Lindsey will support BBISS’s research, education, and partnership activities across Georgia Tech and beyond. Working closely with BBISS leadership, faculty, staff, students, and external partners, he will coordinate Institute programs, support leadership operations, facilitate stakeholder engagement, and help ensure smooth day-to-day operations.

Andrew brings more than four years of experience in project management, operations, communications, compliance oversight, and organizational improvement in higher education and nonprofit settings. Most recently, he served as project intake and communications specialist at Kennesaw State University. Before that, Lindsey spent nearly four years with the Southern States Police Benevolent Association, first as project coordinator and later as project manager.

Lindsey’s background also includes experience in higher education instruction and mentoring. As a teaching assistant with Georgia Tech’s Grand Challenges program, he worked directly with student teams tackling complex societal issues, providing guidance on research development, collaborative problem-solving, and project execution.

He earned a B.A. in history, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Georgia in 2021, and completed a Master of Public Administration in 2025.

“Andrew’s experience supporting complex projects, improving organizational processes, coordinating across diverse stakeholder groups, and commitment to mission-driven work make him a strong addition to the team,” said BBISS Director of Business Administration Kristina Chatfield.

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

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

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

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

Beyond Conventional Fracture Testing

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

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

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

An Honest View of Sustainability

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

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

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

From Cracks to Circularity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgia Tech will play a key role in the newly announced Genesis Mission, a national initiative harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to propel scientific discovery and address challenges in health, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, and national security. The White House announced the first Genesis Mission projects on July 22 as part of a more than $5 billion investment in AI-enabled science and technology. 

Brian Magerko has been appointed as the James and Mary Wesley Chair for New Media Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Magerko is a Regents’ Professor of Digital Media and head of the Expressive Machinery Lab. He has served as director of graduate studies for the Digital Media Program for eight years and will step down from this leadership role on July 31.  

School of City and Regional Planning Assistant Professor Rounaq Basu knows it, too. So he and his students (supported by the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics) created the Cool Routes app to help people in Atlanta find the most shaded — and most importantly, the coolest — paths if they have to walk or bike outside.

Describing Atlanta’s latest heatwave, “This is great for research, but not so great for residents,” Basu said. “I like to walk and bike everywhere, and it’s too hot. I need to know where the shaded paths are!”

The Cool Routes app currently covers 10 cities in the U.S., including Atlanta. Users choose a city from a dropdown menu, provide a trip start and destination, tell the app whether they’re walking or biking, and select route preferences. The app then generates up to three routes to the user’s destination, allowing them to compare how much cooler one route is from another. Further refinement of routes is offered after that.

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“We would talk, not just about public policy, but about life,” said Cheryl Leggon, a retired associate professor in the Carter School.

According to those who knew her well, those small exchanges outside D.M. Smith reflected the way Persons, a professor in the Carter School, moved through the world. She built friendships and drew whole organizations together, one conversation at a time. Over more than 30 years, those connections became the bedrock of her remarkable career and legacy. 

Following her passing in July, her colleagues and friends reflected on the lasting impact of those relationships.

Building Communities

“Georgia was committed to bringing together scholars in her field,” said Willie Pearson Jr., a retired Regents’ Professor in the School of History and Sociology. 

She specialized in connecting policy and political science scholars to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Persons played an active role in founding the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and edited the National Political Science Review, the Conference’s refereed scholarly journal, for ten years — an unusual distinction in scholarship and service.

Persons’ talent for bringing people together also extended beyond colleagues in her discipline. She served all of Georgia Tech’s faculty as an ADVANCE Professor and was active in the Atlanta University Center Consortium, which promotes collaboration and public service among its historically Black colleges and universities member institutions.

“As one of the Carter School’s founding faculty members, Georgia encouraged others to engage with contemporary social policy issues and with the larger community,” said Aaron Levine, interim chair of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. “The School wouldn’t be where it is today without her.”

Widening the Doors

Persons’ talent for building communities and supporting others began during her undergraduate years at Southern University in Louisiana, where she studied under eminent scholar Jewel Limar Prestage, the first Black woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in political science. Throughout her career, Persons followed her mentor’s example, encouraging those who were pursuing academic paths in political science and other fields.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in political science at Southern, Persons earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in American government and politics, urban politics and policy, and political development.

“She earned her Ph.D. at MIT at a time when there were far too few African Americans — and even fewer African American women — pursuing graduate work in such spaces. That achievement alone speaks to her determination, discipline, and exceptional capacity,” said Kaye Husbands Fealing, a professor in the Carter School and former dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

“But Georgia did not simply enter those rooms; she helped widen the doors for others,” she added.

As a teacher and mentor, Persons changed lives. 

“Your laid-back yet academically enriching teaching style is unique among the faculty, motivating me to take any course in which your name is associated,” Husbands Fealing quoted one of her students as saying. “It is under [your] insights that I am inspired to pursue a career in Public Policy.”

Persons was also known for weaving personal experience into her teaching and research in ways that students found meaningful and inspiring. 

“Georgia did more than teach courses. She opened intellectual pathways. She helped students see history more clearly, policy more critically, and their own futures more expansively,” said Husbands Fealing.

Scholarship with Human Consequence

At Georgia Tech, Persons published widely on African American politics, American national government, national institutional processes, health policy, and health disparities. She was awarded the highly competitive Ford Foundation Fellowship and was named an American Political Science Association Fellow. 

“Georgia had a gift for looking honestly at history — not as a fixed account of the past, but as a living record of struggle, resilience, exclusion, and possibility,” said Husbands Fealing.

Recently, Persons conducted research on health policy and healthcare safety nets. She was also consulting for the Fulton-Dekalb Hospital Authority. Her work focused not only on the problems with the healthcare system, but also on its potential and possible futures. 

“Georgia’s scholarship mattered because it was never detached from human consequence,” said Husbands Fealing. “She studied institutions not as abstractions, but as forces that shape opportunity, dignity, health, leadership, and democratic belonging.”

An Enduring Legacy

Across her decades at Georgia Tech, the qualities colleagues remember the most about Georgia Persons are the same ones reflected in those conversations outside D.M. Smith: her warmth, generosity, and remarkable ability to bring people together.

Associate Professor Hans Klein recalled that in his first semester at Georgia Tech, Persons saw him in the hallway and joked that she thought he was one of the undergraduates. They laughed, and that good-humored warmth remained a hallmark of their relationship. (As recalled to Kaye Husbands Fealing.)

“I had the privilege of knowing and working with her for many years and have many memories of our long association. Georgia was a unique colleague, and will be greatly missed,” said Professor Philip Shapira.

“Generations of students and faculty benefited from her wisdom and experience,” said Dean’s Distinguished Professor Mary Frank Fox. “I will miss Georgia — ever, always.”

Lindsey will support BBISS’s research, education, and partnership activities across Georgia Tech and beyond. Working closely with BBISS leadership, faculty, staff, students, and external partners, he will coordinate Institute programs, support leadership operations, facilitate stakeholder engagement, and help ensure smooth day-to-day operations. 

Andrew brings more than four years of experience in project management, operations, communications, compliance oversight, and organizational improvement in higher education and nonprofit settings. Most recently, he served as project intake and communications specialist at Kennesaw State University. Before that, Lindsey spent nearly four years with the Southern States Police Benevolent Association, first as project coordinator and later as project manager.

Lindsey’s background also includes experience in higher education instruction and mentoring. As a teaching assistant with Georgia Tech’s Grand Challenges program, he worked directly with student teams tackling complex societal issues, providing guidance on research development, collaborative problem-solving, and project execution. 

He earned a B.A. in history, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Georgia in 2021, and completed a Master of Public Administration in 2025. 

“Andrew’s experience supporting complex projects, improving organizational processes, coordinating across diverse stakeholder groups, and commitment to mission-driven work make him a strong addition to the team,” said BBISS Director of Business Administration Kristina Chatfield.

Superfund sites are highly contaminated areas designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for hazardous waste cleanup. Superfund Research Centers are coordinated research programs — not physical buildings — designed to address complex environmental health problems, reduce exposure to contaminants, and improve public health. Fewer than 24 exist nationwide.

A Community Asking Questions for Decades

For generations, residents of the city of Brunswick and Glynn County have lived near former industrial facilities that produced or used chemicals such as toxaphene, PCBs, and mercury. Many have long suspected that these contaminants were affecting their health, yet lacked scientific evidence to validate their concerns.

That began to change in 2023, when Emory University researchers launched the Glynn County human exposure study at the invitation of residents. The study found elevated levels of legacy pollutants in the blood of many participants, confirming what community members had feared.

“I want more neighbors to have the opportunity to be tested and to learn about the project,” said resident Semona Holmes. “Because now more folks are saying, ‘I want to be tested.’”

Others on the coast echoed the need for continued investigation. “Exposure isn’t always uniform,” said Brunswick resident Michael Staley. “Some residents may have higher levels depending on their proximity, diet, or occupation. I hope this gives our neighbors a clearer understanding of how our communities are affected, because often regular people feel uncertain and overlooked.”

Residents have repeatedly asked for more testing, more transparency, and more opportunities to understand what is in their soil, water, and bodies. “I would like to see an expansion of the exposure study because the soil needs to be tested,” said Larry Owens, who lives near the Hercules-Pinova site, a former chemical plant that closed in 2023.

Another resident, John Freeman, emphasized the need for broad participation. “They need to make sure everybody in our neighborhood knows they are going to be doing research so that everybody will have the chance to come out and get tested and see what’s in their bodies.”

Building on Community Momentum

The new Superfund Research Center will expand this work significantly. Led by Emory University in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Georgia, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, and Texas Tech University, the center will focus on five major research areas:

• Human health research — evaluating links between chemical exposures and metabolic diseases.
• Toxicity testing — assessing how contaminants harm health.
• Environmental sampling — identifying soil, water, and other exposure pathways.
• Extreme weather modeling — studying how storms and flooding move hazardous chemicals.
• Remediation research — evaluating low‑impact cleanup strategies suitable for sensitive coastal ecosystems.

“By combining cutting-edge exposure science and health research with direct community partnerships, the center will translate complex environmental data into practical information that supports healthier decisions for families, clinicians, and policymakers,” says Dana Barr, professor of environmental health at Emory University and director of the Superfund Research Center.

Barr credited community leadership for the center's existence. “This project is a direct consequence of community support in many forms. We would not be here without your efforts, and we know what that means: We must keep community voices at the forefront of our work, and we need to deliver.”

Community Voices at the Heart of the Work

Residents say the exposure study empowered them to speak up and demand answers.

“After I learned my numbers showed contamination, I started coming to the community meetings,” said Jocelyn Farmer, a fenceline resident. “I wanted to learn more about the study and about my neighborhood.”

Another resident, Eugene Smiley, said that “everyone who lives in this neighborhood should have their blood tested. Yes, I think they should come back and give people a chance to get tested so that we all are aware of what chemicals are in our bodies.”

For many in this coastal Georgia area, the new center represents long-awaited recognition.

“We’ve been living here a long time, and we’ve been exposed to it,” said Victoria Mackey. “If this study had not happened, we would not have known. Now we have chemical awareness. There are generations that have been exposed to these chemicals. The expanded exposure study is needed.”

Community partners also see the center as a turning point.

The research involves working with Healthy Coastal Neighborhoods, a community-driven coalition working at the intersection of environmental quality and public health in Glynn County, Georgia. The coalition brings together community groups, researchers, and residents to address the toxic legacy that has affected coastal Georgia communities for decades. The coalition issued a local news release announcing the new research center on June 10.

“We are honored and truly humbled 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-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.”

Investing in Education, Engagement, and Local Capacity

Funded at approximately $15 million over five years, the center will also support:

• Community engagement programs.
• Youth educational outreach.
• Improvements to the Healthy Coastal Neighborhoods’ Seafood Smart website.
• A community advisory group.
• Training for local healthcare providers.

“The issue of industrial contamination is inherently complex, and this Superfund Research Center offers a rare opportunity to address it from multiple angles,” says Noah Scovronick, deputy director of the center. “Just as important, the center supports community-led efforts to raise awareness and reduce exposures.”

A Model for the Nation

Although the center’s work is focused on Glynn County, its findings will have national relevance. Communities across the country face similar challenges with legacy pollutants, and the center’s research aims to provide actionable insights for reducing exposure and improving public health.

“Even after production stops, these chemicals can continue entering people’s bodies through lingering exposure pathways,” says Melanie Pearson, associate professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. “Understanding how that happens is essential to reducing risk. Partnering with affected residents strengthens the science and ensures it leads to meaningful, real-world benefits.”

When most people think of hurricanes, they picture howling winds tearing off roofs and snapping trees. But for Ali Sarhadi, a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Faculty Fellow, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and director of the Climate Risk and Extreme Dynamics Lab, the real killer is often less visible. “People think that hurricanes are about wind, but sometimes that’s not the whole story,” he said. “The majority of fatalities are coming from the water, not the wind.”

Supported by two Sustainability Next Seed Grants, Sarhadi’s work draws on climate science, fluid physics, engineering, and artificial intelligence. He’s using AI-powered, physics-informed models to better anticipate water hazards that can cripple cities and power grids in both coastal and inland communities.

Rethinking Hurricane Risk

Sarhadi focuses on compound flooding, the dangerous interaction between storm surge, torrential rainfall, and river flooding that increasingly defines hurricanes. He points to Hurricane Mitch, which hit Central America in 1998, as a stark example, noting that more than 12,000 people died, “all from freshwater flooding — none from wind,” he said.

His work has shown how climate change and sea-level rise are reshaping flood risk from storms like Hurricane Sandy, which devastated New York and New Jersey in October 2012. In the current climate, a Sandy-level natural disaster has a recurrence period of roughly once every 150 years. But that is changing fast. “Because of climate change and sea-level rise, by the middle of this century, the same level of flooding is likely to occur once every 60 years. By the end of the century, that goes up to once every 30 years,” he says. “Hurricane Sandy caused about $70 billion in damage. Imagine experiencing that kind of destruction every 30 years.”

Since 1970, Sarhadi notes, damage from tropical cyclones has increased by about 380% globally, a trend driven by the combined effect of stronger storms and more people and infrastructure being located in harm’s way.

Physics-Informed AI: Street-Level Flood Warnings

While storm forecasting has improved dramatically in recent decades, Sarhadi argues, “We’re in good shape in terms of track forecasting, and we’re getting better at rapid intensification forecasting. But what is missing is the hazard part, and specifically the water part. That’s the number one killer.”

His lab is developing AI models tightly coupled with physics-based simulations to forecast hurricane-induced flooding at unprecedented resolution.

Using Hurricane Sandy as a test case, his team showed that by integrating physics-based surge and rainfall models with generative AI, they could forecast building-level flood depths three to five days before landfall. “We could predict that a storm was surge-dominant and estimate how much flooding could happen at the level of each building with an accuracy beyond 90%,” he says.   

Those extra days, and that level of granularity, could give emergency managers and local leaders the information they need to order earlier evacuations, pre-stage resources, and protect critical infrastructure. “We hope by combining AI and physics-based models we can come up with faster, more accurate modeling, first, to save lives, and then to minimize the economic damage,” Sarhadi says.

Targeting Georgia’s Coastline 

Although much of the public’s attention focuses on the Gulf Coast and megacities on the Eastern Seaboard, Georgia’s coastline is also highly vulnerable to surge and compound flooding. Sarhadi is collaborating with Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow to model risk in places like Savannah and the surrounding coastal region. “We’re working to come up with good long-term solutions for protecting coastal communities and infrastructure,” he says.

Events like Hurricane Helene in 2024, which triggered extended blackouts in Georgia and lethal flooding in western North Carolina, underscore how far inland these risks can reach. “People think hurricanes are just a problem for coastal areas,” Sarhadi says. “But even if you are far from a coastline, you can be at risk when saturated soils, torrential rain, and river flooding combine.”

Building Climate-Resilient Power Grids and Cities

Sarhadi’s work doesn’t stop at forecasting. A central focus of his research is climate-resilient infrastructure, particularly the power grid. His team is exploring digital twin modeling — virtual replicas of energy and infrastructure systems. “When you have a digital twin of your grid, you can run that hurricane through it and identify which substations or power lines are more vulnerable,” he says, explaining that this knowledge could trigger utility crews to fix or reinforce power lines ahead of storms.

Looking decades ahead, these tools could help utilities and planners prioritize where to upgrade aging infrastructure as hurricanes intensify and water levels rise. “We know hurricanes are getting more intense, and our infrastructure is aging,” Sarhadi said. “By combining engineering, climate science, and AI, we’re trying to design better adaptation plans so our communities and power systems are more resilient in the future.”

Bruce brings more than two decades of senior executive experience at the intersection of global partnerships, institutional growth, and cross-sector collaboration spanning academia, philanthropy, government, and industry. Most recently, he served as senior expert and strategic advisor to the C-Suite at Conservation International on AI-enabled sustainability innovation. Before Conservation International, Weinelt served as Vice President of Global Growth at Schmidt Futures, where he founded the Global Growth function and served as chair of the Quad Fellowship.

Earlier, Weinelt spent a decade at the World Economic Forum, most recently as co-head of Partner Development for North America and Europe and a member of the North America Executive Team. He also led the Forum's multiyear Digital Transformation initiative, advising six national governments on digital readiness. In addition, he served as head of the Global Future Council on Space, shaping global space governance through frameworks such as the Space Sustainability Rating. He is a regular speaker and contributor to global media and convenings and has contributed to publications including Klaus Schwab's The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

“Bruce is a rare hire for an academic institution,” said Beril Toktay, executive director of BBISS, Regents’ Professor, and Brady Family Chair in the Scheller College of Business. "He has built and scaled global partnerships at the highest levels of philanthropy, multilateral diplomacy, and the private sector. His combination of strategic experience, fundraising track record, and convening power across sectors is exactly what BBISS needs as we move into our next chapter.”

Weinelt holds MBAs from the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary and IESE Universidad de Navarra. He completed an Executive Education in Global Leadership program offered by Columbia University, Wharton, INSEAD, and the China Europe International Business School, tailored to World Economic Forum Leadership.

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.”

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.