Jenny McGuire, an associate professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, is building a regional blueprint for safeguarding biodiversity in the southeastern United States while drawing insights from half a world away in Denmark. She is the Harry and Anna Teasley Professor in Ecology and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) faculty fellow. She is currently on faculty development leave in Copenhagen where she is sharpening her work with fresh perspectives from European conservation practice.
McGuire, winner of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award, describes herself as a spatial or landscape ecologist, rather than a traditional wildlife biologist. She currently leads Georgia Tech’s Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab, whose motto is “learning from the past how to conserve the future.” She uses modern, historical, and paleontological specimens to identify how communities of plants and animals move across landscapes over long time scales in response to past climate shifts. Her goal is to identify strategies to conserve as much biodiversity as possible in the face of an increasingly volatile climate.
Twice awarded with Sustainability Next Seed Grants by BBISS, most recently in 2025, McGuire is using that support to knit together scientists, conservation groups, agencies, and students to understand how plants and animals are moving in response to both climate and land-use change.
“I’ve been wanting to pivot to a more regional approach toward this work,” McGuire said. “The Southeast, and especially the Atlanta region, is really critical because we sit at this important geographic point where southern Appalachia and the Piedmont come together.”
As species track cooler temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, many are expected to move upslope into the southern Appalachians, even as Atlanta’s urban and suburban footprint continues to expand northward. “There’s a lot of competing stressors on the regional environment,” she said.
Building a Regional Conservation Community
One of McGuire’s Sustainability Next Seed Grants, in collaboration with Nicole Kennard, BBISS Assistant Director for Community Engaged Research, supports a partnership with Roots Down, an innovative urban land-use nonprofit working with the cities of Avondale Estates and Atlanta to understand how native plant restoration affects ecosystem health. Georgia Tech students established protocols to survey sites before and after restoration to track changes.
The other seed grant McGuire received enabled her to convene a conference that brought together nonprofit conservation organizations, government agencies such as Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources, and academics from across the Southeast. The group formalized their collaboration as the Wildlife Ecology in the Piedmont and Appalachia (WEPA) coalition. They agreed to survey the resources, such as data, projects, and people, that would support a regional wildlife conservation effort. Over the past semester, her team compiled those resources and shared results back with partners in a second virtual conference.
Early indications from this survey show a strong focus on mammals in urban Atlanta, including 11 camera-trap projects. Two of these projects follow transects from urban cores to suburbs to see how animals move across the city. This group has conducted extensive studies on how wildlife use roadside drainage structures, such as culverts, to move beneath roadways, and how animals are shifting to more nocturnal activity to avoid traffic.
Making connections among current and ongoing studies reveals knowledge gaps where both contemporary and historical data are sparse. Although historical records are held by regional museums, including the Georgia Museum of Natural History, many collections across the broader region remain undigitized. “Those historic distributions exist somewhere, but they’re really difficult to access,” McGuire said. Identifying these data sets is “critical to establish a baseline of where things lived in the past so we can understand how human landscapes and climate change are affecting things today and into the future.”
She’s also working with Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow (GT²), a new College of Sciences initiative focused on regional impact. The program is hiring a postdoctoral fellow whom McGuire will supervise to jumpstart a collaborative research agenda around biodiversity dynamics.
McGuire’s work is increasingly collaborative, drawing on expertise across Georgia Tech and partner institutions like Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum.
Benjamin Freeman, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, focuses on bird ecology to detect shifts in diversity and species ranges. In a new North Georgia Bird Project, with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, he is resurveying bird communities across 13 mountain ridges, concentrating on about 40 forest bird species. His research tests projections that a rapidly warming climate could leave Georgia with very different plant and animal communities within a few human generations. “There’s no substitute for going out there and seeing what is actually changing,” says Freeman.
In a May 2026 Nature Reviews Biodiversity paper co-authored with McGuire, he combines his field-based bird surveys with her paleo-ecological analysis of fossil and pollen records.
“We make models that predict how species and biological communities will respond to warming, then we go into nature to test those predictions, and finally refine our models when reality doesn’t match what we expected,” he says.
Another Georgia Tech faculty member, Steve Mussman, assistant professor in the College of Computing, brings a different skill set to the project. “I’m a computer and data scientist. I can help with the technical modeling aspects to make the analyses valid and useful,” he says.
One of the ways he does this is to identify “sampling bias” in camera-trap and citizen science data, which may not be uniformly sampled from the animal population. “I’m really excited to bring machine learning and statistics to a very practical problem,” he adds.
Together, these collaborations support WEPA’s overarching goal: to integrate past and present data into tools that help decision-makers prioritize conservation actions under climate uncertainty.
Lessons From Denmark
For the past nine months, McGuire has been on faculty development leave in Copenhagen, using the time to think deeply about habitat connectivity and how species move across altered landscapes. There, she found a natural comparison point.
“The entire country of Denmark is about the same geographic size as the region we’re interested in,” she noted. “And population-wise, it’s smaller than the Atlanta metro area.”
What struck her most was how thoroughly human activity has reshaped Denmark. “There’s no part of the entire country that hasn’t been very heavily modified by humans,” she said. “At this point, all conservation is gardening.”
By contrast, she sees the Southeast as having retained a foundation of the historical ecology. Forests in the Appalachians have been heavily affected, “but not nearly for as long, or to the same extent, as in Europe,” she said. “It’s kind of nice to think about how we still have a slightly more natural landscape to start with that we can then maintain moving forward.”
In Denmark, McGuire has been learning from conservation biologists who are developing tiered metrics to assess restoration success, from basic, low-cost measures such as tree diameter and understory volume to more advanced tools like genomic analyses. She hopes to adapt similar frameworks to help southeastern land managers and communities assess ecosystem health under tight budgets.
From Appalachia to Berkeley to Georgia Tech
McGuire grew up in southern Virginia, where her love for biodiversity and the southern Appalachians first took root. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she deepened her focus on how species and ecosystems respond to environmental change over long time scales.
She then completed postdoctoral research at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and at the University of Washington, where she expanded her quantitative and interdisciplinary toolkit — experience that now underpins her work at Georgia Tech, bridging ecology, paleontology, data science, and conservation planning.
“From my perspective, there’s an ethical imperative to maintain the world around us,” she said. “Being in nature and recognizing that we’re being good neighbors and good partners to the other species on the planet is just incredibly rewarding. We must leave the next generation a planet that is at least as healthy as the one we inherited."
Life Beyond the Lab
Beyond research and mentoring, McGuire enjoys hiking and biking. Much of her free time during her Copenhagen sabbatical has revolved around her young daughter, who turns 4 this summer.
McGuire looks forward to the occasion, which follows a cherished Danish school tradition: The child circles a picture of the sun once for each year of their life, holding a small Earth, while a parent holds up photos and tells a story from each year.
Returning Home
As she prepares to return to Georgia Tech in August after a year away, McGuire will resume her fieldwork and continue her conservation initiatives throughout the Southeast. She hopes to draw in collaborators from all across Georgia Tech to help build a truly regional, interdisciplinary effort around biodiversity and climate resilience.
“Within WEPA, we’re really excited to bring more people into this work. For anyone interested in conservation modeling, sensors and AI, policy, or how nature supports communities,” she said, “there’s a place in this regional effort to understand and protect biodiversity.”
]]>The seed grant program, administered by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), reaches faculty members from a diverse array of disciplines due to the generous support provided by broad-based partnerships in addition to the funds provided by the Sustainability Next committee. This year’s partners are the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the College of Design, BBISS, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, and the Institute for Data Engineering and Science.
The goal of the program is to nurture promising research areas for future large-scale collaborative sustainability research, research translation, and/or high-impact outreach; to provide mid-career faculty with leadership and community-building opportunities; and to broaden and strengthen the Georgia Tech sustainability community as a whole. The call for proposals was modeled after the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research’s Moving Teams Forward and Forming Teams programs.
This year’s seed grant awards align with the four main thematic areas in which BBISS aims to enhance Georgia Tech’s research to address some of our most pressing sustainability challenges:
The 2026 Sustainability Next Seed Grant awards are:
Forming Teams:
Moving Teams Forward:
Superfund sites are highly polluted areas designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as needing cleanup of hazardous waste that threatens human health or the environment. Superfund Research Centers are not physical buildings, but rather a coordinated set of research studies designed to solve complex environmental health problems, decrease exposure to contaminants, and improve human health. There are fewer than 24 Superfund Research Centers in the United States.
The new center will be Georgia’s first and will focus on industrial pollution—from contaminants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and toxaphene—in Glynn County. Situated on the state’s southeastern coast, the county is home to 17 identified hazardous waste sites and four Superfund sites that are on or proposed for the EPA’s National Priorities List of most polluted sites.
The center’s multiple research initiatives—which will be led by Emory University in collaboration with faculty from the University of Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, and Texas Tech University—will include:
“By combining cutting-edge exposure science and health research with direct community partnerships, the center will translate complex environmental data into practical information that can support healthier decisions for families, clinicians, and policymakers. It can provide a model for addressing environmental contamination and protecting public health in vulnerable communities nationwide,” says Dana Barr, PhD, professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and director of the Superfund Research Center.
In addition to the primary research studies, the center—which will be funded by NIEHS at approximately $15 million over five years—will include other projects concentrating on a variety of community-focused and community-driven initiatives. These projects will include:
“The issue of industrial contamination is inherently complex, and this Superfund Center represents a unique opportunity to address it from multiple angles. Our research will span everything from the toxicity and health impacts of these chemicals to their presence in the environment and innovative approaches for remediation,” says Noah Scovronick, PhD, associate professor of environmental health at Rollins and deputy director of the Superfund Research Center. “Just as important, the Center is designed to support community-led efforts to raise awareness and reduce exposures. By bringing these elements together, we aim to generate actionable knowledge and help answer questions that residents have been asking for decades.”
While the Superfund Research Center will be focused on the industrial pollution issues in one coastal county, the scientists say the data produced by the studies will provide meaningful benefits that extend far beyond Georgia.
“Even when production stops, these chemicals can continue to get into people’s bodies through lingering exposure pathways,” says Melanie Pearson, PhD, associate professor at Rollins. “Understanding how that happens is essential to reducing risk. Communities across the country are dealing with similar environmental contamination. Working in partnership with affected communities not only strengthens the science, but helps ensure it leads to meaningful, real-world benefits.”
"We are excited to be partners in this project," said Jill Gambill, executive director of the CEAR Hub and senior research associate for the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech in Savannah. "The residents of Glynn County have been asking hard questions about their health and environment for a long time. This center is our opportunity to put Georgia Tech's resources and expertise to work directly for the community.”
Article by Rob Spahr, Emory University
Editor's note. This story was first published by Georgia Tech Research.
“Organizations need to shift the way they treat bias in AI,” said Reeham Mohammed, a postdoctoral fellow in Georgia Tech’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. “Bias isn’t a problem that can be solved once and for all, and it affects everyone. We are all stakeholders in how this technology is implemented.”
Most efforts to address AI bias focus on fixing systems after they are built. Reeham proposes starting earlier. In a recent book chapter, she outlines an approach called participatory modeling, where stakeholders help map how AI systems function before they are deployed. The process reveals where bias can enter along the way.
Her framework draws on an unexpected comparison: the human immune system. When the body detects a virus, multiple systems respond and remain active until the threat is contained. Addressing AI bias, she argues, requires a similar approach — one that is continuous, adaptive, and systemwide.
“It takes the whole body to react to a virus, and the immune system stays active until it contains it,” Reeham said. “Stopping AI bias also requires ongoing intervention. AI is rapidly evolving, and our response should evolve with it.”
To test this idea, Reeham and her co-author, Erik Johnston of Arizona State University, wrote the recent chapter reporting on three empirical studies examining how bias can emerge across complex systems.
In Peoria, Illinois, the research mapped how health services, social services, and other support systems used AI and how it affected their operations. Three main issues stood out: Access barriers to resources kept some stakeholders out, AI systems reflected their designers more than the intended users, and the complexity of public institutions made public trust challenging.
Johnston analyzed 311 service request data, showing how citizen input, usage patterns, and response systems can reflect — and sometimes reinforce — existing disparities between neighborhoods. For example, low-income, ethnically diverse communities often don’t use 311 due to language barriers or low government trust. In a third study, Reeham conducted focus groups with 57 stakeholders at a higher education institution, including students, instructors, and administrators. These interviews explored perceptions of AI use and oversight within the higher education environment. Many of the conversations addressed faculty policies on student AI usage, with students reflecting frustration that they were not consulted in the making of these policies.
Together, the findings show AI systems cannot be designed effectively from the top down without excluding important groups that actually use the AI services. Instead, participatory modeling calls for stakeholders to be involved early to help identify where bias begins. Whether through town halls or focus groups, stakeholders should be part of discussions when designing a new system. Stakeholders also need to remain engaged after deployment to ensure that systems stay fair; this could include everything from community advisory boards to third-party consultants.
“People should know that if they see bias in AI, they need to speak up,” Reeham said. “We often assume machines are more objective than humans, but that’s not always true.”
CITATION: Johnston, E.W., Mohammed, R.R. (2026). How Participatory Modeling Can Enable Collective Bias Mitigation when AI Is Used across Systems and Institutions. In: Ahrweiler, P., Gilbert, N. (eds) Participatory Modelling and Simulation to Improve AI-based Public Social Services. Artificial Intelligence, Simulation and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-15283-1_13
]]>Declan Abernethy, a lecturer in the School of History and Sociology, joined the latest episode of Generating Buzz to share his insight into how the scope and scale of the World Cup compares to events of the past, how the city’s capacity to host “mega-events” has changed since the 1996 Olympic Games, and expectations for the visitor and viewer experience.
Abernethy teaches courses at the intersection of sport, history, and science and technology studies, with an emphasis on the culture and community around soccer.
Listen to the full podcast on the GT News Center website.
]]>As data center development accelerates across Georgia and beyond, understanding the relationship between AI infrastructure and water systems is becoming increasingly urgent. The BBISS Demystifying Data Centers Insights Series on March 27 focused on this issue, bringing together perspectives from engineering, utilities, and infrastructure planning. Moderated by Ameet Pinto, BBISS faculty director for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration, the discussion highlighted the water impacts of data centers and the need for systems thinking and collaboration across disciplines.
Why Systems Thinking Matters
A recurring theme was the mismatch between AI infrastructure and water systems. AI services are ubiquitous and scalable, while water resources are local, physically constrained, and managed by regionally fragmented utility systems. Data centers can be deployed rapidly, but water infrastructure evolves slowly. These differences complicate how impacts are measured and managed.
Water usage is more complex than it appears. While discussions often focus on water used directly for cooling, this represents only part of the total footprint. Significant water is used indirectly through electricity generation and the manufacturing of the computing hardware and cooling systems installed in data centers. As noted by Akanksha Menon, assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, distinguishing between direct, indirect, and embodied water use shows that impacts extend far beyond individual facilities.
These complexities make isolated solutions insufficient. Reducing water use in one location doesn’t necessarily reduce overall demand. For example, Douglas County’s collaboration with Google, as presented by Brian Keel, deputy director of Engineering for Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority, has invested in alternative water sources, such as treating wastewater from the Sweetwater Creek facility for non-potable cooling.
Yet the growing energy and water demands driven by accelerating AI use remain a major challenge. In particular, managing water as a finite resource becomes increasingly important because energy can be generated through different methods, but water cannot simply be created. Such complexity highlights the need for a systems approach to navigate overlapping and conflicting issues.
Why Collaboration Is Essential
The session also underscored that no single discipline or entity can fully address these challenges. Douglas County’s partnership with Google highlights not only collaboration between local agencies and industry, but also the need for coordination beyond individual jurisdictions, as water used for power generation or sourced outside the immediate region can create indirect pressures elsewhere.
John Ikeda, chief mission officer for the Water Environment Federation, discussed governance challenges associated with data center water use. Ikeda underlined the challenges in measurement and governance, noting that water impacts can be counterintuitive. While efforts that appear water-saving, such as avoiding on-site water use, can increase indirect water demand through additional electricity use, water-based cooling may reduce total systemwide demand. These complexities reveal the limits of single metrics and the need for frameworks that account for direct, indirect, and life-cycle impacts. Governance challenges can arise from complex practical issues, including rural communities’ limited experience working with industrial partners and broader social resistance to AI and AI infrastructure, which once again calls for large-scale collaboration.
The broader takeaway is that the challenges linking AI and water are deeply tied to structural mismatches between digital AI infrastructure and physical water systems: ubiquitous AI services versus physically constrained water resources; rapid data center growth versus the slower development of water infrastructure; and global digital demand versus regionally concentrated environmental impacts.
As these gaps complicate measurement, planning, and governance, the discussion highlighted the need for broader, systems-level perspectives and collaboration across disciplines and sectors, including engineering, computing, utilities, policy, and community stakeholders. Sustainable data center development depends on perspectives that consider water, energy, infrastructure, and community resilience together.
The Earth and Atmospheric Sciences 2026 Clough Lecture, co-sponsored by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, featured Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and author. Marvel opened a space for conversation about how we understand, feel, and communicate climate change and sustainability.
The evening opened with remarks from Georgia Tech College of Sciences Dean Susan Lozier, who recognized President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough for his support in making the lecture series possible. Alexander Robel, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, then introduced Marvel, describing her work as being at the intersection of climate science and public communication. Robel highlighted Marvel’s “warmth and fearless honesty” in her insistence “that science and feeling are not opposites.”
Based on her recent book Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, Marvel’s lecture questioned a long-standing assumption in science: that objectivity requires emotional distance. She argued instead that climate science is not only about data and models, but also about human experience. Scientific inquiry, she suggested, does not exclude emotion; rather, it can be informed and motivated by it.
Marvel began by reflecting on Earth’s uniqueness as a habitable planet, shaped by a delicate balance of atmosphere, temperature, and position in the solar system. The sense of awe inspired by the planet’s unique position, she noted, is often the starting point for scientific curiosity as well as a sense of commitment to a sustainable Earth. From there, she moved to consider the more difficult emotions, including anger and guilt, that may arise as the stability of that system becomes increasingly uncertain.
To illustrate how understanding of climate evolves, Marvel walked through a range of potential explanations for changes in the Earth’s climate — from orbital shifts and solar variation to volcanic activity and deforestation. What stood out was her skillful interweaving of science and storytelling. For example, she noted how the atmospheric conditions created by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia influenced European artistic expression. Citing the hyper-real intensity of the sky’s color in Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting, The Scream, Marvel highlighted the role of human feeling and imagination in making sense of complex environmental change.
Next, Marvel also suggested that climate modeling is not simply a technical exercise. It can be deeply intertwined with narratives about the future. Different assumptions about human behavior, policy decisions, and technological development produce different climate outcomes. In this sense, models reflect not only data, but also the stories societies tell about where they are headed and what future they would like to have.
The lecture concluded with Marvel emphasizing the importance of framing climate challenges in ways that connect with lived experience and a sustainable future, suggesting that storytelling can help inspire more meaningful communication and action. She pointed to the “hero’s journey” as one framework for climate storytelling — one in which moments of difficulty and uncertainty are inseparable from growth, purpose, and joy, and where action becomes central to moving toward a better future.
Marvel now works with Project Drawdown, who have developed the Drawdown Explorer, an open-access platform that helps individuals and governments assess everyday decisions and public policies in terms of climate outcomes. The Drawdown Explorer frames daily practices as part of a broader journey toward a more sustainable future.
The lecture offered an engaging and inspiring perspective, encouraging the audience to think more actively about how sustainability is communicated, what stories are told, and how emotional engagement can contribute to meaningful climate action.
]]>Marta Hatzell to Lead BBISS External Partnership Efforts
Marta Hatzell has been appointed as faculty director for Strategic Engagement and Partnerships. Hatzell is a Woodruff Professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Her research builds the foundation for sustainable food, energy, and water systems through electrified catalysis and separations.
Across institutes, research centers, federal agencies, national laboratories, and industry partnerships, Hatzell’s work has operated at the intersection of research, infrastructure, policy, and implementation. She has worked closely with power utilities, industry partners, and federal sponsors. In this role, Hatzell will help shape BBISS’s external-facing strategy involving federal agencies, national laboratories, and university partners. She will bring her experience and expertise to steward strategic partnerships and strengthen large-scale collaborative research efforts, working closely with Ameet Pinto, faculty director for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration.
Xiao Liu to Advance AI and Resilience Research at BBISS
Xiao Liu has been appointed as faculty director for Resilience and AI. Liu is the David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research advances statistical methods and machine learning, with applications spanning wildfire risk analysis, climate and environmental modeling, infrastructure systems, and data-driven resilience research.
Liu’s appointment is part of BBISS’s growing focus on connecting AI, resilience, and sustainability research across disciplines, particularly in areas related to sustainable AI and AI for climate and sustainability science. His work on wildfire ignition risk quantification for power delivery networks, wildfire spread modeling, and remote-sensing analysis of wildfire aerosols demonstrates a commitment to using machine learning and AI to address complex environmental and infrastructure challenges. In this role, Liu will lead efforts to advance AI-driven approaches to resilience and will co-steward the AI, Sustainability, and Resilience Initiative in partnership with Josiah Hester, faculty director for Civic Innovation and AI.
Matthew Realff to Lead BBISS Education Initiatives
Matthew J. Realff has been appointed as faculty director for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education. Realff is a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he has served on the faculty since 1993. Realff’s decades of research and education leadership center on advancing sustainable systems, with an emphasis on integrating process systems engineering with environmental and economic analysis. He has contributed to the development of sustainability policy, environmentally informed design, recycling systems, and industry standards.
Realff’s appointment supports BBISS’s ongoing efforts to strengthen interdisciplinary graduate education and workforce development aligned with Georgia Tech’s broader sustainability strategy. His commitment to sustainable systems education and his prior leadership roles, including chair of the Sustainability Education and Curriculum Committee, position him to expand interdisciplinary training and pathways for students who want to tackle sustainability challenges across boundaries.
Beril Toktay, BBISS executive director, said, “I’m delighted to welcome Marta, Xiao, and Matthew to the BBISS faculty leadership team. These appointments greatly expand BBISS’s capacity to address sustainability challenges crossing disciplinary, institutional, and sectoral lines.”
]]>"Data centers are important, and so are their cooling needs. I don't think they're going away," she said. "But there needs to be a lot of investigation to develop guidelines for operating these facilities based on how microbes behave so that we can get the economic benefit and protect the communities where they operate."
Tracing Viruses Across Georgia's Water Systems
Through a Sustainability Next Seed Grant project administered by the BBISS, Graham's lab focuses on water reuse safety, particularly in Georgia communities facing water stress. Her team works with municipal reuse facilities, where, she said, “We look at what comes out of wastewater treatment plants, what exists in the natural waters they discharge treated water into, and what comes into downstream drinking water plants at their intake." Her team is especially interested in pathogens such as viruses and phages.
Phages — viruses that infect bacteria rather than humans — pose no direct human hazard. Still, because they travel through water systems similarly to viruses that can harm people, they serve as powerful ecological markers. "They can be good surrogates for human viruses," she said.
This work builds on Graham's wastewater surveillance experience dating to 2018, which became central during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her lab helped develop actionable public health guidelines to show how wastewater can be used to monitor for mpox outbreaks.
From Cooling Towers to Data Centers: A Proactive Public Health Lens
While Graham's Sustainability Next Seed Grant project isn't exclusively about data centers, the connection to their cooling systems is direct. Data centers need to dissipate massive quantities of heat — typically with water-hungry cooling towers — and are increasingly turning to treated wastewater as a supply.
"Reuse can supply more water of sufficient quality for these cooling systems," Graham said. But beyond the quantity issue lies an underexplored dimension: microbial risk.
Cooling towers have long been linked to Legionnaires' disease, with documented outbreaks occurring miles downwind of a source. "For most healthy people, it may not be a problem," Graham noted, "but for the immunocompromised and elderly, it can be a really big problem." What makes this especially concerning is how little is known. "It's not well quantified. It's not well characterized," she said. "There's been no national study collecting cooling-tower waters and looking at the prevalence of these bacteria."
There is currently no systematic, national effort to characterize the prevalence of Legionella and other opportunistic pathogens in any cooling towers — let alone the potential additional risk of building more cooling systems to accommodate the needs of hyperscale data centers.
BBISS has been central to sharpening her focus here. Exposing Graham to colleagues working on energy and water quantity challenges helped her connect the microbiology dots. "A lot of the data center ideas I've started to think about have been generated by BBISS faculty presenting their own work," she said. "Given that cooling towers are already a problem in pre-AI settings, it seems like a good proactive idea to be aware of the problem going into the age of AI."
Graham is now writing proposals to study microbial communities in cooling towers, analyzing water, air, and biofilms under different operating conditions. Her call to industry is direct: Partner early. "I would be extremely happy to collaborate with anyone interested in this problem. Industry buy-in would be critical — and so helpful — to get it done."
Heat Waves, Infrastructure, and Legionella
Graham's lab also examines how climate-driven extreme heat affects drinking water systems. Working with utilities in the Southwest, her team studies how prolonged heat waves warm distribution-system water, accelerate disinfectant loss, and shape the persistence of microorganisms in drinking water distribution systems.
"We were able to see temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit) — with a maximum of 52 (126 degrees Fahrenheit) — which is very warm," she said. "Most of the literature refers to testing conducted at much lower temperatures, like room temperature." Such elevated temperatures, combined with nutrients and stagnation, can allow opportunistic pathogens to thrive.
Teaching and Outreach
Graham teaches undergraduate environmental engineering and graduate courses in quantitative microbial risk assessment and public health microbiology. She serves as associate editor for Water Research and has hosted a microbiology outreach workshop for K-12 students through Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC).
The through line across her work is consistent: science that anticipates risk and informs action. "As we expand this data center infrastructure, a proactive approach should be taken to understanding concerns that, maybe, haven't been fully addressed yet."
In a region and a world betting big on AI, her research offers a timely reminder: Progress depends not just on computing power, but on ensuring that the water that keeps these systems from melting down remains safe for the communities living alongside them.
]]>Candidates for the fifth annual CoE Faculty Excellence Awards were nominated by their peers or submitted self-nominations. Materials were reviewed by a committee of academic and research faculty members within the College.
Two of these faculty award winners, Hong Yeo and Omar Inan, are members of the Institute for People and Technology. Read the full CoE article >>
]]>Candidates for the fifth annual CoE Faculty Excellence Awards were nominated by their peers or submitted self-nominations. Materials were reviewed by a committee of academic and research faculty members within the College.
Two of these faculty are members of the Institute for People and Technology. Read more >>
]]>College of Engineering Faculty Members with Excellence Awards (Akanksha Menon, Hong Yeo, Kinsey Herrin, Lauren Steimle, Kevin Haas, Omer Inan, Scott Hollister, and Kim Paige).
The 3-year project will examine how obstacles, such as training and certification requirements, geographic issues, awareness gaps, and shifts in federal policy, may affect employment in the sector.
"It’s a good time for a project like this because the renewable energy industry continues to grow and it’s at a point at which it needs to take charge of its own future. This study will help them start making some of those decisions,” said Graff.
Graff is in her first year on campus at Georgia Tech, and is now the principal investigator on a project that spans 13 states and includes researchers from the University of Massachusetts Boston, Northwestern University, and colleagues at Georgia Tech.
The main goal of the project is to understand issues that may complicate employment options for aspirants interested in jobs in the renewable energy sector, which continues to see employment gains despite project cancelations and headwinds due in part to policy shifts by the federal government.
For instance, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in September that it expects wind turbine service technician and solar photovoltaic installer will be the nation’s fastest growing occupations through 2034.
In Georgia, the clean energy advocacy organization E2 reported that jobs in Georgia grew at five times the rate as the rest of the state’s economy in 2025.
The researchers want to first understand how familiar job searchers are with clean energy jobs and what barriers stand in the way for them to be able to find jobs in the sector, including application hurdles, language skills, and location. Part of the work will include in-depth case studies across the country, a virtual workshop, and other outputs.
They then plan to produce policy recommendations.
“The goal is to not only to identify these burdens, but also think of ways to creatively reduce them without sacrificing rigor or training while recruiting the most talented people possible,” Graff said.
Graff’s Carter School colleague Professor Dan Matisoff will act as a connection with the clean energy industry and help craft the policy recommendations.
She expects the study, which is called “Investigating Administrative Burdens in the Renewable Energy Workforce,” will be completed in 2030.
]]>Biology major Sonali Kaluri is a STEM expert. Spanish major Sonali Kaluri is a language and culture expert.
Put the two together and you have a sharply educated researcher with a passion for healthcare. Kaluri is headed to Barcelona after graduation this Spring as a Fulbright Scholar to study the health of migrant workers under the digital platform economy. She plans to later embark on a career in medicine.
It’s something she says she couldn’t have done without her experiences at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
“You need to have a deep understanding of people and the systems that surround us to be able to effectively and ethically help people as a physician,” said Kaluri, who attended Georgia Tech as a Stamps President's Scholar.
Kaluri’s Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies degree from the School of Modern Languages helped shape that understanding, including through classes studying Spanish literature.
“Literature is such an important window into the lives of people different from you,” Kaluri said. “Studying another language’s great works is an excellent way to understand the experiences of different people and build that empathy, which translates to real life for me in being able to better connect with the people I meet.”
Kaluri, who was fluent in her parents’ languages of Telugu and Kannada before arriving at Georgia Tech, had always wanted to combine language training with her work in healthcare.
“Early in high school and college, I would shadow doctors, and if they had a patient that couldn’t speak English, I’d be able to follow along with the conversation even without an interpreter using my knowledge from high school Spanish classes,” Kaluri said. “I figured that one day as a doctor, it would be cool to be able to talk directly to a larger number of patients without needing an interpreter and to be able to build greater rapport with patients. That was the spark for why I wanted to pursue more rigorous study of Spanish.”
Her interest in medicine derives from seeing how cultural norms around gender and caregiving can shape and even sideline women’s own healthcare needs.
“I realized that was a big part of why I wanted to pursue medicine — to advocate for people on a deeper level, to try to bridge these gaps that I've noticed in research, in the clinic, et cetera,” Kaluri said.
Kelly Comfort, one of Kaluri’s Spanish professors, said Kaluri’s success shows what’s possible with a combined STEM and liberal arts education.
“Sonali is the kind of student who proves that the humanities are not separate from science and medicine — they strengthen them. Her ability to think critically about culture, identity, and social systems through her ALIS major has shaped her into a more thoughtful future healthcare professional,” Comfort said.
“She is not only highly skilled in pre-health and pre-medicine fields, but she is also multilingual, interculturally competent, empathetic, reflective, and prepared to improve the human condition across cultures, languages, and borders,” Comfort said.
“Aaron is a trusted colleague and leader who will guide the Carter School expertly as we navigate this transition,” said Amanda Murdie, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
Levine led and implemented many transformational, high-impact efforts as the Ivan Allen College’s associate dean for research and outreach. He supported interdisciplinary research during record-breaking years, expanded research support programs and excellence awards, communicated the impact of research to external and internal stakeholders, established connections with early-career faculty, and co-created a mid-career academy for associate professors.
Levine will continue to serve as the interim executive director of the Georgia Tech’s Institute for Technology and Civic Leadership and participate in the Faculty Executive Leadership Academy.
Levine’s research addresses the intersection of public policy and biomedical innovation, particularly in the context of stem cells, cell therapy, and assisted reproduction. He has a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton University, a M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and a B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Levine will step down as Ivan Allen College’s associate dean for research and outreach on May 31. Effective June 1, the senior associate dean for strategic initiatives position will expand to include college-wide outreach and strategic partnership efforts.
An expedited internal search for the next associate dean for research will launch in summer 2026. Richard Utz, senior associate dean for strategic initiatives, will temporarily oversee the College’s research portfolio.
]]>GT² is a newly established research initiative at Georgia Tech that focuses on discovery science, engineering innovation, and AI-enabled decision tools to address urgent challenges at the intersection of environmental and community resilience in the Southeast. The initiative fosters research in direct service to regional communities through public-private partnerships, and it provides opportunities for graduate student engagement.
The BHIC-GT² research fund and partnership will pursue shared initiatives in the fields of coastal sustainability, ecosystem health, and environmental resilience. By combining BHIC’s applied, field-based conservation work with Georgia Tech’s expertise in technological innovation and data analysis, new opportunities for impactful research will be created through graduate student projects and community engagement.
About the Partnership
Like the GT² initiative, BHIC’s Johnston Center for Coastal Sustainability was created to translate research into real-world impact. BHIC established the Johnston Center as a research partnership and education hub for sustainability initiatives on Bald Head Island, with the broader goal of advancing coastal sustainability across the Southeast. Seed funding for the Center was provided in 2021 by Dick and Pat Johnston, longtime supporters of BHIC.
Dick, a Georgia Tech IM 1962 alumnus, and Pat Johnston shared their enthusiasm for the BHIC and Georgia Tech collaboration, noting:
“We are delighted to see our two favorite institutions come together through this partnership. It brings additional resources, expertise, and leadership to our shared focus on keeping the historic tagline ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ in the hearts of future generations.”
Joel Kostka, Faculty Director of GT² who also serves as Tom and Marie Patton Distinguished Professor and associate chair for Research in the School of Biological Sciences with a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech added:
“The Bald Head Island Conservancy and its Johnston Center for Coastal Sustainability exemplify how place‑based conservation and rigorous science can work together to create real impact. The Bald Head Island Conservancy’s long‑term stewardship, research infrastructure, and commitment to translating science into action make it an ideal partner for Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow as we advance collaborative research that strengthens coastal resilience across the Southeast.”
This partnership will focus on Georgia Tech graduate student research projects that use innovative technology and data analyses to directly support the conservation work of BHIC.
Graduate student research already plays an important role in BHIC’s conservation efforts. Gabie Krueger, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student in Ocean Sciences and Engineering and BHIC’s 2025-26 Johnston Graduate Fellow in Coastal Sustainability, has been working with BHIC scientists on a salt marsh ecology project that examined how ribbed mussels and fiddler crabs influence the health of Bald Head Island’s dominant salt marsh grass Spartina alterniflora. These flora-fauna interactions serve as primary indicators of marsh health, so her research is important for understanding the resilience of Bald Head Island’s salt marsh to environmental concerns such as sea-level rise and development.
Through the BHIC-GT² partnership, Georgia Tech student researchers who work with the Conservancy will also gain invaluable experience with local conservation efforts and community engagement.
G. Christopher Shank, Ph.D., Executive Director of BHIC, commented:
“The Bald Head Island Conservancy is thrilled about this opportunity to create a formal research partnership with Georgia Tech, one of the nation’s most esteemed research universities. It is recognition of the quality of conservation studies we are currently pursuing at the Conservancy and it also augments the impact of our work for BHI and beyond because of the technological and data analysis talent that Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow will bring to this partnership.”
Why This Matters
This research fund and partnership represents an important step forward in strengthening connections between academic research and applied conservation institutions. Together, BHIC and GT² aim to inform coastal management decisions, support resilience planning, engage students, and advance research that benefits coastal ecosystems and communities across the southeastern U.S.
Looking Ahead
Additional details about joint initiatives, research priorities, and collaborative opportunities will be shared in the coming months.
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Chris Shank
Executive Director
Bald Head Island Conservancy
shank@bhic.org
Georgia has become the world’s second-largest data center market, a shift that has brought economic opportunity as well as concerns about water use, energy demand, land development, and impacts on host communities. One recurring theme throughout the event was the tendency for environmental and resource issues to overshadow other important policy questions about community impact, transparency, and long-term governan
Introductory remarks were made by Beril Toktay, executive director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, and Michael Best, executive director of the Institute for People and Technology.
Verghese Jacob, senior vice president of technology at the DayOne corporation, delivered the keynote address. Jacob discussed how DayOne works with governments in Asia to plan data centers and said early policy development and consistent communication can help communities better understand the impact and manage growth for long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships between governments and communities.
The event also included a BBISS Connect Workshop, led by Kristin Janacek, a senior extension professional with BBISS. The workshop built on BBISS’s Sustainability for Data Centers Insights Series and asked participants to contribute to a collaborative “blue paper” intended to guide future research partnerships and responses to funding opportunities.
Two panel discussions explored the social and political dimensions of data center development. The first, moderated by Cindy Lin, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing, focused on international perspectives. Panelists included Celine Benoit of the Atlanta Regional Commission, Matthew Wesley Williams of Groundswell, Kahlil Bostick of Ryan Companies, and Ding Wang of Google Research. They discussed global examples of community-centered planning and the need for transparency in negotiations.
A second panel, moderated by Allen Hyde, an associate professor in the School of History and Sociology, examined collaboration between communities and government agencies. Panelists were Georgia Public Service Commissioner Peter Hubbard; Donnie Beamer, senior technology advisor for the City of Atlanta; Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Zachary Hansen; and Michael Czajkowski, director of advocacy for Science for Georgia. The group highlighted the importance of proactive regulation and clear communication with residents as data center development accelerates.
Speakers throughout the day emphasized that Atlanta’s continued growth in the data center sector will require coordinated planning and meaningful engagement with affected communities. The event closed with a call for all stakeholders to be proactive about creating policies that balance the technological and economic promise of the data center building boom with environmental and community concerns.
]]>When Boys and Girls Club Digital Growth Director Tiffany Simmons met with Georgia Tech students at the organization’s national headquarters in January, her directive was simple: "dream big.”
That challenge served as the catalyst for a collaboration between the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) and the Boys and Girls Clubs that has culminated in a commercial that’s now slated for national distribution. The project will serve as a strong portfolio item for the students as they pursue future opportunities in film production while helping build awareness and donations for the Boys and Girls Clubs.
“It was very exciting to get to work on something with such a big impact and real-life application,” said Lila Parker, the project’s student director. She will graduate this Spring with a degree in Literature, Media, and Communication.
Parker’s vision was selected from a series of competitive pitches delivered by six students enrolled in a special topics cinematography course overseen by John Thornton, LMC's director of film and media. Students Charity Dawson, Jordan Green, Natalie Howlette, Taylor Lee, and Erica Yun comprised the crew and took on various roles to make the commercial a reality.
“During our first meeting, Tiffany told us to dream big. That stuck with me and evolved into the concept for the ad, which I titled, ‘Not Just a Dream,’ Parker said. “The ad starts with a kid sleeping and transitions into a whimsical, dreamy sequence showing pursuits like art and athletics. It then switches to show that this is actually reality for these kids at the Boys and Girls Clubs. The message is that the club provides the resources to make these big dreams come true.”
The partnership originated when Simmons sought a fresh perspective from a younger demographic to modernize the organization’s creative content.
The production involved a two-day shoot, including location filming at a Boys and Girls Club venue and studio work in the Skiles Building, where students designed and constructed their own sets.
Beyond academic credit, participants gained hands-on experience in pre-production, script finalization, and equipment coordination.
The resulting commercial will be integrated into the Boys and Girls Clubs’ paid advertising on television and YouTube to drive awareness and donations. Simmons said she intends to share those metrics with the students to help bolster their resumes.
“In my twelve years of marketing, these students are by far the most advanced I have ever worked with,” Simmons said.
The initiative, which Simmons said she expects will become an annual partnership, highlights LMC's commitment to providing students with industry-standard opportunities that bridge the gap between the classroom and the professional media landscape, according to Thornton.
“It’s a tremendous advantage for college graduates who are interested in pursuing film as a career to leave school with meaningful real-world examples of the kind of work they’re capable of doing,” he said. “These are the kinds of opportunities we’re excited to offer at LMC, and we’re grateful to the Boys and Girls Club for the opportunity to partner on this great project.”
The School of Literature, Media, and Communication offers a concentration in media, including film, as part of the Bachelor of Science in Literature, Media, and Communication, as well as a minor in film and media studies.
Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
]]>The North American hurricane season is, for many on the East Coast and Gulf Coast, six months of vigilance, and among the resources most likely to be consulted during this time are storm tracking maps. If you learn that your home might be in the path of a storm, you probably actively search for the most current version of one of these maps. Bruce Walker, a professor in the schools of Psychology and Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, wants to ensure that storm-tracking maps and other emergency and environmental communication tools convey the most important information in the most understandable manner to the largest number of people possible. “Weather and climate affect every single person on Earth,” he said, “so no one can be left behind when it comes to these critical communications.”
Walker is director of the Center for Inclusive Climate Communication (CICC) at Georgia Tech. CICC is a new and growing consortium of researchers, organizations, agencies, and companies whose goal is to ensure that climate information of all types is widely accessible. The center is housed in the School of Psychology but has affiliated faculty from all around campus, and several universities around the U.S. CICC is expanding internationally as well, developing sub-networks in Europe, Africa, and Australia.
As part of its efforts, the CICC is working with the coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia. Situated about 65 miles northeast of Jacksonville, Florida, Brunswick is no stranger to hurricanes and tropical storms. The city is working to develop a comprehensive Community-Based Emergency Warning System, which will include maps and other emergency communications that ensure language, culture, level of education, or other differences in lived experience are not barriers to residents understanding critical safety information. This work is supported by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) and the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) through the Sustainability Next Seed Grant Program.
Hurricane maps and related information can come from many sources. Government agencies, municipal emergency management agencies, media outlets, and meteorological organizations all may have their own versions, which vary in how they visually display data. The information used to generate the maps is collected and distributed to the public domain by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) every few hours. The maps that the public sees show the important information that one would expect, but they may not do so with an eye for how different people might interpret, or misinterpret, that info.
“Once we determine the best way to present hurricane data to the most people, we will work with content providers to standardize the way they generate these resources,” says Walker. “Reliable data and what we call inclusive communications lead to better decisions by the public.”
The CICC investigators’ process aspires to the philosophy of Universal Design, but since no design can be 100% universal, they refer to what they create as “inclusive designs.” Inclusive design means adapting to the diverse needs of the broadest possible audience. Since the language skills, education, lived experience, and physical ability of the person in the storm’s path can vary, these maps must present information in many alternative ways.
For those who can see the map, for example, improving the visual design (e.g., a better use of symbols and a clearer visual layout) can help. For those with vision impairment, adding audio layers (called “sonification”) to the map can help. For many people, simply comprehending a map can itself be a challenge. In that case, adding more explanations about how to interpret a map, what different terms mean, and what the storm is likely to do can make it more understandable.
All of these strategies provide multiple means of accessing, understanding, and acting on the data represented by the map. When studying how to design inclusive maps, soliciting input and suggestions from as many different potential users as possible helps the CICC team ensure that vital information is understandable and useful to the most people.
One of CICC’s primary goals is to take lessons from their research projects, such as the inclusive hurricane map, and derive general principles for the effective design of emergency communications tools of all types. While every disaster, from floods and wildfires to tsunamis, tornadoes, and ice storms, will require the distribution of unique pieces of data, the CICC researchers and their community partners are identifying design strategies that will make these communications understandable and actionable to everyone.
Walker and other CICC researchers engage students in this work. Isabella Martincic, a Ph.D. student in engineering psychology, shepherds many of the center’s research and design efforts, including AccessCORPS, a team that makes educational materials more inclusive and accessible. Jessica Herring and Ishan Vepa, students in the M.S. program in human-computer interaction, have led the hurricane map project, including overhauling existing maps from recent storms by applying CICC design guidelines to them. And undergraduate student Cal Price has been the lead researcher on the Brunswick collaboration, engaging with both community members and civic officials.
These efforts — adding more features, revamping existing maps, and consulting with weather experts and end users — demonstrate how seemingly simple changes can lead to significantly better interpretations of the data by the target audience. The research behind the inclusive hurricane maps will be presented at the 23rd International Web for All Conference, which takes place later this year.
CICC researchers are also engaging in partnerships with companies that see the potential benefits of this approach. Data visualization company Highcharts, for example, is a supporter and collaborator. Since their business models revolve around distributing such information, they have a keen interest in the lessons learned from CICC research. CICC does not regard its findings as intellectual property; they prefer that good design guidelines proliferate.
“Ultimately, our goal is for anyone to be able to look at a communication tool, quickly grasp critical pieces of information that may impact their lives and well-being, and take appropriate actions,” Walker said, “whether that be for the daily weather or for an impending natural disaster.”
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