respond to them. The materials and surface charges of the particles were all the same, only the shapes differed.

Roy’s team was not expecting cells to prefer discs over rods. They found that in cell culture, unlike spherical nanoparticles, larger sized discs and rods are taken up more efficiently, a finding that was also unexpected. When they ran theoretical calculations they found that the energy required by a cell membrane to deform and wrap around a nanoparticle is lower for discs than rods and that gravitational forces and surface properties play a significant role in nanoparticle uptake in cells.

“The reason this has been unexplored is that we did not have the tools to make these precisely-shaped nanoparticles,” Roy said. “Only in the past seven or eight years have there been a few groups that have come up with these tools to make polymer particles of various sizes and shapes, especially in the nanoscale.”

Cells take in nanoparticles through a process called endocytosis, but depending on the shape and cell-type, specific uptake pathways are triggered, the team discovered. Some cells rely on proteins in their membranes called caveolin; others use a different membrane protein, known as clathrin.

Understanding how cells respond to the shapes of nanoparticles is important not just for drug delivery, but also for understanding the toxicity of nanomaterials used in consumer products. Roy’s new work provides another piece to solving this puzzle. 

“People are making different nanoscale stuff with various materials without fundamentally understanding their interactions with cells,” Roy said.

In future work at Georgia Tech, Roy’s lab would like to investigate how the shapes of nanomaterials affect their transport and function in animal models. This will give researchers a better idea how the particles move into tumors, pass across mucosal surfaces and distribute into organs, and ultimately aid in clinical therapies.

“99.9 percent of our work is still to be done, which we want to continue to do here at Tech in collaboration with researchers at UT,” Roy said.

Other researchers on the study include Rachit Agarwal, the lead author who is now a post-doctoral fellow at Georgia Tech, as well as Vikramjit Singh, Patrick Jurney, Li Shi and S.V. Sreenivasan, all of whom were at The University of Texas at Austin

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award CMMI0900715, and by the National Institutes of Health under award EB008835. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: R. Agarwal, et al., “Mammalian Cells Preferentially Internalize Hydrogel Nanodiscs over Nanorods and Use Shape-Specific Uptake Mechanisms,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013). http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1305000110.

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Writer: Brett Israel

“Most of the time I ride alone,” said Berwanger, a second-year electrical engineering major from Houston. “If I see a friend I’ll give them a ride. That happens about once a week.” Occasionally strangers will ask for a ride, and Berwanger lets them hop on as well.

Last spring, Berwanger and two friends from his economics class got tired of their long walks to class. With one bike among the three of them, the tandem bike became the solution for getting the three of them to class more easily. Walmart was the retailer of choice, and the bright yellow beach cruiser, complete with palm tree decals, was theirs.

All three now live in North Avenue Apartments, though not together, and still co-own the bike, although Berwanger is the “majority owner” and the one who rides it on a regular basis.

“I don’t think they’ve ever ridden it alone,” he said. “I don’t think they have the courage.”

The rear seat of Berwanger’s bike is not for freeloaders. Hop-ons have their own set of pedals and are also tasked with manning the bell and horn that adorn the rear handlebars. Though his roommate has been a great passenger in the past — “a strong rider who is willing to put in the necessary effort to get the wheels to spin” —Berwanger would choose his mom above anyone else to ride “shotgun.”

“She is both very supportive and someone I have grown quite fond of," he said.

As anyone who’s walked or ridden Tech’s campus will know, it’s hilly — and not just at Freshman Hill. Berwanger, who’s also involved with Outdoor Recreation Georgia Tech, knows the terrain all too well, as the Kulana has just one speed. To make his rides less of an uphill battle, he’s considering trading the bike in on Craigslist for something with more speeds.

But one thing won’t change: “It has to be tandem,” he said. “Someone on this campus has to ride a tandem bike.”