The agreement was signed during a Sept. 14 visit by PNNL leadership to Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility. It builds on years of successful collaboration between researchers at the two institutions.
The enhanced collaboration has three primary goals: solving big problems through multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research; sustaining and engaging human capital by creating opportunities for students, faculty, researchers, and interns to work on complex real-world challenges; and accelerating technology adoption by taking scientific discoveries and innovations into industry and the federal marketplace.
"Strengthening our partnerships with national laboratories is a strategic priority for Georgia Tech,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. "PNNL is an outstanding partner, and we look forward to deepening connections among our researchers and students, expanding opportunities and access to world-class capabilities and facilities, and advancing discovery, innovation, and national impact together."
PNNL is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that advances scientific discovery and innovations that support reliable energy, national security, and economic competitiveness. Georgia Tech is one of the nation's leading research universities, conducting more than $1.5 billion in research annually and pursuing a mission to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
"PNNL and Georgia Tech have a long history of working together," said Deb Gracio, laboratory director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “This agreement provides the foundation to take on difficult research challenges and to leverage our complementary expertise and investments in the years ahead.”
The Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) has played a central role in advancing Georgia Tech's engagement with the national laboratory system and connecting researchers with partnership opportunities.
"As SEI takes on a greater role in coordinating Georgia Tech's national laboratory partnerships, this agreement with PNNL demonstrates how we are building stronger pathways for faculty, researchers, and students to engage with world-class national lab capabilities," said Yuanzhi Tang, SEI executive director.
The National Laboratory Partnership Program supports engagement between Georgia Tech and the U.S. national laboratories. SEI now leads the program, with ongoing support from Georgia Tech’s Office of the Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research. The agreement with PNNL is the first formal agreement established through the program since its transition to SEI.
"This MOU formalizes and strengthens relationships that have been growing for many years," said Scott McWhorter, SEI director of national laboratory partnerships. “It leverages the unique strengths of Georgia Tech and PNNL and provides a framework for expanding engagement across areas of mutual interest.”
Georgia Tech and PNNL bring complementary strengths in energy and environmental systems, electric grid resilience, cybersecurity of critical infrastructure, alternative fuels and advanced materials, biofuels, radiation detection, data science and visual analytics, nuclear nonproliferation, and national security. These capabilities will be brough together through two upcoming Genesis Mission projects.
Bill Pike, PNNL's deputy director for Science and Technology, who joined the laboratory’s leadership delegation for the MOU signing, said the projects reflect the growing partnership and expanding collaboration between the two institutions.
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's leading research universities, with strengths spanning engineering, computing, science, business, design, and the liberal arts. With more than $1.5 billion annually in research awards across its Colleges and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech is among the nation's most research-intensive universities. The Institute's mission is to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
About Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
The agreement was signed during a Sept. 14 visit by PNNL leadership to Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility . It builds on years of successful collaboration between researchers at the two institutions.
]]>The CHORUS (Community Hubs for Optimizing Resilience) project will collaborate with coastal communities in Georgia and New York and will be split into two pieces: technology development and community engagement.
“We’re not just building a simulator and hoping it fits the needs of coastal residents,” explains Alex Robel, project leader and Jean “Chris” Purvis Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "By collaborating with community partners from the very beginning, we can ensure that what we ultimately develop will be effective because the people who will be using it are helping design it.”
The technology development component will include faculty from the College of Sciences and the College of Computing. The College of Sciences team will develop an AI-based flood simulator and the College of Computing team led by Josiah Hester, associate professor and Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early Career Professor, will create a web platform that allows users to visualize potential flood impacts.
Traditional flood models can take hours or days to generate results and often require specialized expertise and expensive computing resources. The CHORUS platform will be designed to provide easy-to-understand results in seconds, producing building-scale flood maps that show how water moves through streets, yards, and structures during a range of flooding scenarios. Researchers will use the model to test how specific interventions, such as seawalls, restored marshes, or improved stormwater infrastructure, could affect flooding.
Eventually, users will be able to test their own scenarios through the browser-based tool, enabling them to explore how different decisions could change flood impacts in their communities:
“Users will be able to go into a web browser and indicate where a sea wall could go or change a parking lot into a porous vegetated landscape, then click simulate. Within a few seconds, they’ll have a new flood map showing the impacts of these interventions,” says Robel.
A collaborative effort with the New York Climate Exchange, the project will be funded by Georgia Sea Grant and IBM, with support from Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow (GT2), Georgia Tech’s Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub, and the National Sea Grant College Program. The CHORUS project is an initiative of the New York Climate Exchange, where Georgia Tech is a core partner institution.
Community engagement in Georgia is being led by CEAR and the Pin Point Betterment Association, which represents descendants of the historic Gullah Geechee community near Savannah. In New York, the project team is partnering with the New York Climate Exchange and the Waterfront Alliance to work with communities surrounding Jamaica Bay.
“What makes this partnership meaningful is that it puts community voices at the center,” says Jasmine Smith, president of the Pin Point Betterment Association. “Too often, decisions are made to ‘better’ communities without actually involving the people who live there. We hope this partnership can serve as a blueprint for how communities are included in future sustainability projects from the very beginning.”
The project includes community advisory boards and technical advisory boards in both locations. Community members will help identify priority assets, select flood scenarios for analysis, and shape the design of the web-based tool. They’ll also test and offer feedback. Technical advisory boards made up of local officials, planners, and other experts will help evaluate the feasibility of proposed solutions.
“The aim is to blend information from both groups without allowing the technical perspective to override community priorities,” says Robel.
According to Robel, giving communities direct access to flood modeling tools can help close the gap between public input and infrastructure planning.
“We are putting decision making in the hands of the community. With a tool like this, the community can say: ‘We want to prevent flooding at this community center, this school, or this road,’” says Robel. “They can run the model, produce data, and present it to local governments or the Army Corps of Engineers — advocating for potential solutions themselves rather than relying on outside experts.”
Robel sees this project as just the beginning:
“Funded by two-year grants, CHORUS is meant to be a pilot for how this kind of community-centered project can be done. Once we understand some of the challenges and opportunities involved, it will hopefully make it easier for us to scale this work to additional community partners.”
Georgia Tech is actively working to foster more projects that foster community engagement. Collaborative groups at Georgia Tech involved in the CHORUS project include:
Opening the event, Ameet Pinto, BBISS faculty director for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration, noted that many critical infrastructure systems are facing unprecedented challenges. Aging assets, climate-related impacts, severe weather events, and growing demands on energy and water systems are testing the resilience of infrastructure that communities depend on. At the same time, infrastructure systems increasingly generate vast amounts of operational data through sensors, meters, and monitoring technologies. The opportunities for AI technologies to transform this data into actionable information and inform policy are just beginning to be explored.
Turning Infrastructure Data into Action
Molzahn's presentation focused on the electric grid and the ways AI-enhanced optimization can support smarter infrastructure management. He described the ongoing transition from large, centralized power plants to more distributed systems that incorporate renewable energy, battery storage, electric vehicles, and other distributed energy resources. While these technologies create opportunities for cleaner and more resilient energy systems, they also introduce new layers of complexity for planners and operators.
Among the examples Molzahn shared was research examining how electric vehicle charging could affect emergency evacuations during disasters such as wildfires. Traditional evacuation planning focuses on optimizing transportation networks for rapidly moving vehicles away from danger. However, with more EVs on the roads, consideration must be given to ensure that EVs will have sufficient charge to travel a safe distance when an evacuation order is given without overloading the electrical grid. By linking transportation and power-system models, researchers are demonstrating how planning strategies can significantly reduce stress on infrastructure while supporting faster evacuations.
Wildfire mitigation was another major focus. In recent years, several devastating wildfires have been linked to electricity infrastructure, prompting utilities to increasingly rely on Public Safety Power Shutoffs during high-risk conditions. Molzahn discussed how machine learning and optimization tools can help utilities make these difficult decisions more quickly by balancing ignition risk and minimizing customer outages.
He also highlighted emerging cybersecurity concerns associated with the trend towards more distributed energy resources. Decentralized and digitally connected energy infrastructure, such as internet-connected solar and battery systems, can be more vulnerable than legacy centralized energy sources. AI is playing an important role in identifying potential vulnerabilities.
Practical Applications in the Water Sector
Loe offered examples of how AI is already being deployed by water utilities and municipalities. One pressing challenge involves identifying lead service lines. New federal regulations require utilities to locate and replace lead service lines, but many organizations lack complete records identifying pipe materials. Loe described how utilities can combine statistical sampling and machine learning models to estimate which service lines are most likely to contain lead. Rather than excavating thousands of suspect locations, utilities can use AI to narrow the search, reducing costs while still meeting regulatory requirements and maintaining confidence in the results.
Loe also explained the overarching challenges of maintaining aging water infrastructure. Utilities across the country have significant backlogs of aging pipes that need replacement but lack the resources to replace every asset at once. Machine learning models can predict which pipes are most likely to fail, while optimization tools can prioritize and package disparate replacement jobs into efficient and practical construction projects for which funding can more easily be obtained. This approach allows organizations to move beyond simple age-based replacement strategies and incorporate factors such as risk, community priorities, paving schedules, traffic impacts, and equity considerations.
The Human Element
Although the discussion centered on AI, both speakers repeatedly emphasized that people remain critical to successful implementation. Panelists and audience members also discussed the importance of keeping "humans in the loop" since utility systems directly affect public safety. AI may generate recommendations, identify risks, or highlight priorities, but engineers, operators, and planners should remain responsible for evaluating those recommendations and making final decisions.
Workforce development emerged as another important theme. Both the water and energy sectors face challenges replacing experienced workers as many long-time professionals approach retirement. AI offers opportunities to preserve and transfer institutional knowledge that could enable smaller workforces, but both speakers stressed that future professionals will need expertise that spans engineering, data science, computing, and domain knowledge.
Looking Ahead
The discussion demonstrated that infrastructure resilience is increasingly both a physical and digital challenge. From wildfire management and grid reliability to lead service line replacements and predictive maintenance, AI and digital twins are enabling new opportunities to improve how critical systems are planned, operated, and maintained. However, better algorithms alone will not be enough to counter our aging infrastructure, climate impacts, cybersecurity risks, and rising resource demands. The thoughtful integration of advanced tools and human expertise and judgment built on a foundation of public trust offers the most effective solutions for keeping essential systems running.
Next in the Insights Series
On October 14, BBISS will hold the next Insights Series at the John Lewis Student Center in the Rafael Bras Meeting Room. The topic will be “AI for Climate Resilience.” This session will explore how artificial intelligence is being leveraged to address pressing sustainability challenges and strengthen communities, infrastructure, and environmental systems in a changing climate. The program will open with an update from Jennifer Chirico on the Georgia Tech Climate Action Plan. Presentations from leading researchers will follow, including Suhas Jain, Ali Sarhadi, Abigale Stangl, and Iris Tien, followed by an interactive panel discussion. Breakfast will be served. Registration is required.
]]>Ahmadi and Brown find that neighborhoods with higher shares of Black residents experience higher energy burdens, even after accounting for factors such as income, renter status, and housing characteristics. In this study, energy burden refers mainly to the share of household income spent on electricity, gas, and water. The authors estimate that an approximately 11 percentage-point increase in a neighborhood’s Black population share is associated with about a 1 percentage-point increase in household energy burden, equal to an average annual increase of about $785 in utility costs. These findings suggest that unequal energy burdens are tied not only to household finances, but also to the lasting effects of segregation and discrimination.
Read Full Story on the EPIcenter Page
]]>Reliable energy is required to keep safe in cold winters and hot summers, making it a matter of national security. There are also vying economic policies to consider, political and financial incentives to navigate, and questions of social and economic inequality.
Experts in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts examine the challenges we face with the U.S. energy transition, and work to help make it safe, fair, and effective for all.
Read the article on the Ivan Allen College website.
]]>When Chevron reported its highest quarterly profit in six years on July 31, 2026, it was just one detail in a larger picture: Analyst firm Wood Mackenzie estimates the global oil and gas industry is on course for a cash windfall of US$495 billion in 2026. That’s profit above and beyond what the industry expected before the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began.
Three separate bills seeking to tax those profits are now in Congress, and President Donald Trump has even said the oil companies are “making too much money.”
As an applied microeconomist, I am often asked how taxes affect economic activity. Economists have long held a more nuanced view of windfall taxes than either side of the current debate suggests. Advocates often make overly optimistic revenue projections, and opponents often overstate how much such a tax might discourage investment. A 1980s U.S. windfall-tax experiment is instructive on both counts.
Read Full Story on The Conversation
]]>Three separate bills seeking to tax those profits are now in Congress, and President Donald Trump has even said the oil companies are “making too much money.”
As an applied microeconomist, I am often asked how taxes affect economic activity. Economists have long held a more nuanced view of windfall taxes than either side of the current debate suggests. Advocates often make overly optimistic revenue projections, and opponents often overstate how much such a tax might discourage investment. A 1980s U.S. windfall-tax experiment is instructive on both counts.
]]>The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI), the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), and the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute are racing to close the gap between what America invents and what it can build at scale.
When a key semiconductor plant in Japan went offline after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, supply chain disruptions quickly spread far beyond the disaster zone, affecting manufacturers around the world.
Nearly all of the natural graphite the United States uses, and 70% to 80% of its rare earth elements, come from a supply chain the U.S. doesn't control.
Different vulnerabilities, same underlying problem: The U.S. invents faster than almost any country on Earth, but it doesn't always build, or secure the materials to build, fast enough, reliably enough, or close enough to home to matter when it counts.
That gap has become a national security problem, and Georgia Tech is tackling it within its own centers and with a wider network of universities, government agencies, and industry partners.
“You want to make sure you don't have a brittle supply chain,” says Tom Kurfess, executive director of GTMI and the former chief manufacturing officer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “One link breaks, and all of a sudden, you can't move forward.” For Kurfess, resiliency requires manufacturing networks that are digitally connected, built around qualified processes, and capable of shifting work across facilities without sacrificing quality, traceability, or performance.
A Brittle Supply Chain Is a National Security Risk
That single point of failure is the kind of fragility Kurfess worked to design out of American manufacturing during earlier stints at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, at Oak Ridge and now at GTMI. Concentrate too much capacity in one plant or supplier, he says, and a single disruption — a natural disaster, a fire, or a cyberattack — can freeze an entire industry. His fix is resiliency built through distributed, digitally connected manufacturing. As an example, Kurfess points to the opportunities created by the transition to electric vehicles, where production can be distributed across multiple motor manufacturing facilities located closer to assembly operations. With common designs, digital connectivity, and qualified processes, production can be redistributed more readily when disruptions occur.
GTMI applies the same logic to defense and energy supply chains, helping small manufacturers that build subassemblies for prime contractors connect to qualified digital manufacturing networks where production status, part traceability, and available capacity can be monitored in real time. Kurfess describes their role as “the Google Maps for manufacturing” — spotting the traffic jam and rerouting around it before a bottleneck stalls production.
The Raw-Material Chokepoint
Yuanzhi Tang, executive director of Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute and founding director of its Center for Critical Mineral Solutions, has studied these supply chain vulnerabilities for years. Her focus on critical minerals and materials such as rare earths and gallium is only part of the picture, she says; battery materials carry similar risks. The U.S. relies heavily on imports for these important raw materials, with 70% to 80% for rare earths, nearly 100% for natural graphite, and 20% to 60% of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel used in batteries. “Critical minerals and materials are like vitamins,” she says. “Most of them we don't need in large quantities, but you can't replace them without compromising the performance.”
Tang is leading a Georgia Tech effort, backed by a $7.5 million Department of Energy (DOE) grant, to map critical mineral resources across the Atlantic coastal plain, from Puerto Rico to Maine, with Georgia and the Southeast as an unusually rich source. Her deep expertise in geochemistry and rare earth materials is reflected in more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and her role as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Chemical Geology. Georgia is the country's top kaolin clay producer, she notes, and rare earth-bearing waste from that mining could potentially supply materials the country currently imports.
Much of that work depends on physical space to test and scale new processes: GTMI's Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) serves as a shared facility where researchers from different disciplines can develop and scale manufacturing processes without building dedicated infrastructure for every technology. Tang's team hopes to co-locate a critical-mineral supply chain demonstration capability there, along with a Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center pilot that SEI is standing up in the same space.
What makes the region distinctive isn't just geology. It's the chance to connect resource extraction, processing, manufacturing, and recycling within a few hours' drive, which Tang says is unique and hard to match. She compares the challenge of building critical mineral supply chains to building an airplane. “You can build a wing of the plane, you can build a wheel of the plane, but if you don't coordinate them, you can never build a full plane.”
Georgia Tech is coordinating the Resource Intelligence and Innovation Alliance with universities, national labs, and industry partners. Domestic mineral projects typically take close to three decades to move from discovery to market, Tang says. A coordinated regional supply chain, she believes, could bring the speed to market and significantly cut that time to years.
Designing Supply Chains for Scale, Not Just Invention
Turning a prototype into a fielded system also requires designing the manufacturing network itself, and that's where Chris Gaffney, managing director of Georgia Tech's Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, brings a different lens. Gaffney spent 25 years in supply chain leadership at The Coca-Cola Company, including as president of the group responsible for 95% of its North American volume, before joining Georgia Tech.
“The question of scale is a riddle in any supply chain,” Gaffney says. “People who get it right, they win.” He argues that, too often, companies optimize their own operations while overlooking their suppliers' suppliers, and that a real scale-up strategy extends responsibility across the entire chain, from raw material to end user.
Gaffney draws that lesson from his own experience at Coca-Cola. The company once assumed a can line running smoothly at one bottling plant would perform the same way in a second plant, using the same equipment and cans from the same supplier. It didn't; the tolerances and fits had to be revalidated at the second facility before the line would run reliably. “You can't make assumptions about those variables,” he says.
Gaffney's central design principle is to bring manufacturing partners into the technology design process as early as possible, rather than handing them a finished blueprint. Using a drone as an example, he describes designers, manufacturers, and end users working together from the start. “You go from the tabletop where you make one, to the line where you want to make a thousand, but then you have to make sure that when somebody's in a dirty, grimy combat environment, the thing is still going to work.”
He notes that while assembly can spread across smaller, harder-to-target sites — similar to how Ukrainian drone manufacturers dispersed production into basements to survive attacks — the most sensitive components still require concentrated, tightly controlled manufacturing. In his view, deciding where to centralize or distribute production is a core design choice with direct national security consequences.
Kurfess argues that timing is equally important. Manufacturers must preserve the ability to scale rapidly without carrying every tool and component in their inventory. They can preserve qualified digital designs, process plans, and tooling data so production can be restarted, redirected or expanded when needed.
Georgia's Regional Advantage
All three Georgia Tech experts point to the Southeast, and Georgia in particular, as one region well positioned to pull these pieces together, though careful to frame it as an example rather than the only answer. Gaffney credits the state's port access, calling it “the most progressive port in the U.S.,” along with its rail, road infrastructure, and growing technical talent. Similar pushes are underway elsewhere, he notes, from nuclear manufacturing partnerships with Oak Ridge to critical mineral and battery projects in other states. “Every region has its advantages. That’s the beauty of the country,” he said.
What distinguishes Georgia is how many of those advantages sit within a few hours of each other.
A Convener for the Next Decade
None of Georgia Tech’s experts argue the U.S. can, or should, build every critical supply chain onshore. Instead, they describe coordinated regional resiliency as sourcing more materials closer to home and designing manufacturing networks that can continue operating even when individual facilities, suppliers, or transportation nodes are disrupted.
Gaffney sees Georgia Tech’s role as setting an example other regions can follow. “We role model what good looks like and what good could be,” he said. “Being a convener, bringing different entities together to solve a problem, that's the kind of example I think we have an obligation to present.”
In Kurfess’ view, manufacturers increasingly need to think of capacity not as a single factory, but as a digitally connected network of qualified suppliers, manufacturing processes, and production assets that can respond rapidly when conditions change.
GTMI, SEI, and the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute are interconnected responses to the same national problem: that invention without a path to scale isn't security. Georgia’s combination of accessible raw materials, port infrastructure, a manufacturing base, and research depth allows Georgia Tech to demonstrate what a coordinated, regional approach within a national network can look like.
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent
The cells that keep vaccines working for decades have long remained a mystery deep within human bone marrow. A new study watched them move, settle, and survive in a living human tissue model, revealing a surprisingly dynamic world that could reshape how scientists think about immunity, aging, cancer, and vaccine protection.
For decades, immunologists have known that the body's most durable defenses depend on plasma cells, the antibody-producing cells responsible for long-term immune memory. Long after an infection has passed or a vaccine has been administered, these cells continue releasing protective antibodies, sometimes for decades.
Yet one of immunology's enduring mysteries has remained unsolved: scientists understand what plasma cells do, but not how they interact with their environment.
The challenge is simple. Plasma cells reside deep within bone marrow, one of the most difficult tissues in the human body to study. Encased in bone and inaccessible to direct live imaging, it has largely remained a black box. As a result, much of what scientists know comes from mouse studies or simplified laboratory systems that capture only fragments of the human environment.
Now, researchers at Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt University have opened an unprecedented window into this hidden world.
In a study published in Science Advances, the team developed a human bone marrow-on-a-chip with channels of the size of human hair that allowed fluids to flow through it. This enabled them to directly observe human antibody-secreting cells as they migrated, interacted, and settled within a three-dimensional tissue environment.
The platform recreates not only the cellular complexity of bone marrow but also its vascular architecture and specialized microenvironments.
“What we found was far more dynamic than the textbook view of plasma cells simply taking up residence and staying put,” said study co-senior author Ankur Singh, Carl Ring Family professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Singh is also Director of the Center for Immunoengineering at Georgia Tech, part of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
Rather than creating a conventional cell culture, the researchers engineered a living microenvironment containing two major bone marrow neighborhoods: areas surrounding blood vessels, known as the perivascular niche, and a bone-like region lining internal bone surfaces, known as the endosteal niche.
The team then introduced human antibody-secreting cells generated from engineered lymphoid organoids, which are miniature immune tissues capable of producing large numbers of cells that develop into plasma.
What happened next surprised them.
Instead of dispersing throughout the tissue, the cells traveled through the vascular network and accumulated around blood vessels.
“These cellular gatherings were not random traffic jams,” said co-senior author Krishnendu Roy, the Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Dean of Engineering University Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University. “The cells appeared to congregate in regions rich in survival signals, suggesting that specialized perivascular neighborhoods serve as safe harbors for long-term immune memory.”
The collaboration between Roy and Singh began while Roy was a faculty member at Georgia Tech, where much of the work was initially conceived and launched. The Roy lab pioneered the bone marrow chip while the Singh lab pioneered the lymphoid organoids. Their joint findings provide strong evidence that human plasma cells actively seek supportive environments rather than simply becoming trapped where they are, as previously believed.
Perhaps the most striking discovery emerged when researchers tracked individual cells over time.
Rather than remaining fixed in place, a subset displayed a distinctive "stop-and-go" migration pattern.
“Classic immunology has often viewed plasma cells as largely sedentary,” said Singh. “We found that many cells paused for extended periods, moved, stopped again, and continued exploring their surroundings.”
The behavior suggests that plasma cells actively sample their environment, searching for the combinations of signals and support needed for long-term survival.
The study also revealed that bone marrow's two major compartments perform distinct but complementary functions.
The perivascular niche attracts cells and provides key survival signals, while the neighboring endosteal niche influences how they migrate, persist and are retained.
Together, these compartments form a cooperative ecosystem that shapes plasma cell fate, challenging the idea of bone marrow as a single, uniform environment.
The implications extend far beyond understanding where plasma cells live.
Bone marrow niches support the cells responsible for long-term antibody protection, placing them at the center of vaccine durability, immune aging, autoimmune disease, chronic infection, blood cancers, and cancer metastasis.
The new platform allows researchers to systematically manipulate components of the human bone marrow environment and observe the consequences in real time. It may help explain why immunity wanes with age, why some vaccines provide longer-lasting protection than others, and how disease disrupts the biological foundations of immune memory.
Most importantly, it offers a rare glimpse into one of the immune system's most inaccessible habitats. Though there is still much more to learn, their secrets are no longer quite so hidden.
Media Contact: Ashlie Bowman, Communications Manager
Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience
How does Atlanta's local food ecosystem function today? How do the people working inside it envision its future? And where are the opportunities for transformation?
Those three questions drive the systems and network mapping research of Nicole Kennard, a research scientist and assistant director for Community-Engaged Research at Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS). Within a systems map, Kennard charts intersecting food challenges and the intervention strategies that could address them. A companion social network map reveals the relationships that already exist across the food ecosystem and who needs to be brought together to create change. Both feed into the Atlanta Food System Research Network, an effort to increase coordination and build teams around the food system's most stubborn, systemic challenges.
The mapping regularly shows one significant gap: One in eight metro Atlantans are struggling to access food. Although more local farmers are growing good food, there is a “missing middle layer” of infrastructure connecting that food to those who need it, according to Atlanta’s 2026 Climate Resilience Action Plan. Food produced by smaller farms often can’t enter traditional supply chains due to small quantities, so new models are needed to move that food in ways that people can access it within their everyday routines. A summer research trip through France, Belgium, and the U.K. provided her with fresh models for closing that gap.
"I learned a lot from these models that I'm trying to bring back to Atlanta for my systems mapping research," Kennard said. "One of the biggest issues is we're missing that middle layer — better ways to distribute local food so it's reaching all neighborhoods equitably, and it's actually accessible."
It's not Kennard's first time working on food systems abroad. After graduating from Georgia Tech with a degree in materials science and engineering and running a student-led hydroponics project that grew food for the Atlanta Community Food Bank, she spent nearly four years in the U.K. as a Fulbright Scholar, earning a master's in sustainable agriculture and food security at Newcastle University before completing a Ph.D. in chemistry and biosciences at the University of Sheffield in 2023. That background, she said, is part of what draws her to the field. "Food is the great connector."
Bringing Ideas Home From Europe
This summer, Kennard split her time between France, Belgium, and a return visit to Sheffield. At Georgia Tech-Europe, the institute's Metz campus, she met with Paul Voss, director of academic programs, to explore future partnerships around sustainable entrepreneurship and research, potentially bringing BBISS-affiliated faculty and coursework to the campus.
In Montpellier, she presented her work to three organizations clustered on a single campus: INRAE (France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment), L'Institut Agro Montpellier, and CIRAD, the country's international agricultural development research arm, along with MOISA, an interdisciplinary CIRAD-affiliated research unit focused on sustainable food systems. There, she encountered a "right-to-food" pilot in which Montpellier residents, half of whom live in poverty, pay a voluntary monthly amount on a sliding scale, from as little as 1 euro to 150 euros, and all receive a flat 100 euros back, redeemable at a handful of partner supermarkets. She also saw "social grocery stores" reaching rural areas through mobile markets, and digital platforms, letting neighbors pool their money to buy directly from local farmers.
Kennard also attended the European Ecological Economics Society Conference in Belgium, where she presented her food systems mapping research and learned about other local food models, specifically farmer-based cooperatives.
In Sheffield, Kennard gave a talk on community-engaged research methods and came away with insights from their local food network, ‘ShefFood,’ which is community-led rather than run by the university or city (though both have seats on its board). Leadership rotates every couple of years to keep it grounded in the community it serves.
From Campus to Community
Kennard's Atlanta work leans heavily on the students and community partners building it with her. This semester, she is working with incoming computer science Ph.D. student Tristan Daniel to automate her network map, scraping newsletters, news articles, and annual tax filings to keep the map's data updated in near-real time. Rhutvi Ahir, a master’s student in city and regional planning, has been working on integrating the systems map into a publicly available and interactive online platform.
Last semester, through a BBISS 2025 Sustainability Next Seed Grant project, Kennard, along with principal investigators Johannes Milz, Ingeborg Rocker, and Carl DiSalvo, professor in the School of Interactive Computing, convened 16 community and civic partners for a participatory design workshop mapping how food moves across metro Atlanta and where better data sharing could prevent waste. Drawing on feedback from that session, DiSalvo’s team is now exploring tools such as digital maps that show where surplus food, refrigerated trucks, and distribution sites are located, as well as a dedicated messaging system to coordinate what is now handled through ad hoc texts and calls.
This fall, DiSalvo’s graduate students in the interdisciplinary M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction program — from computing, design, and social science backgrounds — will turn those concepts into early prototypes to test with partners, giving students experience designing technology for real community needs rather than just commercial products.
DiSalvo says the core issue isn’t only a lack of food, but the difficulty of coordinating people, resources, and logistics at scale. “There’s so much need with food insecurity, and resources as well. It’s a coordination challenge. Most people didn’t get into this because they love logistics; they have a commitment to feeding people,” he said.
He credits Kennard with helping position Georgia Tech as a hub for food systems and community-engaged sustainability research. “Nicole’s work is important — not just her food systems research, but also the oversight she gives to community-based research. It’s amazing we have her as a colleague.”
DiSalvo isn't the only faculty collaborator. Sofía Pérez-Guzmán, an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a BBISS Faculty Fellow, has partnered with Kennard to survey Atlanta residents in West End and citywide about how they access food. Their next step: building a tool based on what they learned.
"We're designing a decision-making tool that helps connect food locally, from producers to distributors and food access points in the community," Pérez-Guzmán said.
Not every connection requires a grant or a formal project. Through the networks she is building and her continued engagement, Kennard has linked a local consulting group with a co-op needing strategic guidance and introduced a farmers market organizer to a food rescue partner. Community partner Fresh Harvest even referenced her food system network map in a recent presentation to WABE radio. According to Kennard, it generated a lot of buzz, underscoring the appetite that Atlantans have for a shared picture of the food distribution ecosystem.
Two Maps, One Goal
Both of Kennard's maps are expected to go live by the end of the summer. The network map identifies the organizations working in the space and how they connect. The systems map, still being finalized, distills her interviews and engagement work into nine key thematic areas emerging as priorities for the city, along with competing visions of what a more resilient food system could look like.
The maps also anchor the research network Kennard co-leads with Emory University Associate Professor Emily Burchfield and agrifood systems researcher Kate Mundon-Dixon. The network has held two gatherings so far, one at a local hydroponic farm, where attendees added their own connections to the map. The network’s active listserv now includes more than 55 organizations.
For Kennard, the goal was never a single map or tool. It was building the foundation and the infrastructure that let everyone else act together. "I wanted to create this foundational research so that the academics and partners most poised to address specific challenges can create those teams and move forward together," she said.
She added that while most of her work is Atlanta-focused, it has implications for regional food access across Georgia. “A key insight that came from my systems mapping work is the need to connect rural and urban growers to move forward a statewide agenda for a resilient food system,” Kennard said. “My colleague at Emory, Emily Burchfield, is doing a lot more of the rural engagement, and we hope to align our work later.”
Everybody in Atlanta's food space is doing amazing work, she added, noting that, "If we can better align and coordinate under a shared vision and strategy, then we can actually move the needle on systems change, instead of just a few isolated things happening in different neighborhoods.”
]]>At the heart of the new lab is the miniTrashpresso, a compact recycling and manufacturing system developed by the sustainability technology company Miniwiz. The machine can take used plastics and other waste materials, process them locally, and transform them into new products in less than five minutes. By bringing manufacturing and recycling together in a single system, the Trash Lab aims to give the Georgia Tech community a way to explore sustainable design, material reuse, and the future of circular manufacturing.
“The launch of IPaT’s new Trash Lab represents an exciting step forward for sustainability at Georgia Tech,” said Jennifer Chirico, associate vice president of Sustainability. “As a living-learning lab, it provides students and researchers with hands-on opportunities to work alongside campus operations, turning used plastics into valuable new products and creating innovative solutions that support a more circular campus.”
A Makerspace Focused on Circular Innovation
The Trash Lab expands Georgia Tech’s growing network of makerspaces and innovation environments by focusing specifically on waste recovery and reuse. Instead of treating used plastics as disposable materials, the lab encourages users to view them as valuable resources that can be transformed into new products.
The miniTrashpresso represents the latest generation of recycling technology developed by Miniwiz. The company originally launched the world’s first mobile recycling line, known as the Trashpresso, to support communities that lacked access to traditional recycling infrastructure. The newer miniTrashpresso is smaller, more energy-efficient, and more portable, making it suitable for campuses and community-based applications.
The modular system uses industrial equipment, including shredders, presses, and heating technologies, to process materials on-site. Advanced heat-induction presses and specialized molds can quickly transform recovered plastics into new objects and components. The system can also be integrated with AI-powered waste-tracking tools and robotic automation technologies that help identify, sort, and process materials more efficiently.
For IPaT leaders, the Trash Lab represents more than the addition of specialized equipment.
“Community resilience and people-centered sustainability are core research areas within IPaT,” said Michael Best, executive director. “Our new Trash Lab will allow the entire Georgia Tech community to not only think about upcycling and plastic reuse but to make and do innovative projects that directly demonstrate sustainable futures.”
Turning Trash Into a Resource
Miniwiz founder Arthur Huang, who developed the miniTrashpresso system, describes upcycling as a practice rooted in centuries of human ingenuity.
“Upcycling is actually recycling old material and turning that into something new,” Huang said.
Throughout history, societies have reused existing materials in construction, manufacturing, and everyday life. According to Huang, modern waste streams, particularly plastic packaging and electronic waste, represent an enormous and often untapped source of raw materials.
The miniTrashpresso was designed around that idea. Rather than transporting waste long distances to centralized facilities, the system enables materials to be processed where they are collected. By reducing transportation needs and creating opportunities for local manufacturing, decentralized recycling systems can help lower the environmental footprint associated with traditional waste management.
Miniwiz estimates that using recycled materials can reduce embedded energy consumption by 60% to 80% compared with using raw materials. The company has developed more than 1,200 upcycled materials and products from everyday waste streams, including plastics, food packaging, coffee cups, and electronic waste.
Since its introduction, Miniwiz technology has been deployed in communities, campuses, and organizations worldwide, including projects in Taiwan, Italy, Singapore, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. According to Huang, Georgia Tech is installing and operating North America’s first miniTrashpresso recycling machine from Miniwiz.
Building a Community Around Sustainability
The new facility is also intended to serve as a gathering place for interdisciplinary collaboration. Students interested in sustainability, materials science, engineering, design, manufacturing, and public policy will have opportunities to experiment with new ideas while working with researchers and campus partners.
“When Michael Best first pitched the idea of the Trash Lab, I expected there to be interest in a space like this given the general momentum toward sustainable practices on campus, but the level of excitement from students, staff, and faculty has been outstanding,” said Tim Trent, IPaT’s lab director for the Trash, Craft, Prototyping, and Usability Labs.
“This is an opportunity to create a gathering point for sustainability initiatives, act as a catalyst for partnerships, and help strengthen the many amazing networks and projects already present on campus,” he said. “The IPaT Innovation Labs have a continuous focus on supporting the overall Georgia Tech research enterprise, and I’m happy we are adding another piece to the portfolio.”
As the Trash Lab opens its doors, members of the Georgia Tech community will be invited to explore how waste materials can be reimagined as resources, prototypes, and products. By combining makerspace culture, advanced recycling technology, and sustainability research, the lab offers a tangible demonstration of how circular economy principles can move from theory into practice.
For Georgia Tech, the Trash Lab is not simply a place to recycle plastic. It is a space where innovation, design, and sustainability intersect, helping transform discarded materials into opportunities for learning, discovery, and impact.
---
For more information about the Trash Lab, contact the IPaT Innovation Labs at ipat-labs@groups.gatech.edu.
But recent research from Georgia Tech’s School of Economics in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts suggests adding an asterisk to earlier research that makes that conclusion, saying previous studies failed to account for one simple fact: people adapt.
Georgia Tech economist Bobby Harris used a massive database of Fitbit step count data to measure how temperature shapes physical activity and found that extreme heat cuts step counts by 6% when compared to ideal weather. And while residents of the warmest regions cut their activity by an average of only 354 steps on days over 100 degrees, those living in the coldest regions cut theirs by 1,081, according to Harris’ analysis.
To be fair, cold bites, too. On days that stay below freezing, people take roughly 1,000 fewer steps. That’s a 12% drop, enough to pack on a pound over the course of a typical Madison, Wisconsin winter, Harris found.
But as the climate grows warmer, how humanity will respond to warmer temperatures remains a significant concern. In fact, earlier research projected that, by 2050, temperature-driven declines in physical activity could contribute to 500,000 premature deaths a year worldwide and annual productivity losses topping $2.4 billion.
Projections like those typically assume everyone responds to heat the same way, with no capacity to adapt, Harris said.
Read Full Story on the IAC News Page
The CAREER Award is NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty, recognizing researchers who demonstrate the potential to become leaders in both research and education.
Mahajan received the award for her research on designing energy-efficient, adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) datacenters through a cyber-physical approach that jointly considers AI software, computing hardware, and the physical state of the underlying infrastructure.
As AI models continue to grow in scale and complexity, they place increasing demands on every layer of datacenter infrastructure—from accelerators, memory, and networking to power delivery, cooling, and security. Yet these systems are often designed and optimized one layer at a time, limiting overall efficiency and adaptability.
Mahajan’s research reimagines AI datacenters as cyber-physical systems in which software, hardware, and physical operating conditions continuously inform one another.
“AI infrastructure should be designed around the real-time condition of the hardware, not just its specifications,” Mahajan said. “By making AI systems aware of the physical state of the infrastructure, we can build datacenters that are more efficient, adaptive, and resilient at scale.”
Read Full Story on the ECE News Page
]]>The CAREER Award is NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty, recognizing researchers who demonstrate the potential to become leaders in both research and education.
Mahajan received the award for her research on designing energy-efficient, adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) datacenters through a cyber-physical approach that jointly considers AI software, computing hardware, and the physical state of the underlying infrastructure.
]]>The committee, convened through the National Academies' project Future of Battery Technology Options for Defense Applications, will identify the strengths and weaknesses of future battery technologies, including an examination of performance, safety, and manufacturability across technology and manufacturing readiness levels. The committee will also identify gaps where research investments could potentially improve battery capabilities across technology and manufacturing readiness levels, creating opportunities to leverage commercially available technologies.
With a joint appointment in MSE and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, McDowell is internationally recognized for his research on batteries and energy storage materials. His work focuses on understanding how materials change during battery operation and using that knowledge to develop safer, more efficient, and more sustainable energy storage systems. McDowell is also co-director of the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center. He leads research spanning solid-state batteries, lithium-ion and sodium-ion technologies, and next-generation energy storage materials. “I am very thankful to be selected, and I look forward to working with colleagues on developing recommendations to advance battery technologies in support of our country," said McDowell.
Read Full Story on the MSE Newspage
]]>The committee, convened through the National Academies' project Future of Battery Technology Options for Defense Applications, will identify the strengths and weaknesses of future battery technologies, including an examination of performance, safety, and manufacturability across technology and manufacturing readiness levels. The committee will also identify gaps where research investments could potentially improve battery capabilities across technology and manufacturing readiness levels, creating opportunities to leverage commercially available technologies.
With a joint appointment in MSE and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, McDowell is internationally recognized for his research on batteries and energy storage materials. His work focuses on understanding how materials change during battery operation and using that knowledge to develop safer, more efficient, and more sustainable energy storage systems. McDowell is also co-director of the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center.
]]>This award is part of NASA’s Space Technology Research Grants Program, which supports groundbreaking projects with the potential to transform space science and technology.
Through the three-year, $750,000 award, Mazumdar and her research team will develop laser-based methods to simultaneously measure temperature, chemical species, gas velocity, and other properties in the gases surrounding heat shield materials.
“We aim to implement our measurement techniques in arc jet or plasma jet facilities, like the ones at NASA, to assist with the evaluation of thermal protection systems for next-generation spacecraft,” Mazumdar said.
The project uses ultrafast lasers, which produce extremely short, high-intensity pulses. These pulses allow researchers to study the behavior of molecules on extremely short timescales and measure properties that can improve understanding of the gases surrounding a spacecraft during atmospheric entry.
Mazumdar said she and her students are excited about this project and hope it will help NASA develop new heat shields for spacecraft traveling to destinations such as Mars, Venus, and Titan.
Read Full Story on the ME Webpage
]]>This award is part of NASA’s Space Technology Research Grants Program, which supports groundbreaking projects with the potential to transform space science and technology.
Through the three-year, $750,000 award, Mazumdar and her research team will develop laser-based methods to simultaneously measure temperature, chemical species, gas velocity, and other properties in the gases surrounding heat shield materials.
“We aim to implement our measurement techniques in arc jet or plasma jet facilities, like the ones at NASA, to assist with the evaluation of thermal protection systems for next-generation spacecraft,” Mazumdar said.
]]>Established in 2014, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program brings together distinguished faculty from across Georgia Tech to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, strengthen the sustainability research community, and advance the Institute's mission of generating real-world impact through research, education, and engagement. Serving three-year terms, fellows act as strategic advisors, community ambassadors, and thought leaders within the broader sustainability ecosystem. Building on this foundational vision, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program has evolved to meet the dynamic needs of modern sustainability leaders. The newly revamped program emphasizes active leadership development, offering tailored networking opportunities, connections with broader sustainability networks, and focused training to help fellows grow as influential voices in their respective fields. Through these enhancements, the BBISS Faculty Fellows program aims to empower early-career researchers to maximize their reach, elevate their research, and innovate transformative sustainability solutions.
The 2026 cohort represents a wide range of expertise spanning AI and sustainability, sustainable finance, computational materials discovery, infrastructure systems, environmental chemistry, urban resilience, and community-engaged research.
Collectively, their research addresses the sustainability of interconnected human, natural, and engineered systems, encompassing topics such as watershed resilience, resource stewardship, carbon cycling, circular materials management, and evidence-based environmental decision-making. Their diverse expertise fosters new interdisciplinary collaborations that accelerate the development of practical, scalable solutions for communities, industries, and ecosystems.
“We are delighted to welcome this exceptional group of faculty leaders to the BBISS community,” said BBISS Executive Director Beril Toktay. “Their expertise, creativity, and commitment to sustainability will help expand opportunities for collaboration and accelerate the impact of sustainability research across Georgia Tech and beyond.”
]]>A new study led by Francesca Storici, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and faculty member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, has uncovered an unexpected feature of human DNA linked to gene activity and the physical organization of DNA. The findings, published in Cell, could change how scientists think about DNA organization, transcription, and genome function.
DNA and RNA are usually separate molecules inside cells, each with a different job. But small RNA building blocks, called ribonucleotides, sometimes become embedded in DNA during normal cellular activities. Scientists knew these RNA building blocks existed, but until now they did not know where they were located across the human genome or whether they served a purpose.
Storici's team, working with collaborators at multiple institutions, created their detailed map of these RNA building blocks throughout human DNA. The researchers found that they are not randomly scattered. Instead, they are distributed in distinct patterns across the genome. The researchers call this genome-wide landscape of DNA-embedded ribonucleotides the human nuclear “ribome.”
“Ribonucleotides embedded in DNA have traditionally been viewed mainly as mistakes that need to be removed,” Storici said. “Our findings suggest a different perspective: they can influence the physical properties of DNA and may have biological functions that we are only beginning to understand.”
The team discovered that these embedded RNA building blocks are especially common near the starting points of active genes, where cells begin reading genetic instructions to make RNA. Their abundance also increases with gene activity. These regions experience physical stress as DNA is repeatedly accessed and used. The researchers found evidence that the embedded RNA building blocks influence how tightly the DNA twists and coils in these areas. This DNA twisting, known as supercoiling, is closely associated with transcription.
The findings suggest that these RNA building blocks are more than accidental leftovers from normal cellular processes. Instead, they can modulate DNA supercoiling, revealing a previously unrecognized connection between embedded ribonucleotides, DNA topology, and transcription.
“One of the most exciting findings is that processing ribonucleotides embedded in DNA can change DNA supercoiling,” Storici said. “This provides a new connection between the chemical composition of DNA, its physical organization, and transcription.”
The work also may help scientists better understand diseases linked to problems removing embedded RNA from DNA, including rare autoimmune disorders. More broadly, the discovery could open a new area of investigation into the roles of embedded ribonucleotides in human genome biology.
By providing the first comprehensive map of these RNA marks in human nuclear DNA, the study shows that what once appeared to be simple molecular mistakes may actually contribute to how the genome is organized and functions. The discovery opens new opportunities to explore how embedded ribonucleotides influence DNA topology, transcription, and genome maintenance.
______
Storici's team included: Deepali Kundnani (alumnus), Yeunsoo Lee (Ph.D. student), Tyler Warner (Ph.D. student), and Ryan Eckerty (undergraduate student). Nataša Jonoska, a mathematician at the University of South Florida, also contributed. Additional collaborators across multiple institutions contributed expertise, resources, and scientific insights that greatly expanded the scope and comprehensiveness of the study.
Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience
]]>Through a Next Gen STEM (NGS) NASA Aerospace Skilled Technical Workforce Hubs (NAS_Hub) grant award, Georgia Tech will play a central role in addressing a critical labor shortage in the booming aerospace industry and enhance the state’s role as an aerospace industry leader in the global space economy.
Beginning this fall, the three-year, $1.5 million award will establish the Southeast Space Technology & Aerospace Readiness Skills (SE-STARS) Hub. The hub will expand opportunities for training and workforce readiness in high-demand technical careers in aerospace.
The SE-STARS Hub includes the Georgia Space Grant Consortium (GSGC), Georgia Tech’s Space Research Institute (SRI), the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI), the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), Georgia Southern University, Georgia College and Career Academies, Georgia Aerospace & Defense Alliance (GADA), and select Georgia aerospace employers to support the growing aerospace industry and NASA missions.
Aerospace products are Georgia’s No. 1 export and the state has more than 800 companies supporting aviation, manufacturing, research, maintenance, repair, and operations. Many aerospace and engineering positions rely on skilled technical workers whose training pathways do not require a four-year, or advanced degree. There are significant gaps in technical roles such as machinists, electronics technicians, test operators, and systems integrators. These shortages are driven by an aging workforce and a projected national shortfall of at least one million skilled technical workers by 2030. (National Academics of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, 2025). The gap also stems from the rapid pace of technological advancement, where even current skills can quickly become obsolete if not constantly renewed. All this combines to create an urgent need for training to support new and sustainable aerospace career pathways.
Stephen Ruffin, interim chair of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and GSGC director will serve as the principal investigator (PI). Jud Ready, executive director of SRI; Lori Skillings, GSGC; Hossein Taheri, Georgia Southern University; and Steven Ferguson, GTMI, will serve as co-PIs. Jeffrey McNabb, a research engineer in Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL), will serve as the program manager, leading day-to-day operations and coordinating the project team.
"This initiative strengthens Georgia's position as a leader in aerospace innovation and manufacturing while providing new opportunities for students and industries across the state," said Ruffin.
Coordination between public education systems, industry, and workforce agencies can sometimes be limited. SE-STARS will act as a "hub" to bridge these gaps, connecting Georgia Tech and its specialized research institutes with TCSG’s 22 colleges and 88 campuses to provide statewide access to training.
“Another advantage of the program is the stronger network it creates,” said Ruffin. “Each organization in the SE-STARS team has unique capabilities but together we will strengthen the technical workforce pipeline across Georgia and the broader Southeast.”
The SE-STARS team will collaborate with industry partners to develop curriculum aligned with workforce needs. “The easily ported curricula we develop will be tailored for other institutions to adopt directly, creating a consistent foundation of skills and competencies that employers can universally expect from program graduates across Georgia,” Ready said.
Students will access training through a statewide network of technical colleges serving as regional instructional nodes, which offer flexible online options and hands-on paid apprenticeships to ensure broad geographic reach.
The program also reaches K-12 and adult learners through career academies and specialized STEM labs, creating a structured, sustainable transition from early education to high-demand aerospace credentials. GTMI will support this work through its Advanced Manufacturing Pathways Program, which connects industry-informed training with pathways into high-demand advanced manufacturing careers.
“Georgia's expanding aerospace and space sectors are creating high-paying jobs and driving economic growth,” said Ruffin. “This program will help develop the skilled workforce needed to support that growth and Georgia’s competitiveness in the space economy.”
This barren land isn't Mars or Pluto, but volcanic deserts in Iceland. The environment is so comparable to Mars' arid landscape that researchers can use it as an analog. From Earth, they can extrapolate how planets in our galaxy and beyond could sustain life and what tools humans might need to make homes on these planets.
Georgia Tech researchers explore everywhere from Oregon's mountaintops to Arizona's deserts to better understand space — and life on this planet.
]]>Few neuroscientists would dispute that the brain relies on prediction. From houseflies evading swatters to humans catching baseballs, living things are constantly anticipating what comes next. Understanding how the brain generates those predictions could help explain one of neuroscience's most enduring questions: how the brain builds internal models of the world that allow us to learn, adapt, and anticipate what comes next.
“Without actively predicting the world, we cannot survive,” says Farzaneh Najafi, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a faculty affiliate of Georgia Tech's Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society. “There is quite some sensory-motor delay in the processing. We can’t just sit there, wait for the brain to process our environment, and then react.”
Part of the puzzle may lie in signals known as neural ramps. Almost like a drumroll leading up to a big reveal, neurons in some areas of the brain have shown gradual increases in activity immediately before a stimulus appears. For decades, researchers have interpreted this ramping activity as a neural signature of prediction, reflecting anticipation of an upcoming event.
Recently published in Science Advances, a new study from Najafi’s lab reveals these signals may not be “predictions” at all, but instead a way neurons track elapsed time.
“Surprisingly,” says Najafi, “the very first study from my lab called the Predictive Processing Lab showed that no, these are not prediction signals.”
The finding challenges a long-standing interpretation of one of neuroscience's most studied signals and reveals that the search for predictive neurons may lead to different circuits — or require different experiments to uncover.
There is a challenge in separating simple time tracking from active prediction. Just because numbers on a stopwatch are increasing doesn’t mean it’s counting up to a specific event.
To tease the problem apart, the team designed a series of experiments that progressively stripped prediction out of the equation.
Working with mice, the researchers presented audio and visual cues at carefully controlled intervals. Some appeared at regular, hence predictable, times, while others arrived unpredictably. If neurons are making predictions, their activity should look different when events are predictable versus when they are not.
But that’s not what they found. Even when the researchers introduced errors into those predictable patterns, activity remained largely the same.
“It was in the first year of collecting data in my newly established lab that my student, Yicong Huang, started showing me the data and I was shocked: how come we are not seeing a difference between the expected case and the unexpected case?” Najafi recalls. “Because the entire theory is that there is a difference.”
The team found even more definitive evidence by monitoring “naive” mice that had never seen the stimuli before. The brain must learn a pattern before it can anticipate it, yet they found that these neural ramps were present even in the first few trials.
If these signals aren’t predictions, then what’s happening?
“What we are seeing are pure sensory signals,” she says. “They are not about predicting the timing of the upcoming stimulus. They're about encoding the time that is elapsed.”
Najafi thinks that what neuroscientists have long interpreted as an anticipatory “buildup” to a future event is actually a “relaxation” from the past. Rather than a drummer rolling up to a specific event, imagine one who is always rolling. Each stimulus briefly interrupts the performance before the rhythm gradually returns.
But they found that not every neuron behaves like a drummer. While “drummers” recover their interrupted rhythm after a stimulus, other neurons operate more like a reverberating gong, firing strongly after a stimulus before gradually quieting down.
“The beautiful part of this story is that neurons don't all do the same thing,” Najafi says. “One neuron ramps up quickly, another more slowly, another with a completely different time course. When you put that heterogeneous population together, you get a very robust readout of time.”
The finding may also have implications for how neuroscientists think the brain represents time itself.
“Our findings support the theory that time representation in the brain is an intrinsic property of neurons,” says Najafi. Because the signals appeared even in naïve mice and in sensory brain regions, the results suggest that timing may emerge from the properties of neurons themselves, rather than from a specialized timing system elsewhere in the brain.
For Najafi, the study doesn't close the case on predictive processing. Time, after all, is an important variable to track if you want to make predictions. Instead, it opens more questions about when and where those signals emerge.
“Maybe we didn't find them because this was a passive perception task, meaning mice just passively received stimuli without being instructed to attend to them. Maybe we need active perception or an active movement task, and that's when we can extract these predictive signals from the brain. Alternatively, we may need to search other brain areas to find neural signatures of temporal predictions.”
“Do I believe now that the brain is not doing predictive processing? Absolutely not,” Najafi says. “But before we say we've found evidence for a theory, we really need to do multiple carefully designed experiments. We need to attack this from many different angles.”
Funding: This research was supported by the Whitehall Foundation, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aed6417
As manufacturing systems become more connected, the cyberthreat grows with them. Saman Zonouz has spent years documenting how vulnerable smart manufacturing environments are. He’s an associate professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he co-leads the Cyber-Physical Security Lab with Raheem Beyah, Georgia Tech’s provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs.
"Disrupting the manufacturing sector doesn't just shut down individual shops. It can directly impact national security and public safety," Zonouz said. Because manufacturing is one of 16 federally designated critical infrastructure sectors, it is deeply intertwined with energy, water, and defense, meaning disruptions can cascade far beyond the factory floor.
The threats Zonouz documents go beyond ransomware. His research has demonstrated how adversaries can insert logic bombs into design files, compromising Computer Numerical Control machines or 3D printers.
"We've shown how logic bombs can be inserted remotely into design files so that everything looks normal when the part is printed, but once it's in operation, the attacker can decide when it fails," Zonouz said, citing drone propellers, aircraft wings, and power grid transformer components as examples where invisible sabotage could have catastrophic consequences.
Internet-wide scans conducted by his team found that many shop-floor controllers are directly exposed to the internet, with no meaningful barrier between an adversary and the machines running a production line. Imported equipment compounds the risk, because controllers and firmware from unknown developers may carry unintentional vulnerabilities or deliberately planted backdoors. "In manufacturing, many controllers and machines can still be accessed easily from outside," Zonouz said, echoing the kind of supply chain exposure seen in high-profile attacks on widely used software platforms.
His prescription is straightforward but still largely unimplemented across the sector: Build security into the system design rather than adding it afterward. "The number one principle is to think about cybersecurity and risk when you design the system, not as an afterthought once everything is already built," Zonouz said.
His team has explored this through the $65 million Georgia AIM initiative, a collaboration with Aaron Stebner, Steven Ferguson, and Animesh Chhotaray, led by Ph.D. student Twisha Chattopadhyay. Using AI for automated anomaly detection allows complex production lines to be monitored continuously without requiring constant human oversight.
Georgia Tech's standing at the intersection of manufacturing and cybersecurity is, by most measures, singular. "Georgia Tech is the only top university with a dedicated School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, with about 30 professors focused solely on cybersecurity, and you rarely see this level of collaboration between cybersecurity and manufacturing faculty anywhere else," Zonouz said. That collaboration is already producing joint publications and a patent application for AI-driven attack detection systems developed through Georgia AIM.
Not every attacker wants a quick payoff. Zonouz also tracks advanced persistent threats, where a nation-state actor quietly compromises a controller and does nothing for months, waiting for the right geopolitical moment to act. "They get into the house and just sit there, because by sitting still nobody can detect them," Zonouz said. That patience turns an idle, exposed controller into tomorrow's leverage.
"Manufacturers do not need to solve every problem at once," Zonouz said. Finance and energy already operate under mandatory cybersecurity frameworks, while manufacturing's own standard, the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, is still being phased in. "The security of these systems right now is so weak that basic, easy-to-deploy solutions would stop the majority of attacks that are succeeding simply because the door is wide open," he said. The hardest attacks will always be the patient, targeted ones, and closing the obvious gaps first is what buys manufacturers time.