Here in Atlanta, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum has been part of my daily life for years. Parks and trails surrounding the center connect my neighborhood to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park downtown and everything in between.

At the end of December 2024, thousands of people walked to the library to pay their respects to the former president as he lay in repose. The cold, snow and darkness of the evening were a stark contrast to the warmth of the volunteers who welcomed us in. Our visit spiraled through galleries exhibiting records of Carter’s life, achievements and lifelong work promoting democracy around the world.

U.S. presidents have been building libraries for more than 100 years, starting with Rutherford B. Hayes. But the urge to shape one’s legacy by building a library runs much deeper. As a scholar of libraries in the Greek and Roman world, I was struck by the similarities between presidential and ancient libraries – some of which were explicitly designed to honor deceased sponsors and played a significant role in their cities.

Trajan’s Library

The Ulpian Library, a great library in the center of Rome, was founded by Emperor Trajan, who ruled around the turn of the second century C.E. Referenced often by ancient authors, it could have been the first such memorial library.

Today, someone visiting Rome can visit Trajan’s Column, a roughly 100-foot monument to his military and engineering achievements after conquering Dacia, part of present-day Romania. A frieze spirals from bottom to top of the column, depicting his exploits. The monument now stands on its own. Originally, however, it was nestled in a courtyard between two halls of the Ulpian Library complex.

Most of what scholars know about the library’s architecture comes from remains of the west hall, an elongated room almost 80 feet long, whose walls were lined with rectangular niches and framed by a colonnade. The niches were lined with marble and appear to have had doors; this is where the books would have been placed. Writers from the first few centuries C.E. describe the library having archival documents about the emperor and the empire, including books made of linen and books bound with ivory.

Trajan dedicated the column in 113 C.E. but died four years later, before the library was complete. Hadrian, his adoptive son and successor, oversaw the shipment of Trajan’s cremated remains back to Rome, where they were placed in Trajan’s Column. Hadrian completed the surrounding library complex in 128 C.E. and dedicated it with two identical funerary inscriptions to his adopted parents, Trajan and Plotina. Scholars Roberto Egidi and Silvia Orlandi have argued that Trajan’s remains could later have been transferred from the column into the library hall.

Memorial Model

Either way, I would argue that Trajan’s decision to have his remains included in the library complex, instead of in an imperial mausoleum, established a model adopted by other officials at a smaller scale. In the eastern side of the Roman empire – what is now Turkey – at least two other library-mausoleum buildings have been identified.

One is the library at Nysa on the Maeander, a Hellenistic city named for the nearby river. Under the floor of its entry porch is a sarcophagus with the remains of a man and a woman, possibly the dedicators, that dates to the second century C.E., the time of Hadrian’s reign.

Another is the Library of Celsus, the most recognizable ancient library today, found in the ancient city of Ephesus. Named after a regional Roman consul and proconsul during the reign of Trajan, the building was founded by Celsus’ son, designed as both a place of learning and a mausoleum.

The library’s ornate, sculpted facade contained life-size female statues, making it an immediately recognizable landmark. Inscriptions identify the statues as the personifications of Celsus’ character, elevating him into a role model: virtue, intelligence, knowledge and wisdom.

Upon entering the room, the funerary character of the library became quite literal. The hall was designed like the Ulpian Library, but a door gave access to a crypt underneath. This held the marble sarcophagus with the remains of Celsus, the patron of the library. The sarcophagus itself was visible from the hall, if one stood in front of the central apse and looked down through two slits in the podium.

An endowment covered the library’s operational expenses in ancient times, as well as annual commemorations on Celsus’ birthday, including the wreathing of the busts and statues and the purchasing of additional books.

Power and Knowledge

These two provincial libraries highlight how sponsors hoped to be associated with the virtues a library fosters. Books represent knowledge, and by dedicating a library, one asserted his possession of it. Providing access to learning was an instrument of power on its own.

Beyond the handful of memorial libraries, many other ancient Roman public libraries were great cultural centers, including the Forum of Peace in Rome, dedicated by Emperor Vespasian; the Library of Hadrian in Athens; and the Gymnasium in Side, a city in present-day Turkey.

The most magnificent libraries combined access to manuscripts and artworks with spaces for meetings and lectures. Several had great leisure areas, including landscaped sculptural gardens with elaborate water features and colonnaded walkways. Literary sources and material evidence testify to the treasures that were held there: busts of philosophers, poets and other accomplished literary figures; statues of gods, heroes and emperors; treasures confiscated as spoils of war and exhibited in Rome.

Like the Ulpian Library itself, they continued the long tradition of Hellenistic public libraries, established by the most famous library of antiquity: the Library of Alexandria. Founded and lavishly endowed by the Hellenistic kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies, the building was meant to portray the king as a patron of intellectual activities and a powerful ruler, collecting knowledge from conquered civilizations.

In ancient Greece and Rome, anybody who could read had access to public libraries. Rules of use varied: For example, literary sources imply that the Ulpian Library in Rome was a borrowing library, whereas an inscription from the Library of Pantainos in Athens explicitly forbid any book to be taken out.

But these buildings were also meant to shape their sponsors’ legacies, portraying them as benevolent and learned. Presidential libraries in the United States today follow the same principle: They become monuments to the former presidents, while giving back to their local communities.

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

The center will bring together the strengths of Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business and College of Design’s School of Building Construction, serving as the Institute’s primary platform for preparing students to pursue careers in the real estate industry. The center is a priority for the leaders of the two Colleges: Anuj Mehrotra, dean of the Scheller College and Stephen P. Zelnak Jr. Chair, and Ellen Bassett, dean of the College of Design and John Portman Chair. Designed to support both undergraduate and graduate students, the center will provide academic support, professional development opportunities, academic research, and deeper connections with industry partners.

Kepano credits the lessons he learned at Georgia Tech with profoundly influencing his life and career. 

“I would not be where I am without my Tech experience,” said Kepano. As an out-of-state football and track-and-field student-athlete, he carried a full academic load while working night shifts at Delta Air Lines. The discipline, perseverance, and problem-solving mindset he honed at Tech laid the foundation for his successful four-decade career in commercial real estate. Today, Kepano serves as vice chairman at CBRE’s Industrial and Logistics Advisory & Transaction Services. 

This latest commitment builds upon Kepano’s previous philanthropy directed to Georgia Tech, including support for scholarships and fellowships for business students and for athletics. He also provides volunteer leadership to his alma mater and currently serves on the Georgia Tech Foundation Board of Trustees and Scheller College Advisory Board. 

Kepano sees the center’s interdisciplinary model, which integrates business, design, architecture, city planning, and building construction, as uniquely powerful. Students, he said, will graduate with a “360‑degree understanding of development” and a significant advantage in the field.

“My vision is for Georgia Tech to become one of the top thought leaders in commercial real estate, producing students who are uniquely qualified, prepared, and capable of driving the next wave of innovation in the industry,” said Kepano. “I hope that 10 or 20 years from now, we can look back at all the people this program has influenced, and how they’ve gone out and impacted their environments and communities in a positive way.”

With a focus on offering students a pathway into one of the state’s most dynamic fields, the center will serve as a bridge between academic study and real-world practice. 

Funding from Kepano’s commitment will support a wide range of activities, including student programming and collaboration, faculty and industry outreach, operational needs, technology, and conference participation. His support will allow Georgia Tech to respond nimbly to emerging opportunities in the real estate sector.

“At Georgia Tech, we have a broad base of offerings that are related and connected to real estate. That gives us a competitive edge in providing a well‑rounded education and a portfolio of courses and activities that most universities can’t offer. The center brings all of this together — engineering, design, construction, business — so students can experience the full range of real estate opportunities across the Institute,” said Rick Porter, director of the College of Design’s Master of Real Estate Development program.

By strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration and expanding opportunities for students interested in real estate, the center aligns with Georgia Tech’s commitment to preparing leaders who can shape the built environment and the business landscape surrounding it.

Jonathan Clarke, senior associate dean for strategic initiatives at Scheller College, said, “The future of real estate will be shaped by rapid advances in technology and innovation. Success in this evolving industry will require an integrated understanding of finance, design, and technology. The Tony Kepano Joint Center for Real Estate will play a vital role in preparing students with this multidisciplinary foundation so they’re ready to lead where real estate is headed.”

Kepano’s investment is included in Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech. The $2 billion comprehensive campaign, running through 2027, is a generational effort to make a lasting impact across campus, providing essential resources for Georgia Tech students, faculty, and programs. 

Fresh from earning a doctorate in computer science at Washington University in St. Louis, Zegura arrived as the College’s third female faculty member. In her role with the networking and telecommunications group, Zegura’s work fell into a category of computing research that many would consider “more traditional” — but she never saw things through a traditional lens.

“One of the things that really stands out to me from those early years is that the College very deliberately hired in a way that was pushing the boundaries of what people thought of as computing,” said Zegura. “They hired key faculty in traditional areas of research like mine but were intentional about also hiring people (like Amy Bruckman) who were thinking in creative and new ways about what computing could be.”

For the first 10 years of her career, Zegura focused on digging into the incredible amount of work expected of a new faculty member. In the early days of the College of Computing, it was not uncommon for computing faculty to be asked to step in to fill teaching gaps in areas that were not yet staffed up by new instructors. For example, Zegura was asked to teach a discrete math course even though that was outside of her research area. She jumped in wholeheartedly and ended up loving her work with the undergraduate students in the course — so much that she has returned today to teaching a discrete math course with more than 250 students.

This passion for new challenges and dedication to her role as a teacher have become hallmarks of Zegura’s career at Georgia Tech. It was also during the first 10 years of her faculty career that Zegura began to build her community at Tech — friendships that would transform her future.

“The job is challenging. You’re prepared for some of it, but you’re not prepared for all of it. I really valued my faculty friends from the beginning because they became my critical support system. The people that you’re hired with become good friends. And especially later, when my kids were born and my colleagues’ kids were born, it was so important to have that community.”

It was during what Zegura sees as the second phase of her career when things became “surprising.” In 2002, she was asked to step in as interim dean of the College of Computing during the search for Dean Peter Freeman’s successor. Prior to this, she was asked to oversee space planning for the College during a critical growth period. These two new roles began what Zegura jokingly calls the “slippery slope of administration.”

After Rich DeMillo was hired as the new dean, Zegura was asked to take on the role of associate dean during another transformative time in the life of the College. It was during that period that Schools were first formed within the College, and Zegura was named as the first chair of the School of Computer Science.

During her time as chair, the Computing for Good collective was launched as a social good initiative consisting of Georgia Tech faculty, partners, and computer science students. Zegura, Santosh Vempala, and Michael Best created a computing course with a focus on issues of social justice, and the course was taught for eight years (and is still taught, in a different iteration, as part of today’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science program). These years were filled with impactful collaborations with programs like the Carter Center’s Mental Health Program in Liberia, which empowered students in the Computing for Good course to assist with software and support for a national monitoring program for mental health resources.

Zegura then moved to other methods for involving students in social good projects, including a six-year summer internship program called Civic Data Science, and, most recently, establishing a Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) team called Bits of Good.

She served as the chair of the School of Computer Science until 2012. It was an exhilarating time, and it was also an incredibly busy time. At that point in Zegura’s career, she was ready for a well-deserved sabbatical.

Her sabbatical year took a surprising turn when she decided to take one of Beki Grinter’s Human-Centered Computing courses. Grinter initially offered alternatives to Zegura taking the course alongside the other students. But Zegura persisted and showed up for class every Wednesday, completed all the assignments, and gained new knowledge to enhance her ability for expanded human-centered research consistent with social good.

When the Quality Enhancement Plan for the Institute opened the call for topic proposals in 2014, Zegura collaborated with other faculty concerned about community activism and issues of social justice and put together a concept paper for what would ultimately become Georgia Tech’s Serve-Learn-Sustain program.

“I had an itch to do research that was in line with my educational focus on computing for good,” said Zegura. “I discovered that there is a set of people at Tech who are interested in trying to help students work in their communities and bring value to their communities through that work. I wanted to discover how my research could further that goal.”

Working closely with program co-creator Beril Toktay, professor of operations management and the Brady Family Chairholder in the Scheller College of Business, Serve-Learn-Sustain proposed a path for Georgia Tech students to learn to create sustainable communities through engagement with content and context. Since its launch in 2016, the program has grown to encompass six Signature Programs that include a Sustainable Cities minor, the Sustainable Communities Summer Internship Program, the Innovating for Social Impact Program, RCE Greater Atlanta, and an array of events and workshops.

“I really think the focus on sustainability and community engagement — those ideas were a bit ahead of their time. To be talking in 2014 [when this idea was first developed] about sustainability, climate change, the importance of community — that’s very much in the national conversation now, but it wasn’t as much at that time.”

Then, seemingly just as Zegura was settling into a new phase of her work, which includes her current role as a Regents’ Professor and the Stephen Fleming Chair in the College of Computing, the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

“I think we all went through something very challenging and unimaginable," said Zegura. “It changed things, and it’s going to take time to settle into a new version of how education works. I believe that learning has a significant social and community component — that's an idea that is central to my work. This [the pandemic] impacted all of that.”

As campus adjusted and sought a new normal, one thing that crystalized even further for Zegura is that internet access is directly related to issues of equity. As a result, one of her current projects involves creating an Android-based app to help tribal and other communities across the U.S. take network coverage measurements and have those measurements reported to the Federal Communications Commission. This ongoing Rockefeller Foundation-funded project is part of a process challenging a lack of cellular provider coverage.

As a researcher, Zegura has big ideas about exciting, impactful projects. As a teacher, she remains deeply passionate about her work with Georgia Tech students. As a woman in computing, she feels excited about the collective of female faculty who now lead in computing — and across campus. As only the second woman to receive Georgia Tech's Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, she hopes she’ll see many more women awardees in the future.

“I feel proud and grateful. I’m proud to receive this award, and I’m so grateful for my relationships with my students and collaborators over these 30 years,” she said. “I’m continually looking for ways to do something big, beyond my own research, and I’m excited for what’s to come for the future of my work.”

Something big is surely in Zegura’s future, but ask any of her colleagues or students, and they will assure you that something big has already been accomplished.

Quotes From Colleagues

“The field of computing often falls into the trap of focusing on advancing itself while neglecting its impact on society. Ellen is one of those educators who intentionally resists this trap, teaching her students to use their skills to solve problems in their own communities. She is teaching the next generation to think of computing holistically, as a major factor in social problems and solutions. Ellen is an innovative teacher who cares deeply, and I am glad to see her recognized for it.” - Charles Isbell, Dean of the College of Computing and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair

“Ellen's technical excellence and passion for contributing to societal good have made her a role model for many faculty in our School and College. Her research achievements in networking include the development of an influential internet topology model and the foundations of Software-Defined Networking. Her dedication to teaching is evidenced by the fact that she has taught classes at every level (from 1000 to 8000) and created a unique course on Technology and Sustainable Community Development (SLS 3110) as part of Georgia Tech's Serve-Learn-Sustain QEP. Her internal and external service and leadership have been exemplary, including serving as chair of the Computing Research Association board, an organization that represents all Ph.D.-granting computer science departments in the U.S. It is truly a joy to see Ellen receive this well-deserved recognition.” - Vivek Sarkar, Chair of the School of Computer Science and Stephen Fleming Chair in Telecommunications in the College of Computing

“Ellen Zegura has been an ally and advocate for women in the College of Computing for the 17 years that I have known her. She is someone who has a vision and expedites it. We are all better off for having her in our community!” - Rosa Arriaga, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies, School of Interactive Computing

“Ellen has often mentioned that, while on leave, she took a class from me. Obviously, she was a fantastic student, and I was delighted to have her be part of a community of scholars all focused on human-centered computing. Since then, her research has continued to balance a deep knowledge of the fundamentals of how technology works, with a constant attention to the people who will have that computing experience. It’s a very impressive balancing act that she has managed for many years now. On a more personal note, Ellen has been a mentor and friend to me ever since I arrived at Georgia Tech. Her leadership has been a major inspiration to me, and I'm thrilled that she’s won this award. Thank you, Ellen!" - Beki Grinter, Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty Development, School of Interactive Computing

“As an advisor and mentor, Ellen is unrivaled. Her decades of experience in networking research, her visionary ability to apply computing to under-supported social problems, and her warm, fun-loving personality make every conversation with her transformative. If I acquire but a small fraction of her skills — working across disciplines to address pressing challenges and create sustainable partnerships — while studying under her, I will be thrilled." -Eric Greenlee, Computer Science Ph.D. Student

Since October 2019, more than 5,700 students, faculty, staff, alumni, campus partners, and community leaders provided input via surveys, in-person meetings, workshops, informal sessions, and webinars. They shared varied perspectives, aspirations, and dreams to help shape the future of the Institute.

The steering committee worked in tandem with the visioning and collection process to analyze volumes of raw data and provide the building blocks for the Institute’s new mission, vision, and values, and strategic impact theme areas.

Members of the Georgia Tech community are encouraged to visit strategicplan.gatech.edu to review the draft of the foundational narrative, vision, theme and values and beliefs that will ultimately shape the strategic plan. There, you can submit feedback through March 20, and learn more about the process, the data collection and analysis methodology, and next steps.

Applying to a Working Group

Starting now in Phase two — goal setting— working groups will cluster around six strategic themes. Applications are currently being accepted for any who are interested in serving on one of six themed working groups.

The strategic themes are as follows:

1. Amplify Impact: Embrace our power as agents of change for the public good and concentrate our research and learning efforts on identifying and solving the most critical and complex problems of our time, locally and globally.
2. Champion Innovation: Champion our leadership position as an engine of innovation and entrepreneurship and collaborate with other public and private actors to create economic opportunity and position Atlanta and Georgia as examples of inclusive innovation.
3. Connect Globally: Strengthen our role as a hub of worldwide collaboration and build a global learning platform to expand our reach and amplify our impact.
4. Expand Access: Empower people of all backgrounds and stages of life to learn and contribute to technological and human progress.
5. Cultivate Well-Being: Strengthen our culture of wellbeing and create an environment of holistic learning where all members of our community can grow and learn to lead healthy, purposeful, impactful lives.
6. Lead by Example: Lead and inspire by example by creating a culture of deliberate innovation in our own practices and by being an example of agility, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability.

The working groups will meet between March and May, and work to identify goals, objectives and measures of success necessary to bring those themes to life. The groups are expected to meet on a regular basis, with time commitments expected to be between four to six hours each week.

Interested working group applicants must complete the Institute Strategic Planning Working Group Application Form by Wednesday Feb. 26, 2020.

Questions can be sent to strategicplan@gatech.edu.

Trees naturally capture carbon dioxide, the most significant greenhouse gas, and Georgia already has a registry for carbon held by living trees. But trees used for construction also hold about half their weight in carbon, Gentry said.

“So if you have 100,000 pounds of wood in your building, then there’s 50,000 pounds of carbon that’s sequestered in that wood [for the life of the building].”

Gentry will lead the committee’s approach as they create a carbon-tracking process for trees used in construction. Wood building materials will then be part of the state’s carbon registry, which will allow carbon credits to be bought and sold.

The committee also relies on Valerie Thomas, the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, to determine net carbon benefit of sustainable materials versus conventional construction materials.

Thomas brings expertise in life cycle assessment to the committee. She looks at the whole life of the building material, from manufacture to disposal, to develop an accurate idea of environmental impact.

“Some of the part I’m especially tasked with is, ‘How do you quantify this? How much is it?’,” Thomas said.

It’s not as simple as adding up the weight of lumber used and dividing by half. “We have transportation, sawmills, and treatment,” she said, “and we’re probably using fossil fuels to do it.”

The environmental cost of all those processes must be compared to the costs of processes associated with concrete and metal frame buildings.

To make sure the credit for captured carbon is meaningful, “We have to look at all that to make sure the comparison is quantitatively sensible.”

California and Canada's British Columbia have related carbon-tracking systems, which provide incentives for using their timber in construction.

“Georgia is the largest forestry state in terms of structural lumber production,” said Gentry, “but we don’t have a lot of mass timber being produced from Southern Pine, so that’s considered to be a competitive disadvantage for the southeastern United States.”

This amendment to the current carbon registry provides incentive to use Georgia timber in construction, rather than bringing it in from other states. It will also help builders prove their commitment to greener development, Gentry said.

“Mass timber ties the logging and forestry industry -- a core business of rural Georgia -- to Atlanta where we have this huge influx of people. Cities need to build lots of multifamily housing, but in a thoughtful and environmentally conscious way,” said Gentry.

“This project speaks so well to both Georgias, and I think that’s part of the challenge we see in many things right now, is knitting that together. If there’s a win on both sides, it’s a good win.”

Building Taller and Cleaner with Mass Timber

At the Digital Building Lab, Georgia Tech researchers develop new ways of using mass timber in commercial construction.

“Mass timber is a process of cutting a tree up into lots of small pieces, essentially observing and removing the defects and then putting those boards back together to make huge pieces of wood,” said Gentry.

“This could be a panel of wood 10 feet by 40 feet by a foot and a half thick,” he said. “That's like a piece of plywood on steroids. That can become a floor system in a 20-story building.”

Mass timber is a relatively new technology: in 2021 Georgia building codes were updated to allow for timber buildings taller than 5 stories using the new mass timber technology. These changes allow for taller and more cost-competitive mass timber buildings.

Very few buildings in the state use mass timber technology. Two local examples are the Kendeda Building, on the Georgia Tech campus, and T3 West Midtown, a 7-story office building in Atlantic Station, near the Georgia Tech Campus.

Although the committee is not the first research group to look at carbon held in buildings, they will still have to develop new models to compare how much wood construction captures carbon as compared to traditional steel, Thomas said.

But, she said, the research is so new that “we can’t just look at what everybody else does and say, ‘that's what we're doing’.”

According to Thomas, the committee is “defining the regulations that will make it possible to have mass timber buildings that sequester carbon in the state of Georgia, and I expect that the procedure we use will be used by others also in the USA and in other countries. So we’re directly applying our expertise to support the state of Georgia.”

One implicit consequence of the amended carbon registry is that it “encourages building these innovative types of buildings in Georgia,” said Thomas.

“I grow my tree. I cut it down. I make a building with it so it's just sitting over there for hopefully a very long time. And then I grow another tree. So I'm taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into buildings on a continuing basis.”

For carbon sequestration to have an impact on the environment, “we're not talking one or two buildings in Atlanta. It has to be really large scale,” said Thomas.

“If we’re going to get the climate stabilized at 1.5 degrees centigrade increase, we’ve got to have some kind of technology for taking carbon out of the atmosphere.”

Growing a New Industry at Georgia Tech

And cultivating a new type of construction is no small endeavor, Gentry said.

“The mass timber problem is one of integration. It’s not like there’s a specific problem with adhesive bond lines or the density of wood. The real problem is the entire ecosystem that it’s going to take to make a mass timber industry in Georgia.”

Mass timber components require development of sophisticated manufacturing techniques.

“There’s tremendous capital expense for the presses that make these materials, and automation and CNC equipment that cuts these things into the kind of interlocking shapes that come to the job site and make these buildings so easy to erect,” Gentry said.

“In the Digital Fabrication Lab (DFL) we have much of that equipment. Our students are learning to run that equipment, and so this semester our students are exploring the design and economic potential of mass timber, looking at not only design of buildings, but also the technical aspects of prefabricating the components and bringing them to the site.”

The fact that Gentry and his students can prototype and deliver these building components right from the DFL amplifies the impact, he said. “I think one of the huge strengths of Georgia Tech is its ability to deliver not just knowledge, but instances of that knowledge applied.”

Gentry speaks from experience: he’s an alumnus of the Institute as well as a decades-long faculty member of the Schools of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering. So, too is another member of the Sustainable Building Material Technical Advisory Committee, Devon Dartnell (EE '84) Director of Market Analysis and Research at the Georgia Forestry Commission, and a Georgia timberland owner. Dartnell manages the work of the committee for the Forestry Commission.

The legislation identifies the specific viewpoints and expertise required to craft the new sustainable building carbon registry. Members include Edie Sonnie Hall, a life cycle analysis consultant from Washington State; Brian Campa, Principal at Cooper Carry; Jacek Siry, Professor of Forest Economics at the University of Georgia; Troy Harris, Managing Director of Timberland at Jamestown; Ted Miltiades, Director of Construction Codes and Industrialized Buildings at Georgia Department of Community Affairs; and Bill Howard,  General Manager of Claude Howard Lumber Company.

That includes making more of these chips here at home.  

Big data, global connectedness and the digitization of almost everything are driving a whirlwind of change that touches every aspect of our lives.

Georgia Tech continues to be at the center of that of that maelstrom of progress, pushing the cutting edge, developing and influencing advances and being an insistent voice for ensuring those advances are shared as broadly as possible.

Five faculty members share what they see as major forces impacting the coming year and beyond.

Microchip shortage will drive manufacturing to US and other supply chain changes

One of the big technology and supply chain stories of 2021 was the global shortage of microchips that impacted huge parts of the business world. One of the more visible impacts of that shortage was in the automotive field.

According to industry experts, the microchip shortage cost the automotive business $210 billion in revenue in 2020 driving prices up for new and especially used vehicles throughout the year. Dr. Madhavan Swaminathan, Georgia Tech’s John Pippin Chair in Microsystems Packaging and Electromagnetics, says the industry’s focus on finding solutions will bring noticeable change in the coming year.

He says early word of a trend in moving chip manufacturing to the United States will become a big focus in the coming year as well as auto manufacturers and other industries re-examining just-in-time supply decisions as they build inventory. 

Advances in addressing bias in AI bolsters inclusion

In computer science circles, it is no longer any sort of surprise that there can be bias in certain applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Bias can stem from a range of factors from the data used to software design to the situation where AI is being used.

How to know what to show each user with different world views in search or newsfeeds is quite different than making sure that software used for healthcare works for everyone. For example, sometimes a data set, even a quite large one, may not be representative.

There are close to 100,000 cases of skin cancer in the U.S. a year, and it is difficult to detect, especially the darker someone's skin tone is.

Machine learning researchers are making huge advances in detecting skin cancer, but a big limit is that the data they are using comes from light-skinned populations.

Knowing this problem exists opens the door to using data and artificial intelligence to improve detection for all. Dr. Deven Desai, a law and ethics professor in Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, says in the coming year, because this potential for bias is known, we will become much better at identifying bias from wherever it may come and addressing it to limit harm.

The focus in the coming year will be on making the searching and sifting tools of AI and machine learning more attuned to potentially skewed results. This focus will bring better, more inclusive results. 

Watch the video: A Good Challenge: The Future of AI

Digital twins drive safety, efficiency and savings in construction

Think of them as the ultimate in interactive blueprints that can actually communicate to owners about building performance. The idea of a digital twin is not new. Building an exact match, digital version of a construction project is commonplace in construction now and has been for years. Architectural drawings, CAD images, or BIM images would all be considered “twins” in a way.

The advances that are happening now with true digital twins and that will be taking off in the coming year are in what you can do with and learn from a much more robust digital twin.

"Digital twinning is about the building and all the components that are in the building. Where they are, what condition they're in, all kinds of qualities," says Russell Gentry director of the Digital Building Lab at Georgia Tech.

In the coming year, Gentry expects the idea of using a digital twin will grow as its uses expand - monitoring for maintenance needs, identifying potential problems like leaks or water damage, dialing in HVAC system efficiencies - just a few of the changes that are happening or soon will be. Digital twins will be used to improve building safety, efficiency and even retrofitting existing buildings with new and improved technologies.

The automation and improvements that can be achieved will be a powerful force in construction and building management.  

Technology led up-skilling drives job agility that will increase worker satisfaction and productivity

In the U.S. alone, November 2021 saw more than four and a half million people quit their jobs, the biggest spike on record and continuing a streak of transition and upheaval. As the pace of change continues to increase, we need to be able to rapidly reconfigure workforces to address new challenges.

Ashok Goel, professor of computer science and human-centered computing in the School of Interactive Computing, has been watching the rapid changes in the job market. He sees technology as a solution to reskilling employees. 

“It is critical that we leverage technology to develop better tools to sync up employers and educators so that job seekers have clear paths to reskilling,” Goel says.

Using AI to match workers to jobs, to improve job performance and satisfaction are just a few of the efforts in the coming year that will ultimately result in improved worker well-being and productivity as well.

Covid public health crisis leads to public policy evolution

The pandemic has defined very clearly a strain in the relationship between scientists and some segments of the general public.

Some public policy makers, as a reflection of that divide, have made decisions related to public health that do not always match generally accepted science. For academic leaders in public policy like Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto, the Marie Patton School Chair in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech, this is one of the biggest challenges our society and people making public policy will face in the coming years.

Bridging the divide made clear by Covid and building the relationships that will result in better policy will be an effort that will have impact for decades.

“In many ways we’re setting the stage for the other looming global crises that we’re being faced with like climate change, like issues around social justice.

All of those are going to take the same kind of navigation in communication between the public between science and between policy makers and not just within regions but globally,” said Sugimoto.

It’s a challenge that she and her colleagues have dedicated their careers to taking on.

Watch: Public Policy and the Pandemic

For more trends and in-depth predictions, read: The Year Ahead: Trends to Watch in 2022 

“We really try to accommodate all filming and photography requests that complement what we do as a teaching and research institution,” said Deborah L. Greene, campus use and film specialist, Office of Capital Planning and Space Management (CPSM). “However, the requests were coming from so many internal and external groups that it became clear that we needed a more consistent process for reviewing requests and permitting filming and photography in the least disruptive manner to the campus.”

So, the Filming and Photography on Campus Policy was created in 2016 to define the rules of engagement for photographers and videographers to film on campus.

Last year, the policy was reviewed and revised to help clarify certain aspects of it. In addition, basic “how to” guidelines were developed to help outline the process.

Greene adds that no two requests are the same, and there are many nuances to how each request is managed. However, the following filming and photography ground rules will help ensure greater consistency and compliance while facilitating the review and approval process.

To Whom Do the Policy and Rules Apply?

• The policy applies to any third-party entity, company, or organization (for profit and nonprofit) as well as to all members of the Georgia Tech community (students, faculty, staff, and affiliated organizations) using a third-party vendor to acquire film footage. Third-party vendors, with whom Georgia Tech has a contractual agreement to perform facilities design and construction work on campus, also need to follow the policy but may not be charged the application fee; this is evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
• The policy also applies to students, faculty, and staff capturing their own footage for independent use or for school-/work-related activities. To protect their allowable intellectual property rights, students, faculty, and staff should complete a filming application so that the circumstances of the filming can be evaluated for applicable fees, related charges, and potential safety and security issues. The process is streamlined for film or photography projects initiated, managed, and implemented wholly by Georgia Tech campus communicators, their staff, or their designated staff or faculty representatives to film within the interior footprint of their college, school, or research areas.
• In addition, the policy applies to individuals who are not current students or employees, who wish to conduct incidental personal photography on campus (e.g., a Georgia Tech alumna taking wedding photos on Tech Lawn). While an application is required, the need for a location license agreement and proof of insurance will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
• In general, the policy does not apply to news organizations as defined by Institute Communications. However, news organizations are required to coordinate all on-campus visits with the Media Relations team. In addition, news outlets often request to produce documentaries on campus featuring Tech’s faculty and their research. These types of filming requests require completed filming applications and generally require proof of insurance and location agreements.

How Do I Submit an Application and Begin the Approval Process?

• A Filming and Photography Application must be completed in its entirety and submitted to films@cpsm.gatech.edu before filming or photography requests are reviewed.
• Written approval, generally through an executed license agreement, must be obtained prior to filming or photographing on campus. CPSM reviews and approves the proposed project from a logistics viewpoint (i.e., location and proposed dates) and then sends it to Institute Communications (IC) to review and approve. IC reviews the content from a brand reputation viewpoint, which requires a thorough understanding of the intent of the filming/photo shoot, questions to be asked (or script of scenes to be shot on campus), and distribution outlets. If the proposed filming or photo shoot are not in the Institute’s best interest, Georgia Tech reserves the right to decline the request.
• Georgia Tech is a state agency so, depending on the scope of the project, there may be additional compliance requirements to be met prior to gaining approval for filming or photographing on campus. These may include:
  • Vetting international film crews with the Office of the General Counsel.
  • Vetting intellectual property.
  • Verifying that the requester has required insurance.
  • Executing a Georgia Tech location license agreement. Georgia Tech employees are not permitted to sign any third-party agreement (i.e. confidentiality agreements, location license agreements) to film or photograph on campus. If agreements are required, they must be Georgia Tech agreements and must be reviewed by the Office of the General Counsel before filming or photographing on campus is approved.
• In addition, all requests for filming and photo shoots on Tech’s campus that involve the use of small unmanned aircraft systems (e.g., drones) must be submitted to and approved by the Georgia Tech Police Department.

Given the requirements and parties involved, sufficient time is needed to review requests and obtain necessary approvals. While smaller productions often require a minimum of 10 business days, major motion pictures, television episodes, and some advertising commercials require a minimum of six weeks. Staff in CPSM and IC will determine time requirements on a case-by-case basis within these parameters.

For more information on filming and photography on campus, including guidelines and FAQs, visit space.gatech.edu/films-and-photo-shoots. Questions about the Filming and Photography Policy, including how it applies to your project, may be submitted to films@cpsm.gatech.edu.

In 1997 Nerem recruited Andrés García and his wife, Michelle LaPlaca, to join the pioneering IBB program at Tech after they completed their work as postdoctoral fellows at the University of Pennsylvania — his in cell and molecular biology, hers in neurotrauma.

In 1998 when García and LaPlaca joined Tech, IBB launched its National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in Tissue Engineering with Emory University, making it a strategic community for García to join to start his research program in an emerging field. Now as executive director of IBB and a Regents Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, García is continuing Nerem’s legacy of vision, collaboration, and innovation in everything he does. In recognition of his work, he is the 2021 recipient of the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor given to a Georgia Tech professor. The award is presented to a professor who has made significant, long-term contributions to teaching, research, and public service.

Known as a global pioneer in developing biomaterials systems for translational applications in regenerative medicine, García holds more than a dozen U.S. patents. Discoveries include the development of hydrogels for protein and cell delivery in regenerative medicine, engineering biofunctional materials to improve islet survival, and the design of infection-fighting materials. His research focuses on creating an engineered class of materials that can be used for applications to transplant a graft without immune-suppressive drugs. Human studies are planned to start next year. Researchers in his lab are developing new ways to treat Type 1 diabetes, eventually working with adult stem cells to reprogram them into insulin-producing cells. Future applications include addressing kidney failure and other diseases.

Creating Opportunities for ‘Collisions’

García is enthusiastic about his research, as well as all of the collaborative research in IBB. “IBB is a fantastic community of faculty, trainees, and staff who come together in making discoveries and developing the technologies in bioengineering and bioscience that will change the world,” he said. His goal is that IBB will continue to expand research and integrative opportunities to have a major economic impact, creating an environment to translate research into commercial products and therapies. “With IBB we want to provide opportunities for ‘collisions,’ unexpected interactions that lead to the discoveries. It was Bob Nerem’s vision to drive that sort of collaboration,” he said.

García shared an example of one such collision: “As part of a grant from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), I was required to present unpublished research progress at a meeting with other researchers from throughout the country. After I made my presentation that morning, a JDRF director announced that for the next three-year cycle of funding we would need to collaborate with someone in the room on research. We went to lunch, and as I was building my sandwich, an immunologist introduced himself to me, complimented me on my presentation, and asked me if I thought I could develop a biomaterial to deliver the particular protein he was working with. You never ask an engineer if they think they can do something. They’ll find a way. I said I could, and we started working together.”

An elected member of both the National Academy of Inventors and the National Academy of Engineering, García has established three startup companies in the past seven years. He has received numerous awards for his teaching and research and has published more than 230 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals.

Mentoring Students

García has supervised 15 postdoctoral researchers and advised/co-advised 37 Ph.D. students. He is known for his long-term commitment to his trainees, as well as mentoring students outside of his laboratory and classroom. While he has not taught for the past three years because of his responsibilities as IBB executive director, he still mentors students in his lab.

“I take my responsibility as a mentor and supervisor seriously. It is important to have one-to-one interactions,” García said. “I take a practical approach and feel it is critical to explain why learning a topic is important, sharing practical applications, and offering experiential hands-on learning. I have had very supportive and engaged mentors and would like to pass that on to others.”

Background

A native of Puerto Rico, García originally came to the states to study at Cornell University. He was very interested in the emerging field of biomedical engineering, but his father, an industrial engineer, advised him to major in another engineering discipline as a backup in case the biomedical field didn’t develop as anticipated. García took his father’s advice, earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and also taking biology and bioengineering classes.

During his senior year García participated in a project to design a structure to support fractured legs for horses. He worked to optimize the way a “boot” attached to the bone so that it wouldn’t fracture again. He became interested in research, and his professors recommended that he go to graduate school. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. García was the first person in his immediate family to earn a doctoral degree.

García and his family have embraced all things Georgia Tech. He and LaPlaca have two sons, Rafael, a Tech mechanical engineering (ME 2018) graduate working at GTRI, and Andrés, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student at Tech. They hold season basketball and football tickets. One of their dogs is named Buzz.

García said he was deeply honored, humbled, and shocked when Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera called and told him he had been selected for this year’s Distinguished Professor Award. “The award is special to me because it reflects the great contributions my friends, family, and peers have made in my life to get me to this point. I am grateful for my trainees, my collaborators, and colleagues, and for the support that Georgia Tech has provided in giving me the tools to succeed. Georgia Tech is the best,” García said.

Quotes From Colleagues and Former Students

“Professor García has been an integral part of growth of the international reputation of our bioengineering program and the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Having seen the sustained impact that he has had on students from K-12 (Project Engages) through graduate students, he is a remarkable educator who I feel is well deserving of this award.”

Sam Graham
Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair in Mechanical Engineering
Georgia Tech
 

“He remains on my short list of speakers because I resonate so strongly with his approach — very deep technical skills, outstanding problem definition, and tremendous colleague in service and collegiality. He is also a terrific mentor, and his former lab members are stars. He cares about doing great science and teaching people what he learned. Andrés García is a gem at Georgia Tech, and as an alum I hope you can keep him there — he is doing some of the best biology on campus and is a superb attractor of the best students from MIT.”

Linda G. Griffith
S.E.T.I. Professor of Mechanical and Biological Engineering
Director, MIT Center for Gynepathology Research
Chair, MIT Biological Engineering Undergraduate Programs Committee

“The lab around Professor García performs research at a unique broadness and depth. His remarkable combination of professional and personal skills is the key for his success and makes him a highly estimated collaboration partner for other scientists across disciplines and continents. He is the most invited American scientist at plenary lectures in European conferences on biomaterials. This is not only due to the high quality of his work, but also to his ability as a communicator and active discussion partner, his openness to address new topics in collaboration, and his passion for science and education that truly inspires and motivates young researchers.”

Aránzazu del Campo
Director INM-Leibniz Institute for New Materials
Professor, Materials Synthesis, Saarland University

“The five years that I spent in Andrés’ lab were transformative for me, and the influence of that experience is difficult to put into words. Andrés taught me many things — how to be a scientist; how to develop creative and impactful ideas; how to execute on those ideas; how to write; how to present, etc. But more important than all the technical aspects of what I learned from Andrés, I learned from him who I wanted to be. Most of my professional life, and much of my personal life, is modeled after what I have learned from watching Andrés as a professor, colleague, friend, father, and husband.”

Charles Gersbach
Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Director, Center for Biomolecular and Tissue Engineering
Director, Center for Advanced Genomic Technologies
Duke University

Rinehart joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2013. In her role as associate dean, she oversees a broad range of College programs, including academic affairs and curriculum, admissions and outreach, faculty affairs and development, and assessment and accreditation. Rinehart also serves as a member of the teaching faculty in the School of Architecture, coordinating the first-year design studio sequence and teaching the History of Architecture, among others. She is the faculty leader of the Exploring Architecture and Design summer track for incoming students, and a faculty advisor to the Tau Sigma Delta Honor Society (Rho Chapter) and several other student organizations. Rinehart also continues to serve as part of the Academic Steering Committee of the Institutional Response to Covid-19 team.

“Many thanks to Michelle Rinehart for serving as interim dean of the College of Design,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “Michelle is a skilled administrator and leader who invests incredible energy in her colleagues, students, and the Institute overall. We are grateful for her leadership through this transition.”

Rinehart has nearly 30 years of experience in higher education. Her varying leadership and administrative roles have also included experience in enrollment management, student services, academic advising, and budgets and finance. She holds an Ed.D. in Higher Education Management from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Architecture from Tulane University.

Rinehart will serve until a new dean is named. The work of the search committee, chaired by Dean Kaye Husbands Fealing of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, is well underway, with assistance from search firm Russell Reynolds Associates.

Urban analytics is an emerging field that incorporates smart cities, urban informatics, and urban science. The goal of urban analytics is to leverage data science in addressing major issues cities continue to face, including air, water, and land pollution; carbon emissions; traffic congestion; inadequate housing options; and disparities in access to services. The skills and knowledge necessary to tackle such challenges require an integrated multidisciplinary approach, which this degree is designed to provide. 

It is aimed at students who are interested in solving urban problems through the acquisition, integration, and analysis of various forms of data. Undergraduate preparation for this degree can include a range of fields such as engineering, planning, computing, and various social science disciplines. 

Georgia Tech is the only university in the University System of Georgia offering an urban analytics degree. Programs of this kind are quickly gaining national relevancy — similar graduate programs exist at Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Northeastern University, and the University of California at Berkeley. 

Subhro Guhathakurta, chair of the School of City and Regional Planning and the director of the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization, noted that Tech’s urban analytics program stands out from the others given its strategic partnership with top-ranked programs in engineering and computing to offer this multidisciplinary degree.

“The objective is to harness Georgia Tech’s recognized strengths and expertise in data analytics to focus on the critical problems facing urban regions,” he said.

Read also: Gulsah Akar Appointed New School of City and Regional Planning Chair

Additionally, there are many aspects of industrial engineering that can be applied to urban analytics, Pascal Van Hentenryck, associate chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in ISyE, said. 

“Many supply chain logistics concepts and solutions can be applied to address the inefficiencies in public transportation, accessibility, and the relationship between mobility and the built environment. This program is pioneering in that it links many viewpoints holistically, from the concepts to the mathematical and computational tools, and their applications to problems faced by our growing cities,” he said.

Georgia Tech’s ISyE program is ranked as the No. 1 graduate program in in the industrial, manufacturing, and systems specialty and has held the top rank for 31 years.

Advances in computation are also essential to ensure the sustainable development of modern cities and guarantee that they operate effectively, Haesun Park, Regents' Professor and chair of CSE, said. 

“Understanding and planning for the interdependent and interactive quality of city infrastructures require computational models and tools of increasing complexity and scale. This is where data, computing, and networks are ubiquitous, with computation playing unprecedented new roles in the management and operation of cities,” she said.

Besides new introductory courses, several existing classes in the degree-participating schools are available as part of a well-rounded curriculum. These courses are carefully selected to meet four core competencies: urban systems, spatial analysis, computational statistics including machine learning, and modeling and visualization.

The curriculum will place special emphasis on social end-values such as sustainability, justice, and resilience, and on individual data rights including: permission for collection; privacy through aggregation; and transparency through open data.

"One of the most exciting aspects of this new degree is the diversity of academic programs working together on this topic of urban analytics. It will unite faculty and students from across campus to work on solving many important challenges," John Stasko, Regents' Professor and interim chair of IC, said.

Specialization within the degree is encouraged. The one-year program spans fall and spring semesters, with a summer workshop.

Applications for the Fall 2021 cohort open this summer. For more information, click here.

The two searches will run concurrently and will fill the upcoming vacancies by Dean Steve French and Vice Provost Yves Berthelot, respectively.

The search for the new dean of the College of Design will be chaired by Kaye Husbands Fealing, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and supported by the Russell Reynolds Associates search firm. Adam Stulberg, Sam Nunn Professor and Chair in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, will lead the search for the vice provost for International Initiatives. Michael Toney, director of Academic Administration, will serve as administrative lead for both searches.

“Dean French and Vice Provost Berthelot have provided invaluable leadership to their respective areas and we are grateful for their service to Tech, particularly over the past year,” McLaughlin said. “I invite faculty, staff, and students to join us as we search for our new leaders. Community input is welcome and encouraged as we identify the best candidates to continue our forward momentum as an institution and realize the goals set forth in our new strategic plan.”

Virtual town halls for faculty, staff, and students to learn about the respective search processes and timelines, and to provide feedback on the characteristics of ideal candidates have been scheduled as follows:

• College of Design: Thursday, April 8 (separate faculty, staff, and student meetings throughout day)
• International Initiatives: Thursday, April 8, at 11 a.m. (campuswide)

Search details, including committee rosters, ongoing updates, and specific information on the town hall sessions for each search can be found at https://provost.gatech.edu/design-dean-search and https://provost.gatech.edu/vice-provost-international-initiatives-search.

Architecture for Teens offers readers an overview of the basic elements of architecture—structure, program, aesthetics, and region. The book also shares the vast career opportunities for architects that range from residential and commercial design to historic preservation, landscape architecture, urban planning, and more. Using real world examples, Willkens presents architectural projects, colorful illustrations, and thoughtful details of their impact.

Willkens’ book was written with teens in mind to inspire and educate future architecture at younger ages. Even though the book is geared toward teens, it is a book for anyone with an interest in architecture. Architecture for Teens explores architectural movements and designers from pre-history to today while paying special attention toward building a more environmentally responsible world.

Architecture for Teens features projects and interviews by Andrew Daley, AIA of SHoP, Pascale Sablan, FAIA, NOMA, LEED AP of Adjaye Associates and Beyond the Built, Valerie Friedmann, urban planner for the City of Lexington, KY, and Pavan Iyer (Bachelor of Science in Architecture, ’14) , founder of eightvillage.

Willkens joined the School of Architecture in the fall of 2019.  She is a practicing designer, researcher, and FAA Certified Remote Pilot who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. As an avid photographer and illustrator, her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects National Photography Competition and she has contributed graphics to several exhibitions and publications.

Currently, Willkens is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Atlanta Preservation Center, and a member of the Education Committee for the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art’s Southeast chapter. Since 2016, Danielle has participated in the research and documentation project for the spatial reconstruction of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She is currently the co-PI, with Auburn Assoc. Prof Junshan Liu, conducting a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, funded by the NPS African American Civil Rights Grant Program. 

Learn more and order your copy of Architecture for Teens.

“Dean French’s vision and guidance have resulted in great progress for the College of Design, both within the Institute and beyond,” said Steven McLaughlin, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “We are very grateful to Dean French for his leadership within the College of Design, the Institute, and our community, and we wish him the very best as he returns to the faculty.”

Under French’s direction, the College experienced a significant increase in enrollment, especially at the undergraduate level. This is due to innovative research- and technology-focused academic programs, which are unique among U.S. design colleges. New programs include the Bachelor of Science in Music Technology, the Master of Real Estate Development, and the minors in Industrial Design and in Sustainable Cities.  Increased philanthropic support, including new endowed chairs and graduate fellowships, is also a credit to French’s tenure as dean.

French has served as dean of the College of Design since 2013 and has held the John Portman Dean’s Chair since 2014. In 2016, he led the transition from the College of Architecture to the College of Design. He joined Tech in 1992 as the director of and a professor in the City and Regional Planning Program. His expertise in sustainable urban development and natural hazard mitigation has contributed to Georgia Tech’s visibility in these areas.

The College will remain under Dean French’s leadership while a search commences. Details on the search process and the leadership transition will be announced later this spring.

The PFI Program within the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships (IIP) provides researchers from science and engineering disciplines funded by the NSF with the opportunity to take their research and technology from the discovery phase to the marketplace for the benefit of society. 

Russell Gentry, Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture, serves as the project’s principal investigator (PI). The three-year grant continues Gentry’s research on the reuse of retired wind blades and builds on the proprietary technology developed as part of the Re-Wind Tripartite Research program funded by the U.S. NSF, Science Foundation of Ireland, and the Department for the Economy of Northern Ireland.  

“In our foundational NSF grants, our team demonstrated the potential for wind blade re-use and the positive environmental benefits that will come from the re-use of these amazing composite materials in civil infrastructure,” said Gentry. “This potential is embodied in the two patents we are pursuing and in the follow-on Partnership for Industry grant from NSF. The team is now advancing our hardware and software technology and has partnered with companies in the wind energy and electrical transmission industries to pilot these technologies.”

Logisticus Group joins the project as the key provider of transportation for the retired wind turbine blades. As one of the largest wind blade transporters, Logisticus Group brings supply expertise for the complex logistics of transporting decommissioned wind turbine blades, which are approximately 50 meters in length. 

"We are thrilled to partner with Georgia Tech on this project. Their team has always had a passion to conduct research and development on proprietary technology when it comes to reusing wind blades. We feel, as a company, that we need to be a part of the solution to find ways to recycle and repurpose these blades,” said Will Stephan, founder of Logisticus Group.”

Wind turbine blades are made from high-quality Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composite materials, which are not biodegradable or recyclable. Currently, turbine blades are landfilled or incinerated at their end-of-life stage. Georgia Tech and Logisticus will conduct research and development to commercialize mass-market architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) products from repurposed FRP composite of decommissioned wind turbine blades.

The team, comprised of Georgia Tech faculty, laboratory staff, and graduate and undergraduate students in architecture and engineering, will develop commercial products using Generative Design software, architecture studios, and workshops, structural and Finite element analysis, life-cycle analysis, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, and full-scale testing of prototypes in Georgia Tech’s 20,000 sq. ft. Digital Fabrication Laboratory. 

“The success of our project comes from the diverse talents and viewpoints represented on the team. It’s rare to have architects, engineers, and social, geospatial and environmental scientists working on the same fundamental problem,” said Gentry. “As we move to commercialize, we are building an entrepreneurial team and linking with industry. We look forward to seeing our re-use applications implemented in the next three years.” 

Prior to receiving the NSF PFI grant, researchers at Georgia Tech developed proprietary algorithms for a tool called the “Blade Machine” and created unique testing methodologies to rapidly characterize any wind turbine blade currently in production for architectural and structural analysis and design purposes. 

This fall the team is participating in the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program with Angie Nagle from the University College Cork in Ireland and Chloe Kiernicki, Bachelor of Science in Architecture student at Georgia Tech, serving as entrepreneurial leads.  James Marlow, founding CEO of Atlanta-based Radiance Solar, is serving as the I-Corps team’s industrial mentor.

About the Georgia Tech School of Architecture

The Georgia Tech School of Architecture offers five distinct degree programs – a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, a Master of Architecture, a Master of Science in Architecture, a Master of Science in Urban Design, and a Ph.D. in Architecture.  Embedded in the heart of Atlanta and a part of a top-ranked research institution, the School of Architecture combines research, technology, and design to form a well-rounded, interdisciplinary, future-focused education as students prepare to make an impact on the built environment.  www.arch.gatech.edu

About Logisticus Group

Logisticus Group (LLC), a certified Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), specializes in transportation logistics, project management, and technology solutions serving projects throughout North and South America. At Logisticus Group, we believe our processes, technology solutions, personnel, and business model deliver a more predictable, controlled, efficient, and expedited project. To learn more visit, www.logisticusgroup.com. 

Nominations opened for this year’s HCD awards in March, just as COVID-19 cases began to increase in the US. Members of healthcare communities around the world, including Matić-Isautier, began to focus their efforts on safety of the healthcare workers on the frontlines, personal protective equipment (PPE), and efforts to contain the virus. 

Matić-Isautier was awarded Researcher of the Year for her work. As a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Architecture and a graduate researcher with SimTigrate Design Lab, her research aims to bridge the gaps in design as they relate to behavioral choices and health outcomes. Looking at not only healthcare design, but her doctoral thesis is also focused on the bigger picture of design for health, exploring how design affects behavioral choices and how individuals perceive and use health-promoting resources in the Atlanta area.

Over the past several years, Matić has focused on the design of biocontainment units (BCUs), exploring ways in which design can be used to improve staff safety and patient experiences in these spaces.  

Her research on biocontainment unit design dates back to the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak. Matić-Isautier was a part of a multidisciplinary research program Prevention Epicenter of Emory and Atlanta Consortium Hospitals (PEACH)that produced several peer-reviewed journal publications. She co-authored a publication titled, “Design Strategies for Biocontainment Units to Reduce Risk During Doffing of High-level Personal Protective Equipment,” that underscores the role of design in supporting staff safety and which was published in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases 

Matić-Isautier led the SimTigrate Design Lab’s 2019 collaboration with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) in the analysis of the layout and organization of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) doffing space in biocontainment units. This research has helped to refine the design of the six BCUs that will go to the new bed tower at CHOA’s, which aims to open in 2025. 

Most recently, Matić-Isautier was the lead author of a white paper titled, “Design Strategies for Biocontainment Units: Creating Safer Environments.” The paper is translated into Mandarin, Korean, Portuguese, and Farsi and made available online, providing useful information for architects, interior designers, and facility managers– everyone who is looking at ways to create safer and more efficient BCUs.

Lisa Lim, an alumna of the Ph.D. in Architecture program and former researcher with SimTigrate Design Lab and Imagine Lab, was named HDC’s Educator of the Year.

Lim joined the Texas Tech University College of Architecture as an assistant professor in 2018, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and elective courses in design and health. Lim studied evidence-based design at Georgia Tech. Like Matić-Isautier, Lim studied healthy environments for people and understanding how their behaviors and feelings are impacted by physical environments. She now teaches students about this type of health-driven design.

Lim keeps close ties to SimTigrate Design Lab and contributed to “Design Strategies for Biocontainment Units: Creating Safer Environments,” along with Matić-Isautier, Benton Humphreys, Yeinn Oh, and Jennifer Dubose, which was published by Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture in 2020. 

HCD recognized Lim’s accomplishments with her teaching efforts providing real-world and collaborative learning environments to the students. Her research studies healthcare facility design, its effect on teamwork, and its impact on the well-being of healthcare professionals. 

Lim also developed “Visual Power,” that “quantifies interpersonal visual relationships among users of a space, furthering analytical capabilities of the field,” and “Functional Scenario analysis approach” to analyze and evaluate healthcare settings from the users’ perspective. Using this method, researchers are able to quantify spatial features for patients, providers, and family members to improve the comparisons of design options. 

Click here to read more about the 2020 Healthcare Design Awards.

“Studio 2020+ set out to methodically tap into and iteratively cultivate participants’ design imaginations during these unprecedented and incredibly challenging times,” said Kaseman. “Initially calibrated to develop a collective array of architectural typologies tied to projective scenarios within a post-COVID world, the police killing of George Floyd ignited sustained nationwide protests against racism, police brutality, and racial injustice approximately halfway through our five-week long semester.”

“Recalibrating the studio at that point involved a week of attempting to synthesize our raw emotions, while simultaneously building design arsenals and sharpening them towards new directions,” said Kaseman. “With two weeks left, all seventeen students were tasked to initiate and deliver final projects with full freedom to tackle any issue of urgency at hand.”

Master of Architecture students Will Reynolds and Breanna Rhoden decided to examine issues of social injustice in their projects. During their final review, it was suggested by their jurors that Reynolds and Rhoden submit their projects to the Hip Hop + Architecture As Design Justice competition.

The competition was hosted by Michael Ford, also known as The Hip Hop Architect. Ford uses music to critique the built environment in its past, present, and future. In the summer of 2017, the Georgia Tech School of Architecture brought to campus the Hip Hop Architecture Camp, a one-week camp for middle school students in under-represented communities and connects them with professionals in architecture, urban design, and their communities. Students create architectural models, a Hip Hop Architecture track, and a music video to summarize their design. 

The Hip Hop + Architecture As Design Justice competition’s call for submissions asked, “How will spaces look in a Just City? A city which has defeated and dismantled racism? What tools will help us get there?”

On Monday, June 22, it was announced that Reynolds received the top prize in the competition and Rhoden was recognized among the top 20 submissions.

The first rule the recent Design Justice competition required that submissions be “inspired by a Hip Hop lyric, track, or album title focused on imagining better communities.”

In his winning entry, Reynolds referenced lyrics from AmeriKKKan Idol by Joey Bada$$, which says, “The scary part, boys and girls/Is most of these stories don’t make it to the news and reach mass consciousness/It is for sure time that we as a people stand up for acknowledgment/And accomplishment of what we call human rights/It is time to rebel, better yet, raise hell.”

“The intent of this project is to facilitate a new form of justice, one that holds those enforcing the law to a new standard of honesty and transparency,” Reynolds said of his project. “This system of drone outposts is dispersed throughout a city. The structures, or outposts, deploy drones when a civilian reports a police stop. Ideally, this report could be vocally activated with a smartphone –‘Hey Siri, the police are here.’ The drone arrives onsite and records the police throughout the interaction. The information is streamed back to the outpost to be monitored by civilians.”

“These drone outposts would act as a facility to store and maintain drones, store, and broadcast information securely, and create a safe space for civilians,” Reynolds added. “This new building typology could be freestanding or occupy existing structures like the space between billboards.”

“I chose the song by Lil Baby called “The Bigger Picture” because it directly speaks to the Black Lives Matter movement currently taking place across the globe during this unprecedented time and how we have to start by inspiring future generations to create a better future through addressing the problems happening now,” said Rhoden about her project, which proposed a new place of refuge, resiliency, and celebration for the community.

“The social and economic effects of the pandemic along with the systemic injustice has and will continue to affect the mental health of the community,” Rhoden continued. “My hope is that this newfound type of architecture will bring solidarity, confidence, and provide some comfort to those putting their lives on the line protesting for racial equality.

Learn more about the Hip Hop + Architecture As Design Justice Competition.

Augenbroe served as the director of the High Performance Building Lab and as an advisor of Ph.D. candidates in the high performance building specialization and Master of Science in Architecture students with a concentration in high performance building. In his career, Augenbroe has advised over 40 Ph.D. students from both the U.S.A. and Europe. And in 2008, Augenbroe received the lifetime achievement award for work in building simulation from the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA).

Augenbroe has served on the scientific board of five international journals and published three books and over 200 refereed papers. Augenbroe is widely known in his field for his research in the areas of building performance, computational building simulation, indoor air quality, intelligent building systems, uncertainty and risk, system monitoring, and diagnostics.

This year, Scott Marble, professor and William H. Harrison Chair of the Georgia Tech School of Architecture and founding partner of Marble Fairbanks Architects, joins the ranks of the AIA College of Fellows.

According to the April 2020 edition of the AIA Newsletter to its members, “Fellowship represents recognition of your significant achievement at this point in your life and it signifies the beginning of a new phase of great potential for your passion for the profession. This is your start for doing more.”

One of the responsibilities put forth by the College of Fellows is that fellows continue to use their time and talents to benefit the future of the profession and to mentor the next generation of professional architects.

“Being elevated to a Fellow is a great honor and it re-energizes me to move to the next level of practice and teaching with a greater focus on impacting the educational and professional processes to help the next generation,” said Marble.

“Through design, teaching, research, and practice, he [Marble] has worked to advance the discipline of architecture,” noted the College of Fellows. “His work merges user-centered design with advanced digital tools and technology to create novel and engaging spaces for people.”

Click here to read the AIA College of Fellows May 2020 Special Issue Newsletter.

The competition, which kicked off on January 13, is designed to simulate a real-world design, planning, and development project.

This year, the competition enters its 18th year. According to the ULI competition website, "The ULI Hines Student Competition is part of the [Urban Land] Institute’s ongoing effort to raise interest among young people in creating better communities, improving development patterns, and increasing awareness of the need for multidisciplinary solutions to development and design challenges." 

Six teams from Georgia Tech entered this year's competition. Each team must have five graduate students from at least three different disciplines to be eligible to compete.

The assignment for this year's competition explored the redevelopment of a site in Miami with the Florida East Coast Roast Railway splitting the site into the Wynwood and Edgewater neighborhoods. Student groups imagined that the Tri-Rail would begin providing commuter rail service to downtown Miami in 2021. They were tasked with redeveloping the parcels in the site area to accommodate a station in Midtown Miami, and turning the site into “a thriving, mixed-use, transit-oriented neighborhood.”

The Georgia Tech teams selected as an honorable mention submitted projects titled, “ETS” and "SPACES."

Team ETS

On Team ETS were Master of Architecture (M.Arch) students, Zachary Brown and Rand Zalzala, Master of City and Regional Planning (MCRP) student Brock Thompson, and Master of Science in Urban Design (MSUD) students, George Doyle and Eleni Kroi. Building Construction and City Planning part-time lecturer John Threadgill was the faculty advisor for this team. Designer II at Portman Architects, T. Coston Dickinson, was the professional advisor for ETS. 

"The importance of the ULI Hines Student Competition for graduate students is the nature of its interdisciplinary emphasis,” said Doyle. “This competition immerses a diverse group of graduate students with unique post-undergraduate backgrounds and skillsets that allow new ideas and the byproducts of these ideas to become tangible solutions to real-life issues needing resolution or mitigation.”

Team SPACES

On Team SPACES were M.Arch students, Conner Smith and Wanli Gao, Master of Real Estate Development student Nicholas Ferran, MCRP student ShuHui “Giselle” Zhen, and MSUD student, Joel Jassu. School of Architecture professor of the practice, Brian Bell was faculty advisor for SPACES. Associate principal at Perkins&Will, Jeff Williams, AICP was the professional advisor for the team. 

“We had 30 students from across the Institute participate this year on six teams,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor and director of the MSUD program. “I know it’s cliché to say they’re all winners, but seriously, it’s pretty awesome what their collective efforts were able to produce and the learning that went on. The fact that two of the six were recognized by the jury for honorable mentions is icing on the cake! We’ve had 12 placements, including four finalists in nine years. I couldn’t be prouder!”

The work from all six teams is currently on exhibition in the Cohen Gallery located on the second floor of the College of Design’s Architecture East Building.

Click here for the ULI Hines Competition press release.

The approved mission statement reads: The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university established by the state of Georgia in Atlanta in 1885 and committed to developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

Feedback from internal and external campus stakeholders was used to guide the development of the mission statement.

Along with this new mission statement, the strategic planning process has also produced a vision and foundational narrative, values definition, and strategic themes, which are currently being further refined by active working groups. 

The strategic planning process is currently in phase two: goal setting. Working groups are focusing on six strategic themes that will drive the Institute’s actionable goals — Amplify Impact, Champion Innovation, Connect Globally, Expand Access, Cultivate Well-Being, Lead by Example. These themes resulted from the first phase of the strategic planning process: the visioning phase. During visioning, more than 5,700 students, faculty, staff, alumni, campus partners, and community leaders shared varied perspectives, aspirations, and dreams to help shape the future of the Institute. From there, the steering committee worked to extrapolate and organize the most relevant and salient themes from the data collected. The committee then divided into four sub-committees to draft the mission statement, vision narrative, values definitions, and strategic themes that are now being further developed.

“Our mission to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition has never been more relevant and necessary,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “Georgia Tech is a leading research university devoted to inclusive and impactful innovation, relentlessly committed to serving the public good and breaking new ground in addressing the biggest local, national, and global challenges of our time. Our many contributions in combating the covid-19 pandemic offer a clear illustration of what our mission means in practice.”

Learn more about the work of these groups and each strategic impact theme by visiting the strategic plan website.

Provost Rafael L. Bras announced in January that he will step down and return to the faculty following a decade as the Institute’s chief academic officer. The original timeline for the search for a new provost has been extended in order to allow both search committee members and candidates to focus on addressing the immediate issues all colleges and universities are facing at this time. Conditions permitting, a final decision is expected before the end of the calendar year, with the goal of having the next provost by January 2021. To accommodate this change, Bras has agreed to continue to serve. 

The search firm Heidrick & Struggles has been selected to assist with the search and will support the work of the 18-member advisory committee, including co-chairs Charles Isbell, dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair of the College of Computing and Susan Lozier, dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair of the College of Sciences.

Two town halls were held in March, and feedback was used to shape the position description and search process. Additional town halls and opportunities for input from the community will be planned throughout the search. The next town hall is scheduled for Friday, May 15, at 1 p.m. The search co-chairs and search firm partners will discuss the search’s progress to date as well as next steps.

Nominations and applications are still being accepted and should be directed to GTProvost@heidrick.com.

To attract the best candidates for this position, the names of the finalists will not be announced publicly. But representatives of the faculty, students, and staff will have an opportunity to meet the finalists in a confidential setting and provide feedback to the search committee. Elected representatives of each of these groups have been contacted to discuss the search process.

A position profile, as well as details about joining the May 15 town hall, can be found at president.gatech.edu/provost-search. Additional details, including an application link, will be accessible on the site as soon as they are available.

The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon is a collegiate competition that tasks student teams with designing and building highly efficient and innovative buildings powered by renewable energy. This year, the Department of Energy combined two student building design competitions to create the new Solar Decathlon competition.

The Solar Decathlon Design Challenge Weekend took place April 12-14, 2019. Throughout the weekend, student design teams presented their work to a jury of industry experts, attended presentations by collegiate peers and leaders in the energy profession, and engaged with a variety of energy-focused organizations.

The Georgia Tech team was led by Tyler Pilet, Ph.D. in Architecture student with a focus area in high performance building (HPB).

“Our team designed a community-driven, low cost, net-zero home in Grove Park,” said Pilet. “We partnered with the Grove Park Foundation and Atlanta Habitat for Humanity to make the design’s construction a reality in the future. The competition was a great experience that taught us how to design every part and system of a building, from conceptual massing to HVAC and community solar power design.”

In addition to Pilet, the interdisciplinary team consisted of Warren Alexius Campbell (Master of Science (M.S.) in Architecture, HPB), Wen Yi (Vincent) Chang (M.S. in Architecture, HPB), Yuran Kong (M.S. in Architecture, HPB), Yuhang Li (Master of Architecture), Dan Lu (M.S. in Architecture, HPB), Jingxin Xu (Master of Science in Urban Design), Raj Sanjaybhai Shah (M.S. in Building Construction), Raunak Tibrewala (M.S. in Architecture, HPB), Xinyi Zhang (M.S. in Civil Engineering).

Jason Brown, full-time lecturer for high performance buildings in the School of Architecture, served as the team’s advisor. Fried Augenbroe, professor and director of the High Performance Building Lab, and Tarek Rakha, assistant professor for high performance buildings, also helped by reviewing the students’ work. Acme Panel and YKK served as industry partners. Additional outside partners that contributed to the final project included Grove Park Foundation, Grove Park Neighborhood Association, Atlanta Habitat for Humanity, Perkins+Will, Southface, Pursuit Engineering, the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Mayor’s Office of Resilience.

Read more about the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon.

The vision of the Mild Cognitive Impairment Empowerment Program (MCIEP) is to revolutionize the experience of people affected by MCI by creating a comprehensive approach that can be replicated nationally and internationally.

 With the aim of speeding up development, testing and dissemination of evidence-based interventions for MCI, the Innovation Accelerator (IA) core is offering seed grants to support research in the following areas: therapeutic programming, technology, and the built environment. 

The funded projects should result in innovative solutions, strategies or methodologies developed through a culture of collaboration among students, researchers, clinicians, and people with MCI in less than 12 months’ time.

Beginning in the fall of 2019, $150,000 in seed grants will be available each year for the next three years. Proposals can range from semester to year-long research projects and smaller proposals can target funds to convene valuable discussions, gather data, develop methods and metrics or to prototype new designs and technologies.

See the related file to the right for more information on the pre-proposal call and how to apply.

All pre-proposals will be evaluated by a review committee comprised of representatives from all cores of the MCIEP and individuals affected by MCI. Feedback from the committee will be given to all pre-proposals. Those selected for full proposals will be contacted by the end of the day on September 10. 

For additional information or questions regarding the seed grant process email kimberly.seaton@design.gatech.edu 

Looking forward to reading your pre-proposals,

Jennifer DuBose,
MCIEP's Innovation Accelerator Director 


 

In February, applications to serve on the working groups were received from interested students, faculty, and staff. Co-leaders for each working group were also identified. Comprised of more than 250 people representing colleges, schools, and other units from across campus, the working groups will meet weekly and engage between meetings through online collaboration tools, and surveys to complete the strategic analysis and draft goals. In some instances, the working groups will engage guest speakers and subject matter experts to complete their strategic analysis. The working group drafts will then be considered by Institute leadership over the summer, with the final goals and objectives to be finalized and communicated in early fall. 

“I thank every member of the working groups for ensuring that the momentum around our strategic plan effort continues, even in these uncertain times and as their professional and personal lives are disrupted,” said President Ángel Cabrera. “This crisis highlights the critical role Georgia Tech plays in finding solutions to global challenges and in developing leaders who can make a difference locally and around the world. That is indeed the core idea behind our mission and vision and the foundation of our new strategic plan, so the timing of this effort could not be better.”

The themes and working groups are as follows:

Amplify Impact: Embrace our power as agents of change for the public good and concentrate our research and learning efforts on identifying and solving the most critical and complex problems of our time, locally and globally.

Co-Leaders:

• Michael Oxman, managing director, Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business; Professor of the Practice, Sustainable Business, Scheller College of Business.
• Mitchell Walker II, professor and associate chair for Graduate Programs, Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

Champion Innovation: Champion our leadership position as an engine of innovation and entrepreneurship, and collaborate with other public and private actors to create economic opportunity and position Atlanta and Georgia as examples of inclusive innovation.

Co-Leaders:

• Sherry Farrugia, chief operating and strategy officer, Pediatric Technology Center.
• Raghupathy Sivakumar, professor and Wayne J. Holman Chair, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; founding director, CREATE-X.

Connect Globally: Strengthen our role as a convener of worldwide collaboration and build a global learning platform to expand our reach and amplify our impact.

Co-Leaders:

• Amy Henry, executive director, Office of International Education.
• Anna Stenport, professor of Global Studies; chair, School of Modern Languages; co-director, Atlanta Global Studies Center.

Expand Access: Empower people of all backgrounds and stages of life to learn and contribute to technological and human progress.

Co-Leaders:

• Lizanne DeStefano, professor, School of Psychology; executive director, Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC).
• S. Gordon Moore Jr., executive director, Student Diversity and Inclusion, Institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. 

Cultivate Well-Being: Strengthen our culture of well-being and create an environment of holistic learning where all members of our community can grow and learn to lead healthy, purposeful, impactful lives.

Co-Leaders:

• Tiffiny Hughes-Troutman, director, Center for Assessment, Referral, and Education (CARE).
• Neel Naik, undergraduate student, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Lead by Example: Lead and inspire by example by creating a culture of deliberate innovation in our own practices and being an example of efficiency, sustainability, ethics, and inclusion.

Co-Leaders:

• Raj Vuchatu, interim deputy director for Research Operations and Information Systems, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).
• Nazia Zakir, assistant vice president of Environmental Health and Safety, Facilities Management.

Members of the Georgia Tech community are encouraged to visit strategicplan.gatech.edu to review the foundational narrative, vision, theme, values, and beliefs that will ultimately shape the strategic plan. There, you can also follow working group progress and activities, and learn more about the process, data collection and analysis methodology, and next steps. Questions should be sent to strategicplan@gatech.edu.

The 18-member advisory search committee is comprised of faculty and staff, as well as students from the undergraduate and graduate student government associations. The committee will be co-chaired by Charles Isbell, dean of the College of Computing and Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences.

Two town halls are scheduled for students, faculty, and staff to hear about the search process and provide feedback on the candidate considerations:

• Monday, March 9, at 4 p.m. in Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, Room 144
• Tuesday, March 10, at 4 p.m. in the Global Learning Center, Room 236

Additional town halls are planned for later in the semester as the search progresses. 

The full search committee includes:

• Charles Isbell (co-chair), Dean of the College of Computing and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair
• Susan Lozier (co-chair), Dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair
• Sinet Adous, Student Government Association Vice President of External Affairs, International Affairs Student
• Nisha Botchwey, Associate Professor, City of Regional Planning and Associate Dean for Academic Programs, Georgia Tech Professional Education
• Tristan Denley, Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Chief Academic Officer, University System of Georgia
• Ameet Doshi, Director, Service Experience and Program Design and Subject Librarian for the School of Public Policy and Law, Libraries
• Kelly L. Fox, Executive Vice President for Administration and Finance
• David Joyner, Executive Director of Online Education & OMSCS, College of Computing
• Andrés García, Executive Director, Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience; Regents Professor, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
• Raquel Lieberman, Professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
• Margaret Loper, Associate Director of the Trust, Institute for Information Security and Privacy, and Chief Scientist of the Georgia Tech Research Institute
• Frank Neville, Chief of Staff and Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, Office of the President
• Reta Pikowsky, Associate Vice Provost and Registrar, Enrollment Management
• Nancy Sandlin, Director of Development, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
• Narayan Shirolkar, Student Government Association Graduate President, MSE Ph.D. Student
• John Stein, Vice President for Student Life and Brandt-Fritz Dean of Students Chair
• Laura Taylor, Professor and Chair of the School of Economics
• L. Beril Toktay, Professor and Brady Family Chair in Management; ADVANCE Professor; Faculty Director, Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business
• Jennifer Herazy (ex-officio), Chief Administrative Officer for Academics and Research

Georgia Tech will be assisted by Jackie Zavitz, Ellen Landers, and Kaley Palanjian of Heidrick & Struggles. Nominations and applications should be directed to GTProvost@heidrick.com.

Once finalized, an application link will be provided, as well as ongoing search updates, via the search site.

Considered a perfect companion to the Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, Assembling the Architect is a useful resource for practitioners as well as architecture students.

“By stoking a broader historical awareness of some of the unresolved tensions that have shaped architecture practice, it is hoped that students of architecture will be inspired by the challenge and potential of redesigning practice itself, to be innovators and agents of change,” said Johnston. “Long-time practitioners may also be surprised to learn about the sources of some of the profession’s most taken for granted assumptions.”

Focusing on the period from 1870 to 1920 when the foundations were being laid for the U.S. architectural profession that we recognize today, this study traces the formation and standardization of the fundamental relationships among architects, owners, and builders, as codified in the American Institute of Architects' very first Handbook of Architectural Practice. It reveals how these archetypal roles have always been fluid, each successfully redefining their own agency with respect to the others in the constantly shifting political economy of building. Johnston’s book hit the shelves in early 2020.

“In the coming decade, architects like other professionals will need to re-conceive altogether how to educate themselves and others, not for the singular profession as they have known it, but for the multitude of roles that increasingly automated practice will demand,” said Johnston. “Where professionalizing efforts of a century ago withdrew the architect from both the site of construction and its field of financial interest, new tools have the potential to thrust architects by whatever names back more organically into the heart of the action, into a multitude of pluralist practices where sharp lines separating project instigation, design, and execution are blurred. The challenge will be to avoid the kinds of professional uniformity that nineteenth- and twentieth-century professionalization incurred.”

In order to open a broader discussion around the themes of Johnston’s book, the Georgia Tech School of Architecture will be hosting the Reassembling the Profession Symposium on March 11. Click here to register to attend the symposium.

Click here to learn more about Assembling the Architect.

Urban Systems Design analyzes the ways in which society utilizes Internet of Things-based sharing platforms in the context of smart community dimensions—energy, transport, urban form, and human comfort—and explores how these platforms can be used to improve community health and welfare. 

With recent achievements in research regarding the potential impact of Internet of Things and big data, Urban Systems Design delves into how to identify, structure, measure, and monitor urban sustainability standards and progress. This book reviews the financial, institutional, policy, and technical needs required for a successful implementation in smart cities. 

“Urban design is becoming data-driven. Empowered by new tools and technologies, cities are now far more designable than ever before. The ability to handle how massive data are captured, analyzed, and applied in cities is now critical to addressing problems occurring in places, neighborhoods, and cities. Urban systems design offers an approach to designing new forms of sustainable, resilient, and socially responsible cities in the face of increasing impact of emerging technologies, big data, and urban automation to people, communities, and their placemaking,” said Professor Yang.

Click here to learn more about Urban Systems Design.

This year, the award will be presented to James Cramer, part-time lecturer in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture and founder of the Design Futures Council and its journal, DesignIntelligence. Cramer is also the former Chief Executive of the American Institute of Architects in Washington DC.

Cramer has authored four books including How Firms Succeed, A Field Guide to Design Management (co-author, Scott Simpson) now in its 5th Edition and Design+Enterprise, Seeking a New Reality in Architecture now in its 3rd Edition. He has written over 220 articles and book chapters for numerous publications and was founding publisher of both Architectural Technology and DesignIntelligence.

Another recognizable name among the Christian Petersen Design Award winners is Georgia Tech’s College of Design (formerly College of Architecture) Dean, Thomas Galloway. Galloway was the Dean of ISU’s College of Design from 1985 to 1992, and joined Georgia Tech the following year, the same year he was the recipient of the Christian Petersen Design Award.

Learn more about the Christian Petersen Design Award here.

The iconic modernist house, designed by Richard Neutra in the 1930s to accommodate his office and family, and rebuilt in the 1960s, is now a museum with a program that invites one artist per year to make installations in the house.

Previous artists in residence were Santiago Borja (2010), Xavier Veilhan (2012), Bryony Roberts (2013), Competing Utopias with the Wende Museum (2014), Luis Callejas (2015), Les Frères Chapuisat (2016), Tu casa es mi casa - Frida Escobedo, Pedro y Juana, Tezontle (2017), and BLESS (2018).

Cottle's installation, THE COST OF MONEY, made from recycled plastic shopping bags and twine, is a meditation on the steep human price capital can exact, particularly from the most vulnerable populations, and at enormous expense to the environment.  

Cottle details his installation, stating:

"It was important that the work engage in a respectful yet vigorous dialogue with the architecture.  In the Neutra VDL House ideals and formal gestures of prewar European modernism find a home in Southern California—including the Arcadian notion of the primitive hut—utopian interiors that are, to all intents and purposes, contiguous with the outdoors, a tamed and regained paradise.

Two visions of modern domesticity co-inhabit:  the original 30s version of the house, and the 60s post-fire iteration.  While the two share an interest in layered and nested spaces, in planarity, and in blurring distinctions between inside and outside, the first version's strict modularity and abstract formal rigor lives in tension with the robust material textures and colors of the second.

I was interested in this tension between abstract and material, between spatial and tectonic, and chose to interact with this doubled vision by suspending three tapestries, each approximately nine feet square, at key moments in the house.

The first tapestry, in the courtyard/garden, adds another lamination, floating just in front of the rough stone veneer. The second, at the stair/bridge, hangs in the gap. The third, in the salon, is a free plane, dividing dining and seating areas.

All three are attached to existing drapery tracks and participate in the spatial logic already established in the house.  The patterns and colors reference the immediate landscape:  paving stones and ground cover, clouds seen through branches, reflections on the water."

Holiday travel is stressful enough — we know we’re supposed to arrive at the airport early, give extra time to drive places, and expect delays. But what about checking the weather on the other side of the country, routing your drive based on smoke from wildfires, or coordinating preparing your Thanksgiving meal around planned rolling blackouts?

Natural disasters and severe weather are unusual factors in planning for travel around the Thanksgiving holiday.

Catherine Ross, Harry West Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and director of the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, explains that one of the first things people do before traveling is to identify local conditions. 

Natural disasters or weather events that have sufficient prior notice (such as hurricanes, wildfires, heavy rains, or blizzard conditions) allow people to take an abbreviated trip, to change the method of travel, or to not travel at all. Some are even forced to cancel travel due to circumstances out of their control.

“During the holidays people tend to put more focus on getting to their destinations regardless of what they need to do to get there,” Ross said. “People have more determination to get to their families. They will spend more resources or consider other ways to travel they wouldn’t normally.”

Wildfires in California

“California’s wildfires have greatly impacted the area a second year running,” Steven P. French, Dean of the College of Design said. He explained that in addition to evacuations, the California wildfires have created a lot of smog and disrupted whole communities.

Ross explained that natural disasters often reoccur. Places like Northern California, where recovery hasn’t taken place from wildfires in 2018, can expect to get hit again. This will further impact their infrastructure systems and make travel — especially increased holiday travel — more difficult.

“Significant events in one location, such as fires, earthquakes, tornados, or floods, can impact infrastructure systems, creating interruptions the travel network,” French said. “There is an influx of volunteers and materials traveling to the impacted area to respond to the disaster, which stresses the system.”

After the utility company Pacific Gas & Electric’s infrastructure system contributed to the largest of the wildfires in 2018, PG&E aimed to mitigate their impact on this year’s fires. The solution was to preemptively shut off the power — imposing rolling blackouts across Northern California, hoping to prevent the start or spread of fires.

“It may be difficult if you do not have a natural gas stove to cook the family Thanksgiving turkey if the power is going to be out for four or five hours a day,” French said.

An Increase in Natural Disasters Nationwide

According to Ross, Texas has had more natural disasters in recent history than any other state. She explained that in the last 10 years, Oklahoma has started to experience more earthquakes than ever before.

“Earthquakes flip the travel envelope almost on its head,” Ross said. Earthquakes can disrupt electrical systems, water systems, roadways, communications, and more.

As the strength and frequency of natural disasters increases, the number of places they impact and how severely the people traveling through those areas feel the impacts also increases.

“The kinds of natural disasters and where they occur is changing. They are occurring with different intensity and in different places than they have historically,” Ross said.

The changes fuel resiliency planning. Ross gave the example of changing zoning and building codes, allowing for regions to bounce back. “The standard has changed,” Ross said.

Places like Oklahoma have to start looking at their mobility and safety systems much more critically, Ross suggested. They need to ensure that the ability to distribute food and make sure electricity is restored quickly is something that they are prepared for — something that they didn’t have to do 10 years ago.

Severe Weather

An increase in extreme weather events causes change to how travelers plan for transportation spikes like Thanksgiving.

“My children are coming here from all over the country, as far away as Seattle and the closest in Delaware. They’re all flying, so we’ll see if that all works,” French said.

“The airline system is so interdependent that when you start cancelling flights in one area of the country, those planes are not available in the other parts not experiencing any sort of severe weather,” he said.

“The whole airline system is impacted by disruptions in the part that is having the extreme weather. It looks like we may get some of that going into the Thanksgiving holiday coming up soon.”

Snow, rain, and fog can impact travel by rail, and especially the highways. It doesn’t even need to be a severe weather event. 

“Even normal weather under certain conditions becomes problematic and gives people thought about whether or not their safety is going to be more of an issue during their trip,” Ross said.

Other Stressors 

Amtrak train services expect a huge bubble in ridership over the Thanksgiving weekend. Airports become busier and roads become more congested. It isn’t just people making extended trips before and after Thanksgiving that contribute to this saturation, Ross explained.

“If you can go on a short trip and get up Thursday morning, leave at 7 and be where you are going by 9, many people choose to make the trip back and forth in a day,” she said.

For those choosing to extend their stay and return home after the holiday, they can expect additional congestion on the roads from package delivery.

“Black Friday and Cyber Monday become the kickoff of the holiday season,” Ross said. “It signals the time to be out and about. You see a surge there, and people are aware of that, so they try to plan accordingly.”

The project titled, “ANOTHER LIFE—Sustaining Iceland’s Family Fishing Economy” looked at the impact of climate change on the fishing industry in Iceland. With an economic imbalance spurred by a shrinking supply of fisheries and a growing tourism industry, Song, Lu, and Tibrewala addressed both matters by designing a hotel and a house.

“The hotel can provide basic services such as accommodation and meals for tourists, and during the fishing moratorium, fishermen can provide tourism services such as guides,” the students noted in their project description.

“The project is elegantly narrated with visually impactful diagrams and drawings,” a juror commented. “The structure offers the potential to serve as an iconic architectural element along the shoreline of an everyday neighborhood. This project demonstrates a level of restraint-responding to the existing context and natural landscape while deftly incorporating public spaces.”

The Design and Research (D+R) Studio, co-taught by Michael Gamble, associate professor and director of the Master of Architecture program  and Tarek Rakha, assistant professor of High Performance Buildings, assigned students to tackle the ACSA Zero-Energy Urban Housing Competition proposal.

The design of green infrastructure is a subject near and dear to both Gamble and Rakha’s focus areas. From its beginning, Gamble has been involved in the Kendeda Living Building project, a zero-waste, zero-energy initiative unique to the Southeast.

“Our mission at Georgia Tech is to improve the human condition through progress and service,” said Gamble. “The Living Building and the work coming out of the School of Architecture are clear evidence that Georgia Tech is shaping the future, and our students love it.”

Students from the 2016 Portman Prize Studio actively participated in the Living Building Challenge, which was based on the building's zero-waste building initiative. With topics of sustainability and green infrastructure deeply embedded in the School of Architecture, Gamble and Rakha saw this competition as an opportunity to directly address what they were already teaching in their courses.

“Students in the High Performance Building Master of Science in Architecture program employ state-of-the-art environmental performance simulation tools to inform their partners in architectural design,” said Rakha. “The design and performance integration happen through the use of advanced, research-based frameworks as experiential learning methods that enhance energy and comfort in built environment design.”

In addition to Song, Lu, and Tibrewala winning first place, Solangely Rivera Hernandez (’19), Warren Campbell (’19), and Lu received an honorable mention for their submission “Recovery Assemblies: Rapid Deployable Housing Post-Disaster Events.”

Their project looked at the current protocols provided by disaster relief organizations as people are displaced following floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc., and created prototypical, temporary, versatile modules that could be adapted to the needs of the user.

Click here to read more about our winners.  

The handbook is the first of its kind. It responds to the interest and need for understanding how planning education is developed and delivered in different international contexts.

“While it could be argued that international planning education has diminished relevance in an era of deglobalization, planning educators across the globe have much to learn from each other. The intent of this Handbook is to contribute to the process,” said Leigh.

The forty-one contributors to the handbook write about general planning knowledge, planning skills, traditional and emerging planning specializations, and pedagogy.  In twenty-eight chapters, they cover the role of these topics in educating planners, the theory and methods of their subjects, key literature contributions, and course designs.

The editors note in their Introduction:

“This handbook comes at a time when there are growing concerns about retrenchment of the globalization that has characterized the world economy and international society since the end of WWII. This ‘deglobalization’ has the potential to undo and destabilize much of the progress and international cooperation that has improved the lives of so many throughout the world.”

Read the full story: Homecoming for Missing Plaque.

More than half of all U.S. commercial buildings were built before 1970 and are inefficient relative to newer buildings. To address the inefficiency of this older stock, retrofit programs rely on on-site auditing to collect information about buildings’ envelope, lighting, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems on physics-based, whole-building energy modeling to identify and diagnose specific inefficiencies in these systems and to design and optimize energy-efficiency measure packages that address them.

Envelopes and windows account for over 50% of energy loads in buildings, but collecting detailed and actionable information about them is challenging. A primary challenge is the difficulty in accessing building exteriors above the first or second story. Using humans to perform this inspection is time-consuming, costly, dangerous, and error prone.

The research team is addressing this challenge in a three-year project called Aerial Intelligence for Retrofit Building Energy Modeling (AirBEM). AirBEM will complement human auditing of building interiors with the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) equipped with infrared sensors and onboard processors to audit the exterior envelope. The drones will use Computer Vision (CV) techniques to detect both materials and heat transfer anomalies which suggest construction defects such as air leaks.

“The aspiration for this work is to profoundly inform building retrofit design by radically enhancing the methods and modes of envelope audits,” said Tarek Rakha, who serves as Principle Investigator (PI) for the project. “We want to allow auditors to move past a small number of single-frame images for inspection; we want to enable retrofits to address specific building envelope issues, and want to develop 3D models that designers can interact with when developing retrofit plans.” 

Research, Development, and Demonstration (RD&D) will be led by Georgia Tech as the prime recipient with academic partners including, associate professor Senem Velipasalar and associate professor Ed Bogucz from the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University, and professor John Fernández from the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Sandeep Ahuja from Pattern R+D software developers will serve as industry partner. RD&D conducted with DOE funding will advance AirBEM from a preliminary proof-of-concept to develop a transformational cyber-physical system that automates diagnostic capabilities of the UAV platform. 

In fact, The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design isn’t really sustainable at all; more accurately, the newest building on the Atlanta campus is regenerative. And it has reimagined from the ground up what a campus building can be.

“The time for doing less harm is gone,” said Shan Arora, director of The Kendeda Building. “We need to have buildings that provide more than they take.”

That broad guiding principle has produced a building that will, each year, generate more on-site electricity than it consumes and collect and harvest more water than it uses. During construction, the building diverted more waste from landfills than it sent to them.

“The Kendeda Building is an incredible and beautiful example of sustainable design, integration with nature, human inclusion and well-being. It is the most sustainable building of its kind in the Southeast,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “Thanks to our partnership with the Kendeda Fund, it will inspire architects, civil engineers, business and policy leaders for generations to come.”

In 2015, The Kendeda Fund committed $25 million for Georgia Tech to design and build a living building on campus in an effort prove a regenerative building was practical even in the Southeast’s heat and humidity. An additional $5 million will support programming activities once the building is certified.

The Kendeda Building is the first academic and research building in the Southeast designed to be certified as a living building by the International Living Future Institute. Over the next 12 months, it will have to prove its bona fides to earn Living Building Challenge 3.1 certification, delivering on its promise to be self-sufficient, healthy, and beautiful while connecting people to light, air, food, nature, and community.

“The dedication of The Kendeda Building represents the culmination of many years of planning and partnership. We are humbled to see the vision come to life, and we hope it can be a model for change across the Southeast,” said Dena Kimball, executive director of The Kendeda Fund. “But the official opening of the building is the starting point, not the finish line. Now the real work begins, as Georgia Tech embraces the goals of the Living Building Challenge and demonstrates what’s required to operate a building that gives more than it takes and creates a positive impact on the human and natural systems that surround it.”

One of the first steps in that effort is getting the on-site water treatment system certified by state environmental regulators. It will be the first rainwater-to-drinking-water system in a commercial building in this part of the country. Arora said that means the project is breaking more new ground for the Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

“We are teaching and learning together, the regulator and the regulated,” he said.

The Kendeda Building will host several events in the fall and then open fully in the spring for classes, when it becomes a living, learning laboratory for education and research.

“Really, the best is yet to come. Our goal is to host as many large and required courses from across campus to give our students access to a building that actually teaches us all something,” said Michael Gamble, associate professor and director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture. “It’s not just for those students interested in sustainability as a career. For example, next semester, calculus will be taught in The Kendeda Building.”

Gamble helped lead efforts to embed the concepts of the Living Building Challenge more broadly in the Georgia Tech curriculum, including a series of pilot projects that helped explore the challenge’s requirements. Gamble also led a series of architecture design studios focused on mass timber technology like that used in the building.

“The pilot project program should be a part of every capital project on campus — we’ve learned more and made more connections than we ever thought we would,” Gamble said.

Likewise, Arora said the project team — general contractor Skanska and architects Lord Aeck Sargent and The Miller Hull Partnership — found new sources of materials and created ways of working that now will ripple out to other projects.

“Once you learn how to build and operate a living building, you can’t unlearn it,” Arora said. “Through this process, we’re creating the local supply chain, the workforce, and the best practices for other buildings in the region to use living building elements.”

Master of Architecture (M.Arch) student, Clay Kiningham, won in the categories of Miscellaneous Architecture, Mixed Use Architecture, and Green Architecture with his project Fourth and Foundry–Timber Housing Towers in South Boston. This project serves as a prototype for the future of sustainable timber cities. In the Spring 2019 semester, Kiningham’s project also received the Portman Studio Prize, a competition studio supported by Portman Architects.

Emily Wirt (M.Arch ’19) also placed in the Mixed Use Architecture category. Wirt’s project titled, “Pockets” was designed during her final Design + Research studio. “Pockets are surprising gathering spaces created through simple means,” aaid Wirt. “Moments of exception are embedded within a dense mixed-use building grid, raveling through channels of light, sound, and air.”

Also among the winners from Georgia Tech, Yevgenia (Jane) Ilyasova (Bachelor of Science in Architecture ’19) received an award in the landscape architecture category for Installations and Structures. Ilyasova’s project, “Theater of the Landscape” created a site on Angel Island that would memorialize Asian immigration from around 1890, when they were tragically kept in barracks as they awaited citizenship before being turned away. The new sanctuary would highlight its past while providing a refuge for new and future citizens. Ilyasova is currently pursuing her Master of Architecture degree at Princeton University.

Rachel Cloyd (M.Arch ’19) won in the Small Architecture category with her project titled, “Transform.” Cloyd’s project was designed in Georgia Tech’s Thomas W. Ventulett Chair, Débora Mesa’s Design and Research studio in the Fall 2018 semester, which challenged students to look at the Atlanta Beltline and prototype architectures that influence the debate about contemporary urban values and spaces. Cloyd’s project looked how transportation infrastructure could fulfill another purpose.

M.Arch student, Michael Koliner, also won in the Small Architecture category as well as in the Miscellaneous Architecture category with his Inflatable Tensegrity Structures project. Koliner worked alongside Georgia Tech’s first Ventulett NEXT Fellow, Jonathan Dessi-Olive, part-time lecturer and senior principal with Uzun+Case, Jim Case, and structural engineer with Uzun+Case, Vinay Teja Meda. In early October 2019, this project presented at the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures Conference in Barcelona, Spain with a pavilion-scale inflatable-tensegrity-structure. 

B.S. in Architecture senior, Jamieson Pye, received an honorable mention in Landscape Architecture in the Installation and Structures category. Pye said that his project was inspired by work from Ensamble Studio. Pye’s project titled, “Incision…a journey through space and time” represents a story of rediscovery by the using discarded, excavated remains of natural terrain to create a new island.

Check out the winning student projects here.

The publication includes 14 in-depth studies, including three co-authored by SimTigrate researchers. It provides insights from recent work to improve routine use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and Ebola-specific PPE, and prevent contact transmission of pathogens to better protect patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs). 

Key findings from the supplement include:

• Healthcare providers (HCP) are frequently contaminated with pathogens during routine patient care.
• Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is an important component for preventing this contamination, but optimal use of PPE is difficult.
• Self-contamination can occur, especially when PPE is removed, potentially endangering HCP and patients.
• HCP contamination can be minimized with HCP training, careful design of the doffing space, improving PPE design and facilitating appropriate PPE use.

SimTigrate’s Research Spans Years

Under the leadership of  Professor Craig Zimring, SimTigrate has been engaged in research and investigation on the design of biocontainment units for several years from both the perspective of the healthcare worker safety and the patient experience. The team interviewed all 4 patients who were treated for Ebola at Emory in 2014 to understand their experience as patients.

SimTigrate as part of Georgia Tech and the College of Design, together with Emory University and Georgia State University, was involved in the (PEACH) research program that was funded by the CDC - Prevention Epicenter of Emory and Atlanta Consortium Hospitals (PEACH) research program.

Jennifer DuBose, associate director of SimTigrate Design Lab, expressed pleasure at seeing the results of the Lab’s work in practice.

“It is really gratifying to see the work that we have done move from theory to practice. With the publication of our research it is possible that many hospitals will benefit, but it is particularly satisfying to know that we have improved the design of two hospitals in our backyard,” she said.

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is one of the hospitals the lab is working with, helping them evaluate and refine the design of their doffing space in the 6 biocontainment rooms that will go into their new bed tower.

The new Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Hospital, at the corner of I-285 and North Druid Hills Road, includes two patient towers. The completion of the hospital support building is planned for early 2020, while the hospital at North Druid Hills will begin serving patients in 2025.

Ph.D. Student Leading Children's Healthcare Research

Zorana Matić, a Ph.D. student who is leading the current research effort, said Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Special Care Unit (CHOA SCU) will be used for the treatment of pediatric patients with lethal, contagious diseases.

This unit will be set up to treat children with highly infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), smallpox, tularemia, plague, viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Ebola), and drug-resistant illnesses.

DuBose is the PI (Principal Investigator) on the Children’s Healthcare project. The team also includes two graduate students, Benton Humphreys, a master’s student in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Alexandra Nguyen, also a masters student in HCI (Psychology & Human Factors).

Student involvement is a central element of SimTigrate’s approach to research; the primary author of one of the papers in the supplement was Maria Wong Sala who graduated from Georgia Tech a master’s in Human Computer Interaction this past spring.

Matić described the past work that SimTigrate did on biocontainment units, which led to them being sought out for involvement with CHOA.

“SimTigrate researchers evaluated the four Ebola treatment facilities in Georgia, and built a high-fidelity mock-up of a biocontainment unit (BCU), in which we tested different design solutions. We analyzed the interactions between healthcare workers (HCWs) and the built environment in the four different settings and identified instances where the built environment failed to support safe HCW’s behavior while doffing,” she said.

Building on the knowledge gained through these specific projects and the lab’s body of evidence-based design research, they are helping CHOA create at a world-class design for the 6 new biocontainment rooms where the environment will support safe doffing of PPE for the healthcare workers.

SimTigrate attended and observed CHOA simulations at a full-size hospital mock-up, evaluated the proposed designs, analyzed alternatives, and proposed specific solutions for designing a facility and care process that would deliver an exceptional experience for patients, their families, and the healthcare team, Matić said.

The redesigned doffing space aims to improve the safety of the staff and reduce risk of self- and cross-contamination and occupational injury. It also is expected to reduce the physical effort and cognitive load of healthcare workers, she said.

Emory University Hospital Midtown to Get Biocontainment Room

The other major medical facility getting help from SimTigrate is Emory University Hospital Midtown (EUHM).

SimTigrate Design Lab is involved in evaluating the proposed designs, analyzing alternatives, and proposing specific solutions for designing the EUHM Mother-Baby Infectious Disease Suite.

DuBose said they are helping the facility optimize the unit design to increase the safety of the healthcare personnel who provide patient care and to improve the patient’s experience.

The hospital currently does not have mother-baby biocontainment rooms, but DuBose said the biocontainment unit will be the first mother-baby Infectious Disease Suite, that they are aware of, anywhere.

It will retrofit existing space to establish the mother-baby Infectious Disease Suite with unidirectional flow, a dedicated donning area, an anteroom for monitoring and observation, and a dedicated doffing area outside the treatment room.

The treatment room will have full-size windows, enabling unobstructed monitoring of the patient. Adjacent to the treatment room is the exam room that will be used for accommodating PUI (Person Under Investigation) and/or newborn.

DuBose said the mother-baby Infectious Disease Suite will be used to assess pregnant women with suspected seriously communicable diseases and deliver the babies.

Besides donning and doffing of Personal Protective Equipment in highly infectious environments, SimTigrate also looked at the thoroughness of hand hygiene while donning and doffing.

You can read more about SimTigrate’s research in the supplement.

Pages S214-S220: Common Behaviors and Faults when Doffing Personal Protective Equipment for Patients with Serious Communicable Diseases

Pages S221-S223: Variability in Duration and Thoroughness of Hand Hygiene in Biocontainment units

Pages S241-S247: Design Strategies for Biocontainment Units to Reduce Risk During Doffing of High-Level Personal Protective Equipment

This summer, the Office of International Initiatives convened a working group of members of the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and the Office of the Provost to develop a resource to guide educational and research activities that happen abroad. The major deliverables of the working group were designed to help Georgia Tech make decisions and ensure proper planning, compliance, and transparency around all international activities.

“Georgia Tech is proud to engage with researchers, scholars, and institutions all over the world as an expression of the Institute’s motto of Progress and Service,” said Chaouki T. Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for Research. “We remain wholeheartedly committed to those important global collaborations, but we must safeguard the Institute, and ensure all activities are fully transparent and in compliance with Georgia Tech policies, as well as applicable government laws and regulations.”

Site users can find direct links to Georgia Tech resources, policies, and relevant campus contacts for offices and units that manage a variety of issues, including export control; managing conflicts of interest; appointments at other institutions; intellectual property; materials, data, and confidential information; the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA); international agreements; disclosing foreign relationships; lab tours; hosting foreign visitors; and international travel.

“Georgia Tech promotes a culture of global engagement and believes that our community is enriched through opportunities to study, work, serve, or do research abroad,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “Thanks to the working group, the guide now provides access to Tech’s standing policies and procedures governing international activities in one centralized location.”

The guide will be maintained by the Office of International Initiatives and will be available on faculty and staff resource pages at several touchpoints, including global.gatech.edu, research.gatech.edu, and provost.gatech.edu, among others.

The working group also refined Georgia Tech’s Guiding Principles for International Activities, a standard set of objective criteria used by the Office of International Initiatives for measuring each international activity’s impact on academic activities, value to the Institute, compliance with applicable policies, sustainability and viability, and risk assessment and mitigation concerns.

Georgia Tech is also in the process of creating an International Advisory Committee comprised of representatives of the administration, faculty, and staff. The committee will be chaired by Yves Berthelot, vice provost for International Initiatives, and will provide guidance and advice regarding how Georgia Tech engages internationally (e.g. research, MOUs, master research agreements, etc.).

“Our success in international activities must be assessed in full consideration of geopolitical factors, as well as current and potential state and federal regulations and legislation,” said Berthelot. “With those considerations in mind, the work of the committee will prove vital for Georgia Tech as we continue to grow our relationships across the world and explore new opportunities to engage globally.”

Nominations for the committee are currently being accepted through Oct. 7. Faculty and staff are encouraged to submit self-nominations or nominations for a colleague. Details on the final committee roster will be made available via the online tool, once finalized. To self-nominate or nominate a colleague for the committee, or for more information on the working group’s activities, contact Monique Tavares, director of Global Operations at mtavares@gatech.edu.

“We have found an ever-expanding field for exploration and invention in architecture—one where every built work is just the beginning of the next project to come, in constant evolution and full of creative uncertainties,” Said Mesa and García-Abril in response to the award. “One that has the enormous potential to transcend our own actions and become part of bigger ideas, bigger endeavors and greater communities. The RIBA Charles Jencks Award has a challenging mission and a humbling list of recipients, so winning it is as surprising as encouraging. We receive it with great happiness and gratitude, eager to do much more and much better.”

“Débora Mesa and Antón Garcia-Abril are bold in their work, which explores the powerful combination of placemaking, functionality, refinement and beauty, in both urban and rural areas,” said David Gloster, Chair of the RIBA Charles Jencks Award judging panel and RIBA Director of Education. “Ensamble Studio is a highly collaborative practice built on the personal, professional and academic strengths of its staff and is a great example of using creative thinking to navigate architectural challenges.”

Learn more about Ensamble Studio and the 2019 RIBA Charles Jencks Award here.

Under the OPT (Optional Practical Training) program, international students who graduate from colleges and universities in the United States are able to remain in the country and receive training through work experience for up to 12 months. Students who graduate from a designated STEM degree program can remain for an additional 24 months on the F-1 STEM OPT extension. 

“This designation helps capture the value of the integration of so many different technological, social, and ecological aspects of our urban design program,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of the MSUD program. 

Georgia Tech has been a leader in urban design education since 1969. In addition to the MSUD, housed in the School of Architecture, students can specialize in urban design in the Master of City and Regional Planning (MCRP) degree or can pursue the M.Arch/MCRP dual degree. All three emphasize a culture of collaboration linking requisite knowledge and expertise across fields of architecture, planning, landscape, and engineering to propose integrated and implementable solutions to the design of urban areas.

The MSUD is the most studio-centric of the three programs with a specific focus on preparing students to produce detailed drawings integrating the design of public infrastructure, public spaces and the subdivision of private land. The MSUD is also distinguished by its exclusive focus on redeveloping our least sustainable areas into more resilient, more equitable, and more prosperous places.

We invite you to Watch the 2019 MSUD Virtual Open House. Applications are open now and the deadline to apply is January 15, 2019. 

IVAN ALLEN COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS

The PTLF cohort from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts will address the challenge of teaching the liberal arts at a technology-focused school. In the spring, the fellows hosted a panel discussion titled “Controversial Topics in Contentious Times: Teaching the Humanities & Social Sciences at Georgia Tech.” Moving forward, each fellow will develop a separate project to address the challenge. Associate Professor Narin Hassan in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication will explore strategies to create a more mindful, empathetic, and just environment in which to discuss social justice issues. Associate Professor Carla Gerona in the School of History and Sociology will write an essay that analyzes the pedagogies of digital history. Associate Professor Gordon Kingsley in the School of Public Policy will focus on the integration of online education into the liberal arts.

In addition, here are the goals for the other respective colleges at the Institute:

SCHELLER COLLEGE OF BUSINESS

The PTLF cohort from the Scheller College of Business will explore opportunities to apply a blended-learning approach to courses. The group is examining how peer business schools, as well as other colleges within Georgia Tech, have incorporated digital platforms into their courses. A second focus area will look at ways to integrate more leadership topics into the curriculum, in addition to the leadership programs already offered. Toward this end, the fellows have gradually begun to infuse leadership topics into their own courses.

For example, D.J. Wu, professor and Ernest Scheller Jr. Chair in Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Commercialization, recently invited Lalit Dhingra, founder and CEO of EnSignis, to address leadership in his course on Electronic Commerce (MGT 4056). The fellows also participate in the Dean’s Advisory Board, where they contribute to discussions about other ways to integrate leadership into the curriculum.

COLLEGE OF COMPUTING

The PTLF cohort from the College of Computing set a goal to enrich the graduate computer science curriculum by offering crosscutting courses with topics that integrate multiple areas of research. Associate Professor Santosh Pande in the School of Computer Science is part of the current cohort and shared thoughts on addressing issues through such an approach.

“While cutting-edge research in the field requires the expertise of experts from multiple areas, graduate students traditionally focus on building expertise in one primary area,” said Pande. “These crosscutting courses will enhance graduate education in the College of Computing by helping graduate students see how they can use their area of expertise to contribute to these emerging research topics.” 

The courses will be team taught by multiple professors with expertise in different research areas. In the spring, the fellows hosted an event at which those who have taught crosscutting courses discussed how to make these types of courses most effective. Several faculty members interested in the initiative have been identified to foster dialogue as they plan and teach courses next academic year. 

COLLEGE OF DESIGN

The College of Design’s PTLF cohort plans to increase awareness of excellence in teaching within its college through a teaching award. Specifically, it plans to collaborate with student organizations within each school in the College of Design to select and honor the winning faculty member at an annual event. This award will be funded by the dean, but winners will be chosen by students.

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

The PTLF cohort within the College of Engineering found that its increasing enrollment numbers have made student experiences in lab courses more difficult. For example, students are not getting enough hands-on experience with the experimental platforms that are representative of realistic and complex engineering systems because there is simply not enough equipment to go around. The College of Engineering cohort of fellows plans to address this problem in the coming academic year through the integration of an augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) platform into select courses.

COLLEGE OF SCIENCES

The PTLF fellows from the College of Sciences will identify opportunities to improve the professional development of teaching assistants (TAs) to help them become effective teachers in today’s learning environment. To do this, the cohorts are collecting information about teaching resources offered by the Institute, what is currently being done for TA professional development in other institutions, and surveying graduate TAs on what they believe could be added to improve TA training. They will use this data to develop a TA competency model to set a clearer standard of performance for training students to be teaching assistants.

During the 2019-20 academic year, the Center for Teaching and Learning will partner with the cohorts to support their initiative and update the campus community on the progress of these efforts.

Learn more about the 2018-20 Provost Teaching and Learning Fellows.

This story has been edited from the initial story, which was prepared by Georgia Tech's Office of the Provost.

Currently, the state Parole Board uses a scientific-based, data-driven, risk assessment tool to assist in the determination of how much time an individual should serve prior to reentry into society.

This project will seek to enhance this process by including supplemental data surrounding the imposition of pre- and post-release conditions that would ensure success variables are present during an individual’s reentry into society from criminal justice system.

It will combine CIDI’s vast experience in prison vocational training programs and prisoner reentry and CQGRD’s expertise in machine learning and predictive analytics.

The CQGRD team, including research scientist Nima Goshani, will use non-linear statistical data modeling tools to develop a national model for improving the decision-making processes of parole boards nationwide,” said CQGRD Director Catherine Ross.

Officials hope the project will help determine factors among individuals that will lead to more parole success. While current assessment tools will continue to be used, this project will result in identifying case specific preconditions to parole and post release conditions for offenders in order to improve parole success. “Each additional success means improved public safety,” said Chris Barnett, Executive Director of Parole.

“Beyond changing the national focus from identifying risk factors to identifying success predictors, the other innovative piece of this project is the long-term goal to create the next assessment tool as an intuitive learning instrument that adjusts in ‘real time’ as additional data is provided,” said Guy Toles, Braille Services Manager of CIDI.

Ultimately, the state Parole Board is seeking to enhance their decision-making capabilities, parolee success rates, and public safety for all Georgians.

-- Tory Holder contributed to this article.

Arthi Rao, a research scientist at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, and Ramachandra Sivakumar, a senior research engineer in the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization, will each work with a community as it prepares for the future. Both researchers also teach in the School of City and Regional Planning in the College of Design.

The Georgia Smart Communities Challenge offers Georgia communities the chance to receive funding and support that enables them to envision and plan for a “smart future.” Recipients receive funding and partnership with a Georgia Tech researcher.

Rao will consult on a project for Macon Smart Neighborhoods, Macon-Bibb County. This project will address underserved areas of the community by installing smart kiosks that will provide internet connectivity and on-demand services, according to an article announcing the winners.

“The project team will utilize data analytics to optimize the placement of smart kiosks and maximize their impacts. We will also collectively develop a stakeholder engagement strategy as well as an evaluation and monitoring plan to track equity improvements and integrate that into Macon-Bibb’s journey of transforming into a smart community,” Rao said.

She has an interdisciplinary educational and professional background in Urban Planning, Epidemiology, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from Georgia Tech. Her research interests focus on social determinants of health, healthcare access, healthy communities, and spatial methods.

Sivakumar will consult on the Woodstock Smart Master Plan and Corridor Study, City of Woodstock. This project will conduct a smart corridor and infrastructure study to improve mobility and congestion in the city and deal with rapid growth and uneven commuting patterns, the article stated.

He said "the goal for this research collaboration is to envision smart mobility solutions for the rapidly growing city of Woodstock.”

Sivakumar has more than 20 years of comprehensive experience in GIS and Information Technology. His expertise includes web GIS, application design and development, network management, database management, and systems administration. His recent research focus is on enterprise GIS, urban forestry applications in GIS, and location analytics.  

Read more about all the recipients and their projects.

Associate professor, W. Jude LeBlanc recalled his feelings that day. “I was alerted to the fire by a text from Michael Gamble, a colleague who directs the summer foreign study programs, Modern Architecture/Modern Cities,” said LeBlanc. “I have to admit it was difficult for me to look at the video images. I would move from article to article on the web, and it took a while before I could bear to look at the videos that showed the falling spire, etc. “

LeBlanc's unique skillset includes the design of furniture and objects; architecture, interior design and installations; and planning, infrastructure and urban design, which all contribute to his interesting point of view not only to that of the design of Notre-Dame, but also to his contributions as a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture. This summer, LeBlanc traveled to France to lead the Paris portion of the Modern Architecture and Modern City international education program. 

What are your thoughts on the modern designs that are being proposed for the restoration of Notre-Dame?

President Macron’s proposal for an architectural design competition that would result in an edifice “more beautiful than before” should give one pause.  Nonetheless, the call for a competition to potentially improve or alter Notre Dame serves several functions.  

It provides a means to understand and perhaps reassess the past, to consider our best potential futures, and to hopefully better understand the relationship between the two.  There are many examples in which culturally significant historical structures have been successfully altered by contemporary transformations—The Louvre (I.  M. Pie) and the Reichstag (Norman Foster), for example. Each case is different. 

The Cathedral is included in a large World Heritage Site called “Pairs, Banks of the Seine”. My own opinion is that this monument should be restored to its near exact state before the fire. 

This was true for the Campanile of St. Mark’s Square in Venice and even more so here.  The stone vaults of the ceiling must be repaired, and the spire and roof should be restored.

Specifically, what are some of Notre-Dame's significant features and why should they be preserved?

The stone vaulted ceiling. At least one current proposal suggests that the vault should remain open as a skylight, in part to commemorate the inferno.  The original building, at great expenditure, made light filled walls bound together by vaulting and flying buttresses.  Opening a vault to the sky would have the undesirable and unacceptable effect of altering the fundamental schema of the section and its spatial implications. 

The spire.  According to Professor Emeritus Rob Craig, the spire was as important as any other element to the essential quality of the Gothic attitude. Many more were planned throughout the cathedrals of France than were ultimately realized.  This is because they obviously were the last elements to be built and they would have required immense effort. It was correct that Violet le Duc replaced the spire to Notre Dame in 1844, after the original had been removed in 1756 for structural fatigue. 

The hidden structure of the spire transfers load to the corners of the crossing. Violet le Duc became an expert on medieval timber construction before undertaking this project.  In the intervening years, much of his work has acquired an historical aura in its own right--especially the spire.  Luckily, the sixteen bronze statues had been removed at the time of the calamitous fire.

The roof.  The roof form is an important visual element in the silhouette of Notre Dame and therefore of the skyline of Île de la Cité.  Its authentic reconstruction is essential to a proper restoration.  One exception should be considered.  The hidden structure between the vaults and the roof was made of so much old growth timber it was referred to as “la forêt”, the forest.  Replacement of this amount of timber, even if possible, would represent an avoidable environmental loss.

What is the significance of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in relation to classic and modern architecture?

Notre-Dame is considered one of the great examples of French Gothic Architecture. Construction of the cathedral began in 1160 and was largely complete by 1260.  First called the “French Style,” the Gothic style first appeared in the early 12th c. at the Basilica of Saint-Denise. The main characteristic of Gothic design is its emphasis on the vertical made possible by novel applications of the ribbed vault and the pointed arch, along with the innovation of the flying buttress.

The Gothic style would have lasting effects that altered future styles. Michael Dennis argues that the Renaissance and Baroque facades of France are distinct from Italy in recurring visual and spatial verticality.  Structural expressionism, a major strain in modernist theory and practice, had the Gothic and neo-Gothic precedent behind it.

For example, Violet le Duc proposed novel uses of iron in design in the late 1800s. Violet le Duc was the architect in charge of the 19thcentury renovation of Notre Dame and the person responsible for restoring the fleche, or spire, that had been destroyed. He argued, against the neo-classical preference of the time, that the Gothic style was superior, especially in this context. 

What is another example of a notable building’s collapse. How was it restored?

The Notre-Dame fire is reminiscent of another historic building calamity-the collapse of the St. Mark’s campanile in Venice.  The campanile was one of several prominent buildings—the Dodges’ Palace, the Sansovino library and the St. Mark Cathedral—that together made up the main square of the city.

A tower had stood on this location in Venice since the 14th century and took its final essential form in 1513.  After damage over the years, especially due to lighting strikes, the tower was outfitted with a lightning rod in the 18th century.  Nonetheless, in July of 1902, the tower collapsed completely. As in Paris, not a single human life was taken. That very evening, the decision was made to rebuild the tower exactly as it was before the collapse.

The Notre-Dame Cathedral is a monument onto itself, a supreme exemplar of a style of building which has come to signify both Paris and France.  Happily, it appears that both the will and the means exist to restore the cathedral in Paris.

The building is important in art history and in the popular imagination. President Macron’s promise that the cathedral be fully restored is laudable, despite controversies. For example, I would hope that aesthetics would not be pitted against social equity.  

In anticipation of season three of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, which is poised to emphasize the mall culture of the 1980s, Dreyfuss reached out to Dunham-Jones, an expert in dying malls and how to retrofit them for future use.

Dunham-Jones is the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, which explores retrofits of aging big box stores, malls, and office parks as they provide healthier and more sustainable places for their communities.

“Newspapers like to jump to the headline that it’s online shopping, but that’s more like the nail in the coffin, than it really is the beginning. The decline of the malls really starts in the 90s mostly because we built so many of them that they started to cannibalize each other.” Dunham-Jones says about the decline of shopping malls. However, Dunham-Jones says that she is most interested in when people are looking at the death of these properties as opportunities to help a 20^th century suburb address 21^st century problems.

Watch Dunham-Jones’ interview with WIRED here.

Many of us have experienced that. And not in a spooky sci-fi way, but in a 21st-century technology way.

Over the past 10 to 15 years the evolution of smart, sensor-based products and systems has reshaped the way we interact with each other and the world around us.

This evolution will be discussed in a College of Design Research Forum on Thursday, September 27. The title of that form is, "When the World Talks Back … Connecting People and Things."

Sensor technology enables us to tap all kinds technologies and allows us to connect to things we have not been able to connect to before, in ways not previously possible, explained Jim Budd, chair and professor in the School of Industrial Design.

With sensors of the late 1900s and early 2000s, interactive products could take an action and respond to it.

Later, researchers realized they could attach micro-processors to sensors to collect data and could share that data, Budd said.

For years, sensors have turned on lights and opened doors for us. But now we have begun to realize even more possibilities, he said.

For example, a sensor on a door or building can let the us know who comes into the building and know when they leave, and then could share that knowledge. If that building knows who you are, it could even greet you!

Researchers realized we could incorporate these technologies into our homes. Now we wire our homes with technologies that can inform us of the weather outside to lighting levels.

Your house, connected to your smartphone, could tell you when someone comes to your home. Then you could communicate with the house, let it know what to tell that person, maybe even have a dialogue.

Some of these things are already happening. Budd said we have only scratched the tip of the iceberg. We are about 20 years into this use of interactive technology.

One of the biggest technological changes over the past 10-15 years, he said, has been the cell phone. Initially it was a device designed for talking.

Now, we use cell phones to gather information, communicate, hail rides, pay for food, and more. And if we ask a question, it can answer!

Interactive Technology in the College of Design

As a community, we recognize that things that we were once only able to dream about can actually happen, he said.

Budd, who is organizing the forum, said the discussion will compare a snapshot from the past with new initiatives today that connect us with the products around us, the buildings we inhabit, and the cars we drive, along with speculation of where we might be headed tomorrow.

He will lead off with a history of where we came from and others talk about their work.

This forum is also a reflection of collaboration across disciplines in the College. Participants cross two school and a research center: School of Architecture, School of Industrial Design, and the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization.

Joining Budd at the forum will be Noah Posner, a research scientist in the IMAGINE Lab in the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization; Stuart Romm, a professor of practice in the School of Architecture; and Wei Wang, an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design.

Posner said his current work focuses “on creating interactive experiences that leverage physical interaction. Past work includes creating an interactive sandbox for visualizing gorilla location data in Rwanda and data collection devices for capturing street view style panoramas. He also is designing physical interfaces for spatial VR experiences, and involved in teaching physical prototyping to MS-HCI students. For the research forum, he will talk about how we prototype connections. He also will discuss methods of prototyping, how technology gets integrated into product prototypes, different hardware prototyping platforms, and how this translates into a course.

Romm said as a topic, “When the World Talks Back… Connecting People and Things,” is one “that increasingly challenges designers to explore how new environments will intersect the physical + digital worlds.” He will talk about an ongoing case study on how the interdisciplinary collaboration between architects, industrial designers, and experience designers are innovating spaces that integrate the physical and virtual realms. One example is the use of interactive technologies in the transformation of Georgia Tech’s historic main library into a 21st Century Research Library for the digital age. 

Wang said we can anticipate that autonomous vehicles will have an impact on accelerating the transformation of automotive products into a transportation service. From the key criteria of human-computer interaction, Wang said he will talk about how to connect people and things in future autonomous driving through interactive technologies. He will also share some examples from experimental student project to sponsored research projects.

About the Research Forums

The College of Design Research Forums allow the College community and our friends across the campus to experience the design- and technology-focused research at Georgia Tech. From music technology to product design; from assistive technology to healthcare; from architecture to city planning, we explore the many ways technology can solve critical problems for the way we live.

The next research forum is scheduled for Thursday, November 8, in the Caddell Flex Space.

The title is, "Community Redevelopment in the Global South." This forum will explore ongoing projects designed to enhance the well-being of residents in the Global South in the face of its rapid growth and redevelopment.

Michael Elliott, an associate professor in the School of City and Regional Planning, will lead that discussion.

The forums take place from 11a-12p. All forums going forward will be in the Caddell Flex Space.

The University of Thessaly was founded in 1984, and the Department of Architecture was founded in 1999 and celebrated its 30 year anniversary.

During the period 1992-2005 Peponis also worked as a part time professor at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he helped initiate the first post-professional research-based Master of Science degree in architecture. He was also invited to offer lectures at the Universities of Patras and Thessaly.

At the University of Thessaly, he helped organize workshops and coordinate conferences. He was on the organizing committee for the conference on Representation and Thought in Architecture that was run  by professors Trova, Manolidis and Papaconstantinou in 2005, and brought together 250 attendees from all Schools of Architecture in Greece and several schools in Europe and the USA, including Georgia Tech, leading to a major book on the subject. Peponis’s book Chorographies: the architectural construction of meaning, written in Greek, has been widely included in reading lists in all Schools of Architecture in Greece since its publication in 1997.

“The development of new ideas, theories and methods always involves intense and persistent face-to-face communication with like-minded people.,” said Peponis. “Some of the people I have been comparing notes with over the years work at the University of Thessaly. I like to think that this recognition reflects not only on my own work but also on the common intellectual ethos that propels fundamental advances in architecture as a discipline. It is also deeply rewarding to be recognized in one’s home country.”

The award ceremony took place on the same day as the Georgia Tech School of Architecture End of Year Show. The End of Year Show gives students an opportunity to showcase their work for an audience of their peers, faculty, family, friends, alumni, and local practitioners. This exhibition is hosted in the Hinman Research Building and the Hinman Courtyard, which underwent a new installation in the fall of 2018.

Design/Build Workshop Project Earns Excellence Award

So it came as no surprise to the School when we learned that the Hinman Courtyard Installation received an excellence award in the student project category. This project took place over three semesters as part of a Design/Build workshop that consisted of multidisciplinary teams who prototyped, detailed, fabricated, and constructed three new installations, which are now in use in the Courtyard. The installation elements include a pavilion, a layered steel veneer wall, and stair seating.

Portman Prize Studio Project Receives Honor

The recognition of our student work did not stop with the Hinman Courtyard. A team comprised of Marco Ancheita, Emily Wirt, and Stephanie Wright received a merit award for their project, “Rigid + Fluid,” which was created for their Spring 2018 Portman Prize Studio taught by Jen Pindyck. This project proposes a Center for Ecological Interpretation and Land Use History at Amicalola Falls.

BLDGS Named AIA Georgia Firm of the Year

One of the strengths of the School of Architecture is that we have faculty who are actively practicing in their fields.

“BLDGS is a recognized firm of local, regional, and national commendation. The Atlanta-based firm has set a precedent for other firms large and small in its design philosophy of individualized solutions and the importance of a contemporary and public focused perspective on design and the built environment,” notes the award announcement by AIA Georgia.

“Equally passionate about both education and architecture, founding principals, David Yocum, and Brian Bell, also serve as professors of the practice at the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Architecture where they have been able to imbue their dedicated and enlightened view of architecture and environmental impact. BLDGS has elevated the public’s conception of meaningful design and their multi-faceted work shows their belief in architecture as a “community asset.” Their work in both architecture and with the next generation of architects is recognized, celebrated and to be commended and recognized with the 2019 AIA Georgia Firm of the Year Award."

Click here to read the press release for this year’s AIA Georgia Design and Honor Awards.

“Our interdisciplinary design studios are based in structured teamwork that includes students from other disciplines on campus,” said Julie Kim, Associate Professor, Associate Chair, and Director of Undergraduate Program in the School of Architecture. “This is central to our curriculum, emphasizing design as a creative pursuit that requires integrated knowledge from various disciplines. With Architecture participating in the Capstone Design Expo, we have an opportunity to share the innovative and collaborative work our students produce to an audience that includes faculty, industry professionals, and students across the Institute.” 

Each semester, architecture students are required to take a studio as part of their curriculum. Juniors and seniors are organized into the Vertical Studio, and this year, 19 teams represented the School of Architecture at the Expo. 

“Our studios this semester took on the challenges of proposing satellite atria for collaborative learning spaces; interrogating maintenance and repair of structures as they age; designing for disaster, while also developing innovative systems in concrete; and considering global culture and community,” said Kim. “By participating in the Expo, our students engage in a larger conversation with their peers across the Institute. It is a reciprocal situation. Others gain awareness of the range of complex issues our students take on just as our own students see how their peers tackle allied concerns. The platform is, then, set for possible future collaborations.”

“Participating was an exciting experience!,” said Jane Ilyasova (Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Architecture, ’19). “Seeing the range of work produced by other Colleges was eye-opening and made me feel proud to be a part of a community of students that work towards making a positive impact through innovation.”

“Typically, a lot of students and staff from other school departments are unaware of what we do as Architecture majors,” added Tia Calhoun, rising senior in the B.S. in Architecture program. “By participating in Capstone, we are able to give the school of Architecture the exposure and recognition  it deserves.”

Architecture is one of the categories in the Spring Capstone Design Expo. This year, Noah Sannes (B.S. in Architecture, ’19) and Christopher Tromp (B.S. in Architecture, ’19) took home the architecture prize for their project titled, “Coalescence.” Coalescence is a hypothetical proposal for a community recreation center within the city of Atlanta. The project is part of the ACSA Built-to-Last: Resilience Design Challenge, a competition focused on innovations in concrete construction.

“Our project specifically was put forth through the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and sponsored by the Portland Cement Company,” said Tromp. “It pushed for innovations in concrete, which we implemented in our project through innovative uses of existing materials and pushing for a new development of the material that could filter water. Our project had to take into account many different factors from understanding the socio-cultural demographics of the site, innovations in concrete, water management, social resilience, environmental resilience, disaster relief functions and accommodations, and accessibility for the neighborhood and then be presented in a architecturally coherent and aesthetically rich manner.”

“I believe that it is important for us architecture students to showcase our design work to a wide audience,” said Sannes. “At the Senior Design Capstone, I have had the opportunity to discuss sustainability and material innovations with professionals and academics across many fields. I have had the opportunity to receive crucial career advice from visiting architects, as well. My favorite part of Capstone is sharing with others about what architects do - we invent, create, make, model, and visualize!”

“It’s a story I don’t think is my own story, I think it’s a story that is shared by so many champions that have come along the way.”

The Centers' collaboration brings together CIDI’s research on issues of accessibility and services for individuals with disabilities, and CQGRD’s research on the development of healthy and equitable places to live.

Both Centers are affiliated with the College of Design at Georgia Tech.

Catherine Ross, director of CQGRD, said “the Center is extremely pleased to add Carolyn P. Phillips, a nationally recognized consultant in the field of assistive technology and disabilities, to the CQGRD team. She speaks frequently on topics that include assistive technology, advocacy, self-determination and living with a learning disability.”

Phillips also serves as Director of Tools for Life, the Georgia Assistive Technology Act Program; the Pass It On Center; and the National Assistive Technology Reuse Technical Assistance and Coordination Center.

Of her new affiliation, Phillips said, “I am looking forward to extending my work partnerships through my affiliation with the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development. This affiliation emanates from ongoing and continuing research and teaching we are undertaking.”

These companies typically provide an app-based service that links passengers and drivers and charges passengers automatically. The innovative ride matching system operated by TMC has the potential to improve the accessibility of the transportation system through proper integration.

In a project funded by the Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions and Dollars, and led by Catherine Ross, researchers examined the use these services in filling gaps in U.S. transit systems.

Ross, director of the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, and researchers stated that these services are now a permanent fixture of the urban mobility landscape. In their report, they advise policymakers to expand the menu of funding opportunities for such cooperation.

Read the full article about Ross' sponsored research.

The symposium will feature leading researchers and designers – alumni trained at the SimTigrate Design Lab in the College of Design, as well as current researchers and students – and will look at the ways design and the design process can transform healthcare.

The symposium, titled Designing the Future of Healthcare: Linking Problem, Evidence, and Transformation, will feature a keynote from SimTigrate Director and School of Architecture Professor Craig Zimring.

He expects the symposium “will identify emerging problems facing healthcare. In the late 20^th century we realized the harms we do to patients inadvertently through errors and infections. That, combined with the opportunities to build tens of billions of dollars in healthcare facilities, led to evidence showing that design can address problems in safety and errors. The field of evidence-based design has helped improve the experience of millions of patients worldwide by supporting safer, quieter, light-filled, better organized facilities.”

The symposium also will show how healthcare design research and innovative design of primary and in-patient care can help healthcare organizations address their biggest pressures, which include cost and reimbursement, patient and staff safety, patient experience, and chronic disease.

The result will be a view of emerging themes in healthcare design and research and a map of how researchers and designers can be full partners in transformation, Zimring said.

Looking Toward the Future

He said healthcare systems are also facing the problem of the coming tsunami of chronic diseases, as care providers deal with things like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and depression.

Zimring said the issue now is to identify the problems that are addressable through physical design and technology. Let’s look at evidence and research that our alumni and lab have done that shows that design can address problems of safety, efficiencies, staff processes, and more, he said.

Looking ahead, Zimring said that for the future of healthcare we must create a system which is more efficient, and which keeps people well rather than just curing them when they are sick.

The way forward, he said, is to bring together built environment technology and improvements in process and access in some integrated way, making the built environment part of the fundamental tool kit in providing health care.

Alumni Bring Their Expertise

Alumni in academia and industry will join current SimTigrate students and researchers. Many continue to do research at their universities, lead research centers of their own, and work with researchers in industry.

One of the returning alumni is Joshua Crews (M.Arch 2011), a senior architect and healthcare team leader at Nelson, an architecture firm with an office in Atlanta.

He is expected to talk about the role of research in the design process, and show how researchers and industry work together.

He and his firm are working with Georgia Tech and Emory University to create a facility to support a living laboratory for those diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. With little existing evidence to draw from, his work will rely on research to inform design decisions, program activities, and more. He will give some insight into the process.

Crews also presents and continues to do research with Jennifer DuBose, SimTigrate associate director.

DuBose and SimTigrate researchers have built a Lighting User Experience or L(ux) Lab with funding from the Pacific Northwest National Lab and fully tunable white lights donated by Signify.

New developments in lighting technology and discoveries about how light impacts the human brain have led to many opportunities to enhance the experience in healthcare environments. Building on literature reviews with the help of SimTigrate alumni and current students, the lab has designed a series of lighting experiments to evaluate the performance, acceptability and impact on behavior of different lighting conditions with a range of spectral properties and intensities.

The findings from the completed experiments on the acceptability of lighting for nursing tasks will be shared.

The presentation also will include a first look at the plans for testing the use of lighting to enhance cognitive performance in the collaboration between Emory and Georgia Tech in the Mild Cognitive Impairment Empowerment Center in Executive Park in Northeast Atlanta.

Zimring notes that one advantage of working with industry is it gives them the chance to implement their work quickly into the real world.

In bringing back former students, Zimring said one idea was to highlight the achievements of Georgia Tech in the area of healthcare design research and of the many former students around the country.

SimTigrate has helped nurture some of the most effective people in the field and they in turn are training students and engaging the world. “We are celebrating our impact,” he said.

Returning alumni and their current places of employment are:

• Sheila Bosch, Ph.D. Arch 2004, University of Florida
• Hui Cai, Ph.D. Arch 2012, University of Kansas
• Josh Crews, M.Arch 2011, Nelson Architects
• Saif Haq, Ph.D. Arch 2001, Texas Tech University
• Anjali Joseph, Ph.D. Arch 2006, Clemson University
• Lisa Lim, Ph.D. Arch 2018, Texas Tech University
• Lorissa MacAllister, Ph.D. Arch 2015, Enviah
• Michelle Ossmann, Ph.D. Arch 2016, Steelcase
• Debajyoti Pati, Ph.D. Arch 2005, Texas Tech University

Current researchers and students are:

• Jennifer DuBose, Associate Director of the SimTigrate Design Lab
• Zorana Matic, Graduate research assistant at SimTigrate and Ph.D. student
• Raha Rastegar, Graduate research assistant at SimTigrate and Ph.D. student
• Craig Zimring, Director of the SimTigrate Design Lab

This symposium is supported by a grant from the College of Design’s Associate Dean for Research, Nancey Green Leigh.

Register here for the symposium.

Marks’ inventive design is a post-mastectomy, custom-crafted bra designed to avoid common bra discomforts after surgery.

The competition received more than 1,500 entries from up-and-coming creators around the world aspiring to “Design for a Better Tomorrow.” With a better tomorrow in mind, Marks’ design gives women an optimistic start in their new beginning.

Marks was among six semi-finalists for the prestigious competition and the only semi-finalist from North America.

Marks’ achievement stems from a career and research focus in methods of integration between endangered traditional handcraft with algorithmic modeling, with the aim of creating new modes of production. As a professor at Georgia Tech, Marks furthers her impact through her research lab focused on digital modeling combined with handcraft.

In a world where certain types of crafts are favored over others in design, Lisa Marks sees a need and an opportunity to blend industrial design and forms of traditional craft, not only for craft revitalization but for better, more inclusive design.

The Back-Story

During Marks’ time as an Industrial Design student, she was involved in a material exploration project. From this project was born her initial point of focus when she decided on knit material as her point of exploration. Through the project, Marks created her first knitting tool.

Over time, Marks began to approach the idea of knitting in different materials and participated in a project based around the bamboo trade in Thailand, in collaboration with the Thai government.

In a country rich in craft communities, how could a thriving bamboo trade help minimize its increasing wealth gap?

It has been years since Marks’ visit but she fondly remembers her travels to Thailand. Based on her observation, she felt that craft revitalization could help empower communities on the less fortunate side of the wealth gap.

“It was really striking to see the wealth gap. 40% of their population only has 2% of the wealth, and if they were to continue to lose handcraft the wealth gap would have little room to improve,” Marks said.

As a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial Design, Marks advocates for empathetic design that humanizes innovative technologies to solve global problems. “Grad students are currently looking for creative ways to combine craft and industrial design to revitalize,” Marks said, showing the implications of her coursework in shaping proactive and solution-oriented design.

In her time in Thailand, Marks worked with craft communities to approach the problem with the wealth gap, a dilemma not unique to Thailand, and began to see the need for exportable modern design among craft communities. Marks ended up creating a series of objects that used parametric modeling to knit semi-rigid material with knit bamboo.

“This led me to a larger interest in craft revitalization and different ways of thinking to incorporate craft and design,” she said. This approach directly impacted her decision to focus her thesis on a similar opportunity to revitalize the craft of Croatian bobbin lace.

Marks’ approach is socially responsible and fills a growing need.

This is a form of design practice that not only thinks of the end-user, but also empowers the original designers, she said, the ones that are passing down centuries of historically driven design. “As designers, we can contribute. We can design objects using these techniques.”

As a professor at Georgia Tech, Marks teaches that design not only needs to express creativity, but also explore solutions around the world.

The original computers and binary code were inspired by the weaving process. Advancement and craft have always been integrated and there is importance in understanding the history of where things come from. “Let’s not forget the importance of craft in our modern world,” Marks said.

With advancement and craft in mind, Marks developed the idea of a post-mastectomy bra. One that could be custom-crafted for each woman to avoid common bra discomforts after surgery. Her unique research track helped identify Marks as a valuable faculty addition for the Industrial Design program, and in her short time at Tech, Marks has continued her exploration into handcraft and algorithmic modeling to further develop her designs.

School of Industrial Design chair, Jim Budd, notes, “Lisa’s combined focus on the integration of craft and parametric modeling that leverages the latest advances in digital technology to produce new historically inspired woven materials is an ideal fit for our fast growing Industrial Design program here at Georgia Tech.”

Marks has been very pleased with the support she has received. “My specialization has been valued and is encouraged at an R1 like Georgia Tech. Algorithmic Lace is now part of a design award!”

While our society is currently obsessed with plastic, automation, and apps, Marks said, “the obsession with 'one' has also yielded to conversations about craft."

"Not everything is a smooth shiny object. When you go home and look around at your belongings, most of them are not that.” To Marks, it is evident people have begun to recognize that some crafts are dying out.

Craft objects carry history and comfort that we want in our environment. “I think we have to fight to keep craft alive and part of that is incorporating craft into the built environment, which is what designers do,” she said.

Weaving Design and Empathy

For years, Marks conducted 3-D modeling projects to analyze the base mathematics behind a stitch of a particular fabric and using that to create design. The idea of algorithmic patterning is using mathematic inputs to “model, in this case, each stitch on a micro level and mathematically modeling proportions, shapes and such,” Marks said.

“I think understanding the math honors the history of how these patterns use to be integrated and their influence in inspiring others.”

The advancement of craft through the Algorithmic Lace project has a unique thought process for Marks.

“As industrial designers, we can create objects by thinking of what we can do with our hands, but we can’t do with machines. We can make lace with machines, very easily, we do it all the time – but, as yet, machines cannot make three-dimensional lace,” she said.  This thought process applied to the idea of a post-mastectomy bra, and how craft can be revitalized from what a machine cannot do to enhance user experience.

Given that women with a mastectomy have very sensitive skin, “About 40 percent of women with a post-mastectomy choose to not have reconstructive surgery," Marks said.

"Many wear mastectomy bras and external prosthetics that are very heavy and create discomfort. Since seams, underwires, and traditional bras can be uncomfortable, with the Algorithmic Lace bra, you can create a three-dimensional bra that fits the body and honors whatever form the body is."

The way that the Algorithmic Lace is patterned creates an optical illusion of fullness, so when looking at a mirror there is a sense of symmetry where there isn’t, giving women an optimistic start in their new beginning.

The process of creating a custom bra requires the woman to have a 3-D body scan. The scan captures everything from size to depths and a program then takes a basic pattern on lace and morphs it onto the body. The base math can then be edited through the points and lines to make it more or less dense, and fully customized for the woman’s comfort.

There are many design choices that the woman can make. This freedom to decide empowers women. As Marks explained, “For instance, some women want it to look more symmetrical, some women may want more dense lace to follow the scar to have the bra express her shape. The pattern is up to women and their design choices.”

With about six months of aggregated work into the Algorithmic Lace design, Marks now advances to develop working prototypes with mentorship by highly respected world-class design leaders – and represents Georgia Tech and the United States on a high level. The prototypes will debut on April 8, 2019, during the Milan Design Week, where the Grand Prix winner of the Lexus Design Award 2019 will be announced.

Given the decline of different hand-craft skills, and the way that different communities depend on hand-craft, Marks said she believes it is worth thinking about how we can design in ways that are really efficient, modern, and exportable to create jobs in these communities. Marks would like to see the project move forward, even if not manufactured, as a speculative project. One that brings attention to craft revitalization through design. The possibilities of good design are endless.

SimAUD is a highly selective annual conference supported by the Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  The conference returns to the United States this year for its 10-year anniversary. Previously, the conference was held in Delft, the Netherlands (2018), Toronto, Canada (2017) and London, United Kingdom (2016). Georgia Tech was selected this year because of the College of Design’s leadership in scholarship and education in design technology. The conference is organized by the Georgia Tech School of Architecture.

This year the program includes four keynote presentations, 11 sessions that showcase 40 single-track, peer-reviewed publications, 8 pre-conference workshops, two professional panels and engaging social events at Georgia Tech and in Atlanta. The conference will also feature a symposium-wide simulation game that will engage participants throughout the three days.

“SimAUD 2019 is going to be a universal celebration of a phenomenal international community of simulation scholars, coming together to discuss state-of-the-art design technology in a truly convergent format,” says SimAUD2019 Program Chair, Tarek Rakha, assistant professor of architecture and high performance buildings in the School of Architecture. “Georgia Tech is both thrilled and honored to host and develop the program for the decennial celebration of this event coming back to the United States, where 12 faculty across Tech’s campus will serve as session chairs and moderators, focusing on a variety of topics ranging from climate modeling to the simulation of people in the built environment. We look forward to welcoming colleagues from all around the world who will disseminate their latest advances in research and innovations for better built environment futures through the lenses of design technology”

“Contemporary architecture practice continuously develops a common digital language to integrate building industry frameworks.” says Scott Marble, Chair of Georgia Tech School of Architecture. “SimAUD 2019 will present critical topics being explored in top academic research centers and architectural practices from around the world. Design technologies have great potential to transform practice in new and innovative ways and through events like this, impactful international synergies are sure to be built to advance this transformation.

“Georgia Tech’s College of Design sets an ideal stage for the 10-year anniversary of SimAUD, leveraging Tech’s technological synergies, along with the College’s strengths in design, planning and creativity.” says Nancey Green Leigh, College of Design Associate Dean of Research. “By bringing together remarkable and established researchers and practitioners in urban planning and design, architecture and building science, visualization and construction, as well as software development, SimAUD 2019, offers promising opportunities for collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship that to advance Tech’s research agenda.”

“The faculty and students at the Georgia Tech College of Design focus on integrating design and technology. We have developed advanced simulation and visualization models at the building, neighborhood, and city-scale,” said College of Design Dean Stephen P. French. “We are thrilled to host SimAUD and look forward to working with you to push the boundaries of simulation research. Welcome to Georgia Tech!”

The conference runs from Sunday, April 7 through Tuesday, April 9. All sessions are scheduled to take place in the John and Joyce Caddell Building’s Flex Space. The conference offers a platform to unite researchers and practitioners in the fields of architecture, urban design, urban planning, building science, and data science. SimAUD 2019 will feature a range of topics related to simulation with a special emphasis on methods that bridge disciplinary gaps between design, construction, operations, resource management, human behavior, and performance analytics across building and urban scales.

Follow this link to register for SimAUD 2019.

About the Georgia Tech School of Architecture

Georgia Tech School of Architecture’s mission is to instill students with a life-long curiosity for the social and cultural meaning of the built environment and a passion to be part of improving the future. The School offers six distinct degree programs that each address the wide spectrum of design, technology, and social and cultural components of the architecture profession. The programs include a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, Master of Architecture, a Master of Science in Architecture, a Master of Science in Urban Design, a dual Master of Architecture and Master of City and Regional Planning, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture.

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech, is a top-ranked public university and one of the leading research institutions in the U.S.A. Georgia Tech provides a technologically focused education to more than 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students in fields ranging from engineering, computing, and sciences, to business, design, and liberal arts.

But researchers in the Georgia Tech IMAGINE Lab didn’t have to wait for brick and steel to start being laid or watch a “construction cam” on a website to envision the possibilities for the new building. They were able to use their expertise in digital imaging, 3D modeling, and augmented reality technologies to create Tech Square in a digital model that included Coda in its earliest concept.

In 2015, the IMAGINE Lab, part of the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization in the College of Design, was tasked by stakeholders at the Institute to create a pilot project for a quick visual tool for planning the future Coda building.

“The main goal of the digital application was to quickly visualize a few possible options with building concepts that included 20, 30 and 40 stories, and allow people to interact with the models and see how the cityscape in midtown would be altered,” said Miro Malesevic, digital designer at the IMAGINE Lab.

In essence, the researchers gave decision makers a virtual time machine to the future that brought the building to life and showed how it might be situated in Tech Square and impact the area.

The visualization tool came in the form of an augmented reality app on mobile devices that allowed users to point the screens at a 2D physical map of Tech Square and watch a 3D model of the space come to life on the screen. Users could tap the screen to start with a 20-story building and tap twice more to end up with a structure twice the height (Coda eventually ended up with 21 levels).

Users could also understand how the length of shadows cast by the building or the structure itself might occlude views at the street level or other buildings. The digital AR application even provided a glimpse of the possibility for traffic simulations.

“Use of the 3D AR application has an advantage over traditional 2D blueprints as it provides an individual user with 3D perspective of the design, interaction with the environment, and the ability to use simulations to help in decision-making,” said Malesevic, who worked on the project.

The powerful tool was built within a week, thanks to the IMAGINE Lab’s 3D modeling library, compiled over a 20-year period.

Over the years the IMAGINE Lab has produced numerous architectural visualizations for Georgia Tech, non-profit, and local private organizations supporting economic development efforts at the city and state level.

The third phase of Tech Square was announced in September. It includes preliminary plans for a two-tower complex at the northwest corner of West Peachtree and Fifth streets and possibly a retail plaza as well as an underground parking deck.

The design team in the IMAGINE Lab is already building this next version of Tech Square inside their digital world. The rest of us will have to wait and see how it turns out sometime in 2022 or later.

Story: Joshua Preston

Video: Noah Posner

Video Editing: Terence Rushin

What seemed like a good idea at the time – housing two nationally known research centers focused on accessibility, technology solutions, and inclusion in the same building – quickly turned into Georgia Tech’s leading force for accessibility innovation.

The natural course of the two centers’ collaborative work led to organizational consolidation. The Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation (CIDI) now combines the strengths of AMAC’s advocacy and service solutions and CATEA’s research in the areas of disability, aging, and universal design.

As a Georgia Tech College of Design research center, CIDI uses research and design thinking to drive innovation in education and practical approaches to life. As part of the Georgia Tech research ecosystem, collaborations with other centers, academic units, and students create unique opportunities for synergies with big data, robotics, wearable technologies, and the digital twin.

“By merging the two centers into this supercenter, CIDI will be able to address the full range of needs for accessibility,” said Nancey Green Leigh, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Design. “The hardware and software solutions for accessibility are rapidly changing, and CIDI’s home at Georgia Tech gives it a major advantage in developing and disseminating those solutions.”

The resulting focus is clear: CIDI works to secure full inclusion of all individuals through innovative research, education, and service.

The research center creates a unique and perpetual workflow of education, which feeds research, which in turn affects service, which then informs education. The center’s clients (individuals, K-12 and higher education, corporations, nonprofits, and government entities) reap the benefit of equal access to education, work, and life.

"Thanks to our innovative CIDI Service, we thrive in knowledge transfer and proactively are addressing the gaps that exist in research so we move the accessibility, assistive technology, and universal design fields forward," said Carolyn Phillips, the former director of AMAC.

"Leveraging AMAC's expertise will bridge the gap at the intersection of design, research, and service and enable us to promote universal design solutions that meet the needs of people of all abilities in order to ensure the full inclusion of those with less ability," said Jon Sanford, the former director of CATEA.

As Phillips and Sanford take on new roles within CIDI, the center is now looking for an executive director with a strong research background in disability solutions.

The position will be responsible for CIDI’s research, service, and educational activities, resources, and hiring/management for administrators, investigators, and staff. With the center’s incredible range of initiatives, the executive director will need to provide a coherent vision for research, education, and service.

Job description:

The Executive Director is the Chief Administrative Officer of the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation (CIDI) - a research and service center of the Georgia Tech College of Design. The newly established center (from a merger of CATEA and AMAC) conducts innovative accessibility research and provides accessibility solutions for colleges, K-12 educators, corporations, non-profits, and government institutions to provide equal access to education, work, and life. The Executive Director reports to the Associate Dean for Research at the College of Design.

The Executive Director is ultimately responsible for CIDI’s research, service/educational activities, resources, and hiring/management of CIDI’s administrators, investigators and staff. The Executive Director is responsible for approving employee and unit goals, creating an organizational structure to meet those goals, assessing unit and employee performance, providing feedback and making compensation recommendations.

The Executive Director should:

• Possess an ability to think strategically, delegate responsibility effectively, build consensus, listen carefully and communicate effectively in a complex matrix organization.
• Demonstrate a record of initiative, problem-solving, and adaptability.
• Have high-level interpersonal communication skills (verbal and written).
• Be comfortable working independently and have experience designing effective management policies.
• Attract, develop, lead and retain staff members capable of achieving excellence and collaboratively contributing to the successful development of CIDI, the College of Design and Georgia Tech.
• Be able and willing to share credit for successes and encourage the integration of others’ ideas and proposals.
• Have the knowledge and ability to implement principles of leadership, management, conflict resolution, negotiation, and motivation.
• Possess a solid working knowledge of standards related to employment, recruiting, employee relations, compensation, and protection/storage of sensitive information.
• Have the ability to maintain confidentiality and work effectively with a diverse group of people.
• Possess experience with activities and decisions that may be complex and varied in nature requiring independent action and judgment.
• Have a clear understanding of the fiduciary responsibility of a leader within an academic institution.
• Have a clear understanding of Profit and Loss Management within a service center.

Responsibilities of the Executive Director:

The Executive Director provides leadership and oversight of CIDI’s wide range of research, education, and accessibility solution initiatives. The Executive Director will appoint an Administrative Team, and in concert with that Team, will:

• Provide leadership to CIDI, embracing the organization’s range of ongoing activities, and providing a coherent vision for research, education, and service.
• Promote excellence across all of the center’s activities in support of the missions of the College of Design and Georgia Tech.
• Ensure that the development of CIDI’s goals, objectives, strategies, performance indicators and targets is aligned with, and will contribute to, the success of the College of Design and Georgia Tech.
• Have fiduciary oversight for CIDI’s compliance with all University, state, and national policies, laws, regulations, and guidelines.
• Augment the profile of CIDI through representation, engagement and the development of strong linkages with professional communities and other groups relevant to CIDI's activities.
• Enhance the reputation of CIDI, the College of Design and Georgia Tech by completing quality research and communicating the outcomes of that research to the appropriate professional communities and society.
• Act as an ambassador for CIDI in developing its international profile of activities through the expansion of strategic partnerships.
• Encourage, advocate and actively participate in fundraising and governmental affairs to support and strengthen CIDI’s mission-critical activities.

Basic Qualifications:

• Education: A graduate degree compatible with providing leadership in a Center having a complex mission of research, education, and service.
• Experience: At least eight to ten years in leadership/management of highly successful medium to large organizations
• A successful track record of academic leadership and team building
• Demonstrated ability to identify, create and articulate a coherent vision for organizations with complex missions
• A well-developed understanding of the priorities, operation, and strategy of successful programs
• Experience in cross-disciplinary initiatives and collaboration
• Experience in financial planning and resource allocation

Preferred Qualifications: 

• A Ph.D. in a relevant area
• Experience in leading and successfully initiating and implementing change
• Demonstrated ability to combine and integrate the skills and expertise of highly motivated staff into multi-disciplinary teams, developing and building upon existing collaborations as well as creating/facilitating new opportunities
• Demonstrated ability to manage resources and ensure that an organization is self-sustaining from income generated from investigations and other sources
• Demonstrated monitoring and decision-making skills to implement corrective action if a program is in difficulty
• Solid working knowledge of accommodation laws/regulations/guidelines
• A Ph.D. in a relevant area
• Experience in cross-disciplinary research initiatives and collaboration
• A well-developed understanding of the priorities, operation, and strategy of a successful research program
• A track record of funded projects and published manuscripts
• History of successful development of early career researchers

Candidates must submit a letter of interest including research statement that describes past work, future goals and how it fits within the context of Georgia Tech (2 pp. max); contact information for three references; full Curriculum Vitae.

Application Process:

Application materials are accepted via jobapplicants@design.gatech.edu. 

For more information, please contact College of Design HR at hr@design.gatech.edu.  

Review of applications will begin on April 15, 2019, and continue until the position is filled. The anticipated date for a shortlist is May 7, 2019, with interviews during the month of May. 

Georgia Tech is an equal education/employment opportunity institution dedicated to building a diverse community. We strongly encourage applications from women, underrepresented minorities, individuals with disabilities, and veterans.

“It’s all about music,” said Gil Weinberg founding director of the College of Design’s Center for Music Technology (GTCMT). Weinberg is also a School of Music professor and School of Interactive Computing adjunct professor.

“Music is about rhythm, pitch, loudness, and tone. These are the same elements used to control vocal prosody, which helps convey emotion, humor, irony, and other subtle, yet crucially meaningful expressions. This project is about using music to allow our robot Shimi to show emotions not only through his voice, but through his body gestures as well.”

Shimi is a personal robot that communicates with humans through music-driven vocal prosody and gestures rather than words.

When Shimi debuted in 2012, it played songs from a user’s library, analyzed the music, and responded with corresponding gestures. Now, with the help of deep learning and with funding from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), Shimi can learn emotional cues in people’s voices and respond with emotive voice and movement.

The project’s research team comprises Weinberg, Ph.D. student Richard Savery, and master’s student Ryan Rose. 

Using deep learning analysis of music and language datasets, the team trained Shimi to communicate emotions using non-linguistic channels. Shimi can also analyze a person’s tone and speech in order to respond in an emotionally appropriate way.

“By modeling humans’ affective communication cues, such as body gestures and vocal prosody, we’ve created a language focused on emotion. With Shimi, we are not projecting words but still allowing for affective communication to occur,” Weinberg said.

Avoiding the “Uncanny Valley”

“Society has seen countless efforts to re-create humanoid robots to interact with humans. Many of these robots fall prey to the same issue as their predecessors: The Uncanny Valley. In the Uncanny Valley, robots simply become too close to human, without being human, which tend to lead to a sense of eeriness and revulsion.

“What then if a robot wasn’t trying to sound exactly like a human? What if we celebrated a robot for what it is, and for the things it can do that humans can’t?” Weinberg said.

This is the logic behind steering clear of identifiable words, and instead equipping Shimi with the ability to respond to humans with non-verbal sounds while still being able to convey a general sense of mood.

“If you are upset, Shimi could project that it is also upset, or maybe decide to encourage you using happy prosody,” Weinberg said.

Creating a Language Built on Deep Learning and Music 

To create Shimi’s voice, tone, and improvisational response for this project the team fed a Deep Learning network with:

• 10,000 files from 15 improvisational musicians playing responses to different emotional queues
• 300,000 samples of musical instruments playing different musical notes, to add musical expressivity to the spoken word
• One of the rarest languages in existence – a nearly extinct Australian aboriginal vernacular made up of 28 phonemes

By processing these datasets on NVIDIA’s Jetson Board, an embedded GPU optimized for machine learning, Weinberg and his team have been able to allow Shimi to use his new affective voice and sing as a self-contained robot that does not need network connectivity.

Through the desire to combine music with deep learning, Georgia Tech researchers have coincidentally shown that communication simply needs empathy and a tune to take place. 

“What we are most excited about is the ability to synthesize various attributes of music, language, and movement through deep learning, and project music as the core element of a robotic communication to show that our robots can understand and convey human emotion,” Weinberg said.

This year, the competition enters its 17th year. According to the ULI competition website, "The ULI Hines Student Competition is part of the [Urban Land] Institute’s ongoing effort to raise interest among young people in creating better communities, improving development patterns, and increasing awareness of the need for multidisciplinary solutions to development and design challenges." 

Seven teams from Georgia Tech entered this year's competition. Each team must have five graduate students from at least three different disciplines to be eligible to compete.

The assignment for this year's competition explored the redevelopment of a site in Cincinnati comprising portions of a highway, the central business district, and the central riverfront along the Ohio River. Student groups took a deep dive into the potential to bridge the highway and combine it with adjacent properties, ultimately to connect both areas to create a sustainable, pedestrian-focused, mixed-use neighborhood.

The competition, which kicked off on January 14, is designed to simulate a real world design, planning, and development project.  This year's assignment focused on Cincinnati’s vision for connecting the central riverfront entertainment district.

The Georgia Tech team selected as an honorable mention submitted a project titled, "Looping the Banks." Conner Smith, Master of Architecture student, served as team leader for Looping the Banks. Also on the team were Master of Architecture student, Wanli Gao, Master of Real Estate Development student, Bryan Katz, and Master of Science in Urban Design students, Jingxin Xu and Siqi Li. School of Architecture professor and director of the Urban Design program, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and School of Architecture professor of the practice, Brian Bell were faculty advisors for this team. Director of the Master of Real Estate Development for the School of Building Construction, Rick Porter, and associate principal at Perkins+Will, Atlanta, Cassie Branum were professional advisors for Looping the Banks. 

According to the group's project proposal, Looping the Banks aims to complete, "a vibrant loop around the Banks riverfront park" while also, "forming a connection between the Central Business District and the Ohio River." 

“I’m really proud of them," Dunham-Jones said. "I love seeing the students work together and produce so much work with people they’ve never really met before. It’s extraordinary, really.”

The work from all seven teams is currently on exhibition in the Cohen Gallery located on the second floor of the College of Design’s Architecture East Building.

Click here for the ULI Hines Competition press release. 

We talked with Leigh ahead of the forum to learn more about the complexity of urban automation.

To start, what are we referring to when we say “urban automation”? Can you give a couple of examples?

There is no one definition of urban automation. Loosely it refers to hardware and software developments that substitute for previous mechanical and human-operated physical or decision-making systems to regulate and service urban functions. These developments are largely enabled by advances in information and communication technologies.

Some present examples include, drones, robots, and sensors. Others will evolve in the future.

How does the topic of urban automation fit in with research at the College of Design?

In planning, it can potentially be used to create smart cities, with optimized functions such as transportation, energy and water use, improving the economy and the environment.

In architecture, urban automation is used to make intelligent buildings that are more energy efficient, and meet human needs of comfort, for example in office environments.

In building construction, it is used in the process of putting up buildings and creating infrastructure. We use drones to survey the physical condition of buildings and roads, and  to access damage of natural disasters and develop more effective responses.

In industrial design, much of that focuses on products we use every day in urban environments, ties into the development of autonomous vehicles, and in the more novel application of wearable technologies,

In music, urban automation can capture and analyze the sounds of a city, helping to track noise pollution, monitor traffic patterns, or generate new musical compositions.

How does your research into the economics of the robotics industry play into this research?

I focus on local economic development planning and how technology drives change that affects the opportunities for work, standards of living, and the strength of local industries that support local economies.

One key point is that the majority of economic activity in our jobs is located in metropolitan areas. We are very much a metropolitan nation, rather than the traditional view of urban and rural nation. So the use of robotics in firms has the potential to make them more competitive and productive. It also has the potential to eliminate jobs, which would affect people’s ability to live in cities and have a high quality of life and standard of living. It also has the potential to change existing work and create new jobs.

My work is focused on understanding this. I’m primarily focused on the manufacturing sector, because that is where robotics are most in use at this point.

What is the most pressing concern that urban automation raises?

The most pressing concern is the reason we are having this forum: ethics and values. We know in many ways that urban automation has the potential to significantly transform the world that we live in. We also know our metro areas have longstanding, yet to be resolved, issues of justice for different communities and demographic groups.

There is a lot of controversy over artificial intelligence, which is a key component of urban automation, and to what extent does it augment, or substitute for, the capacity to make decisions by humans.

All of this has major societal implications. Rather than create the technology without considering these potential impacts, the focus here is on: How do we make choices about the urban automation we use? What is our framework for developing these technologies, to be more conscious of the impact of that?

Relative to that are issues of, "Is it going to be accessible for all? How do we build in safety factors?," because we would hope that “do no harm” is a key criteria for deployment of urban automation.

Will it give us the privacy that we expect to have? Privacy is a highly valued aspect of modern life.

It’s also important to make sure that no one is left out of the benefits that can occur with the best of urban automation has to offer.

How do we address these privacy and ethical concerns?

We don’t yet have all the answers or solutions that we need. That is why it is important to have the discussion that we are planning for in our forum. We need to get these concerns to the forefront of the development of technology.

One pressing concern is informing people about how their data will be used. Much of urban automation is about data collection. That data is used to develop software and hardware, forms of automation, as well as products.

We have some ways to opt out, but it is all primitive and legally driven responses. We need more work on that.

How do we ensure a world that is inclusive and benefits all?

The hope is that urban automation will allow us to optimize the functions of smart cities such as transportation, energy, water use, improve the economy and the environment, and improve access to education and training.

The goal is to improve the functions offered in urban areas and the ability of people to participate in society and the economy.

Urban automation should help the people who create and manage cities achieve goals of “smart cities that are just cities.”

Also on the Panel
Joining Leigh on the panel will be Jason Borenstein, associate director of the Center for Ethics and Technology at the School of Public Policy; Carolyn Phillips, of the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation (formerly AMAC Research Center); and Dennis Shelden, director of the Digital Building Lab and a professor in the School of Architecture. Leigh is also a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning.

Borenstein will focus on the ethics of autonomous vehicles and other computing technologies. While they hold much promise, he suggests that ethical issues emerging from their design and deployment must be addressed in a consistent and ongoing manner. Ethical issues that autonomous vehicles raise include the privacy of those who ride in them, vulnerability to hacking, and how they may interact with pedestrians or other entities in the surrounding environment.  

Phillips notes that we are at a defining moment as we gather at the crossroads of urban automation, ethics, and individuals with disabilities. The ethical implications when considering individuals with disabilities quickly move beyond beneficence, justice, and autonomy to specific concerns of privacy, safety, and informed choice. As we create disruptive, transformational technologies, it is critical that we pause to ensure we have employed an ethical framework throughout each phase of development and deployment so we can design for true inclusion. 

Shelden will talk about urban automation from the perspective of the built environment -- buildings, infrastructure and cities  – which is increasingly becoming “smart,” as physical spaces and devices in these spaces are connected to simulations and data platforms on the cloud. This presents opportunities for improved understanding of the behaviors of built environments and the interactions of occupants in these environments. At the same time, important questions of information, individuality, and culture are becoming more pressing. Questions of data privacy and ownership, security, and identity that are becoming critical questions for individuals and for societies will become pressing in the design and operation of the built environment.

About the Research Forums

The College of Design Research Forums allow the College community and our friends across the campus to experience the design- and technology-focused research at Georgia Tech. From music technology to product design; from assistive technology to healthcare; from architecture to city planning, we explore the many ways technology can solve critical problems for the way we live.

This forum will be January 24, 2019, 11 a.m. - Noon, in the Caddell Flex Space.

The final research forum of the 2018-19 academic year is scheduled for Thursday, March 7, in the Caddell Flex Space.

The international design competition received more than 1,500 entries from up-and-coming creators around the world aspiring to “Design for a Better Tomorrow.”

Marks' inventive design, Algorithmic Lace, is a post-mastectomy custom-crafted bra designed to avoid common bra discomforts after surgery. With a better tomorrow in mind, Marks' design gives women an optimistic start in their new beginning.

Marks' achievement stems from a career and research focus on methods of integration between endangered and traditional handcraft with algorithmic modeling.

As the only American to place as a finalist, Marks now advances to develop working prototypes with mentorship by highly respected world-class design leaders.

She will represent Georgia Tech and the United States on a high level. The prototypes will debut on April 8 during the Milan Design Week, where the Grand Prix winner of the Lexus Design Award 2019 will be announced.

To learn more about the Lexus Design Awards and finalists, click here.

Guhathakurta also participated in a panel discussion hosted by Georgia Tech and Newsweek magazine. The panel examined the question, “How Driverless Cars Will Change the World?” Joining Guhathakurta from the College of Design was Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor in the School of Architecture. Read more here.

Learn about the warning signs. Learn what steps you can take to help someone when it matters most.

Students experiencing a crisis that requires immediate attention may speak with a counselor at any time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Get help now.

For a list of mental health and well-being support services available at Georgia Tech, please visit: Mental Health Support Services & Events.

On September 26, 2018, the Diversity and Inclusion Council welcomed Peggy McIntosh, Senior Research Associate of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and founder of the National S.E.E.D. Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), to campus to help facilitate a conversation about diversity and inclusion between faculty, students, and staff at Georgia Tech. Kaye Husbands Fealing, Professor and Chair of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy and member of the Executive Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2017-2020), and Robert Kirkman, Associate Professor for the School of Public Policy, were invited to join in the discussion and share their personal experiences with diversity and inclusion. Following the panel discussion, the Council shared additional questions submitted by the audience with McIntosh, Husbands Fealing, and Kirkman for their input.

Question: What practical methods can be employed to restructure our education system to expand inclusion, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields?

Husbands Fealing: One item I would offer here is to have policies and governance on how to conduct searches for faculty, staff and students, where the search or recruiting committees reflect our diverse society (not just the representation we see on campus).

Question: When you are faced with a tricky situation, what would be a good technique to address it while simultaneously bringing awareness to diversity and inclusion?

McIntosh: I sometimes speak autobiographically and say, "When I am faced with this kind of situation, I automatically go to questions about diversity and inclusion in my own head, and whether they bear on the situation." I also sometimes say, "I have a divided mind here -- feeling both x and y." I try not to sound like the expert, but rather to talk about my process of thinking through how tricky situations are placed within contexts that carry power dynamics and bear on equity.

Husbands Fealing: In my experience, I first think about what the final outcome needs to be before I respond to the situation.  In my experience, I find it expedient to respond with facts and poise.  It is important in my view to have my best self-present.  What will be remembered is not the first affront, but what I do in response.

Question: How do you address people that try to ignore their own power in addressing diversity?

McIntosh: I am not sure what is meant by the phrase "try to ignore." When I am with people who have power through privilege, but don't seem to realize it, I just keep saying again and again that privilege brings power with it and that people who have privilege have far more power than most of them have recognized. I keep raising the question of how people will use their power, their unearned power, to weaken systems of unearned power. I think most white people have been trained to think of themselves as not having much power that they can use towards social change. But indeed we white people have considerable power just through being white, even if we grew up with class disadvantage. 

Husbands Fealing: It is important for everyone to understand that (a) diversity is often a benefit to all over time, and (b) if we create opportunities for growth, then diversity is not a zero-sum game. So, getting individuals to understand that the pie can be bigger even if various groups get larger wedges is key.  Of course, fairness is paramount, but what is perceived to be fair is subjective.

Question: Since you are speaking to a roomful of designers – have you noticed any particular physical design features that support or hinder inclusion?

Husbands Fealing: Yes!  Often I am on a stage where there is no ramp to get to the podium or dais. That is a clear signal to someone with a physical disability that they are not welcomed.

McIntosh: I have noticed that in schools, that is school buildings, the design of the front hall makes a big difference. If there are many tables to sit at and many chairs, that can make it feel like a cafe or a conversation nook. This makes students mingle more freely with people who do not look like them. In fact, I have come to say to school faculty groups that I believe they must reengineer and reshape the school entrance hall to prevent depression! In addition, I strongly recommend that small classes be configured as a circles with everyone facing each other, rather than having some look at the backs of heads of others, in rows. The mode called Serial Testimony is a structure for discussion which matches the circle. People can write to me (mmcintosh@wellesley.edu) to request my description of Serial Testimony. My assistant Rachel Nagin adds, "Buildings tell stories about who we are and what we value. Many recently built school buildings are designed much like prisons and built with cheap materials, which tells us quite lot about what we think of our students, especially our public school students. So as you analyze and design spaces, think about what's being valued."

Question: Can you talk about the importance of transparency in hiring and admissions and how that affects diversity and inclusion? Also how can we have increased diversity among faculty and professionals?

Husbands Fealing: This is a really complex question that requires several paragraphs to respond adequately.  So, in a nutshell, recognition that diversity, inclusion, and equity are important in concept and practice is paramount.  Leadership should be all-in, not just making comments in the open but not following through with actions—policies are guidelines to actions.  Often I hear, “Well, we just cannot find anyone…they don’t exist.” That is just not the case, though in some fields there is a low percentage of women or minorities. Networks can be used to find individuals to interview or to work on projects. The one caveat I should mention here—many of us get over worked and need to say “no” sometimes when asked to take on tasks. Junior faculty should be protected from placement on such committees. Yet, there is work to be done.

McIntosh: To increase diversity among faculty and professionals, they must be willing to redesign job descriptions, putting them on a broader base than before. This means rethinking everything that the institution is about. They must make sure that any candidate pool includes people from marginalized groups. Search committees must do the extra work needed and cast their nets wide to get beyond the usual habits of search committees, which include "looking for the best man for the job." 

Question: How can we improve diversity without tokenizing people?

McIntosh: In two universities where I have worked, the decision was made to hire two people of color at least, rather than one, for a previously all-white department, and two or more women for a previously all-male department. This helped to work against the appearance and feelings of tokenism. 

Husbands Fealing: Exactly…this is really important and, again, would take a few paragraphs to give examples of how this could work.  Perhaps the best answer to this question is found in the literature.  Someone should do a brief literature search to give readers of the article ability to explore this topic in more detail.  Attached, please find a report on this topic that a colleague and I prepared for the National Science Foundation (NSF) in fulfilment of a grant from NSF. We also published a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist in May 2018: http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/absb/62/5.

Let’s keep this conversation going! We need to hear from you on other ways we can broaden and raise awareness on key themes related to diversity and inclusion at Georgia Tech. Send your questions to Carmen Wagster, carmen.wagster@design.gatech.edu, and we will continue this discussion to help us all pursue a more diverse and inclusive community here at Georgia Tech.

The College of Design Diversity and Inclusion Council members include Julie Kim, Associate Chair for the School of Architecture; Catherine Ross, Harry West Professor for the School of City and Regional Planning and Director for the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development; Jerry Ulrich, Associate Professor for the School of Music; Xinyi Song, Assistant Professor for the School of Building Construction; Michelle Rinehart, ex-officio Council member and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Outreach for the College of Design; Astha Bhavsar, undergraduate student, School of Architecture; and Chirag Venkatesan, graduate student, School of Building Construction.

Jennifer DuBose, associate director of SimTigrate and principal research associate in the College of Design, will lead the innovation accelerator, working across the three cores and engaging people with MCI, students, researchers, and industry to learn best practices and create, test, and implement tailored solutions.

The focus of the innovation accelerator is to expedite MCI research and break down barriers to innovation and collaboration by providing resources and expertise and connecting with other resources in the Atlanta community. Annual seed grants will promote innovation in brain health. Collaborators in the innovator accelerator will capitalize on current MCI research to improve the lives of people with MCI.

For DuBose, her work has special significance. She has a family history of Alzheimer’s and said it’s important to direct a program that will engage with people with MCI as co-designers.

“Innovation in healthcare often takes too long to go from the bench to the bedside. We have the opportunity to break down some of the barriers that exist between research and therapy and between departments and institutions. This is an opportunity to more quickly make a difference in people’s lives,” DuBose said. “Time is a luxury people with MCI don’t have. MCI will rapidly impact our society and we need to address as quickly as we can.”

She continued, “We also want to honor and respect what people with MCI have to offer and they will be as fully engaged in the innovation as they want to be.”

Learn more about Emory Health Sciences and the James. M. Cox Foundation at their websites.

Faculty in the College of Design are working with residents of these communities to enhance the well-being of the residents. They will discuss their work at a College of Design Research Forum on November 8.

They are working to help communities in the Global South to strengthen climate change resilience, design and build community centers, support economic development, and house the urban poor, said Michael Elliott, an associate professor in the Schools of City and Regional Planning and of Public Policy.

The work allows the residents to invest in their communities in better ways, ways that protect their future more effectively.

The faculty members are working in India, Africa, and Latin America (with a focus on Puerto Rico).

Their projects are in communities facing pressing problems and each is done in consultation with, and the engagement of, the residents of the communities.

The faculty each came about their work in different ways.

While teaching in India, Elliott worked with Mahila Housing Trust to expand their housing programs to incorporate climate change resilience. A student in City and Regional Planning with deep roots in Puerto Rico was essential to initiating the work of Catherine Ross and Alberto Fuentes. Daniel Baerlecken has worked extensively with design/build models of community building in Africa.

Working With Communities in India

Elliott’s work in India is just one example of the efforts being done.

He works with Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT), a 20-year-old organization that grew out of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA).

MHT works primarily with women residents of informal settlements to improve living conditions within their communities. These are settlements built without permits, on land the residents might not own or to which they have questionable tenure rights.

MHT helps women, who are often martinalized in community decision making, to work effectively together to resolve pressing problems.

Close, constructive relationships with local partners are essential to community work in the Global South. Elliott and MHT, for example, have knowledge, skills, and relationships that are complimentary and synergistic.

"MHT has a long history of working in slums. They know the people, language, culture and challenges," he said. "I work with staff, building their skills around issues of climate change, resilience, research, and organizational development."

He notes that MHT's working model is that staff from MHT go into the identified communities and work with the people -- mostly women and sometimes adolescent girls -- to organize residents into community action groups.

This includes support for community organizing, building leadership skills, strengthening the capacity of the communities to assess and understand the conditions they face, linking the action groups to citywide organizations of residents from similar communities, and linking both the individual communities and the citywide organizations to city agencies and other stakeholders who could partner to resolve communith needs.

Countries Hit by Climate Change

Elliott says cities in countries such as India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, are among the ones being hit hardest by climate change.

Cities create their own heat island, raising temperatures significantly greater than is caused by climate change alone. Moreover, because slums are often on marginal land and the buildings offer little protection from outside, these informal communities face the greatest climate change risks.

Elliott points out the four biggest risks to people in these informal settlements:

Heat Stress: Temperatures in many parts of India can exceed 108 degrees F during May, significantly higher than a  human body at 98.6. Indoor temperatures can be even higher. People's health are adversely affected by those high temperatures. The type of buildings and landscape can make a difference.

Flooding: Climate change is increasing the variability of storms, thereby increasing the chances of flooding. The project focuses not on flooding from rising rivers, but rather from local stormwater management. Poor drainage and strong rains can bring flooding in communities. Houses are flooded and everything inside gets soaked and possessions are lost.

Vector-based diseases: Climate change is promoting the spreas of mosquitos and water-borne disease. Local communities can significantly alter these patterns.

Management of water systems: Clean water is necessary for drinking, cooking, hygiene and sanitation. Communities can organize to enhance their access to potable water.

Elliott said for him, success will mean that partner organizations will develop the internal capacity to manage complex projects on their own.

Other Forum Paraticipants

Joining Elliott at the forum are:

Alberto Fuentes, an assistant professor in the Schools of City and Regional Planning and of International Affairs; Catherine Ross, a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning, and director of the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, and Daniel Baerlecken, an associate professor in the School of Architecture.

Ross and Fuentes will outline a new prototype for conducting studio courses. The spring 2019 studio, “Puerto Rico – Disaster Mitigation and Recovery,” funded by the American Planning Association in partnership with the Graduate School of Planning at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, is Phase I of a studio series and exchange program focused on disaster mitigation and recovery in Puerto Rico post Hurricane María.

Ross’ previous research focused on collection and analysis of data documenting the impact of natural disasters on critical civil infrastructures and lifelines. Recent research on natural hazards and lifelines have been linked to health partnering with researchers at Tongji University. Fuentes studies processes of economic development and industrial change in Latin America, emphasizing the role of state-business relations.

Baerlecken’s work generally takes place in countries in Africa, often working both government officials and residents.

He has conducted studios in multiple countries in Africa; he often works with clients around designing community important buildings, such as community centers.

About the Forums

The College of Design Research forums are intended to allow the College community and our friends across the campus to experience the design- and technology-focused research at Georgia Tech. From music technology to product design; from assistive technology to healthcare; from architecture to city planning, we explore the many ways technology can solve critical problems for the way we live.

The next forum will be January 24, 2019, from 11a-12p in the John & Joyce Caddell Building in the Flex space.

Researchers from the SimTigrate Design Lab and IPaT have been working with Emory Brain Health to develop an “Empowerment Program” for people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a condition of deteriorated mental capacity that lies somewhere between the effects of normal aging and dementia.

To facilitate the research, they will use this seed money to encourage involvement of other academic units, students, and researchers, expand the range of disciplines, extend discussion and partnerships to external stakeholders and industry, and strategize applications for additional funding.

One goal is to grow the potential impact of Georgia Tech’s involvement in the MCI Empowerment Program.

They plan to use existing campus networks to expand awareness of the opportunities to engage with the MCIEP Innovation Accelerator and recruit additional expertise to the team through several campus wide meetings.

The grant will be used to cover materials and supplies, participant compensation, event supplies, and travel by two key faculty members to Washington, D.C., to speak with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health about potential future funding.

The GVU/IPaT grants are designed to build new collaborations and strategic plans for new research areas and programs. The goal of this program is to engage researchers in thinking and working across disciplines, as a means to generate the novel research questions and approaches required to address grand challenges.

Key academic and research faculty are Craig Zimring, director, SimTigrate Design Lab; Jennifer DuBose, associate director, SimTigrate Design Lab; Gabrielle Campiglia, research associate, SimTigrate Design Lab; Brian Jones, director, Aware Home, IMTC; Brad Fain, director, Home Lab; and Herb Velasquez, professor of practice, School of Industrial Design.

Architectural Record’s fifth annual Women in Architecture awards recognized five recipients for their 2018 awards. The award series was founded in 2014 to recognize the women in architecture who push boundaries in design in the categories of design leadership, new generation leadership, innovation, activism, and education.

Click here to learn more about the 2018 Women in Architecture Awards.

The toolkit was delivered to the city’s Planning Department in June 2018. It is among CSPAV’s growing portfolio of research and community-based projects that push the boundaries of computational data mining, spatial mapping through web services, geovisualization, and spatial representations.

According to Tony Giarrusso, associate director of the Center, the project started after Georgia Tech grad Ryan Gravel (B.S. ARCH, 1995; M.ARCH and MCRP, 1999) asked Giarrusso if the Center could create an interactive tool that allows for dynamic three-dimensional visualization of growth in the city.

At that time Gravel was doing contract work for the city as Director of Design. He helped to get the initiative started in 2016, according to Giarrusso. He said Gravel wanted a way to quickly visualize in three dimensions the effects of different population and employment growth scenarios. Gravel now runs his own private consulting firm.

The project website offers an overview of the design scenarios developed for the city and links to the three main planning tools intended for use by city staff. Documentation and reference material supplement static tutorial manuals, and a brief demonstration video showcases the capability of the tools.

The early phase deliverables include a city infrastructure database containing tangible and intangible assets, design scenarios exploring potential population and economic growth outcomes, and scenarios chosen to direct development efficiently.

The three online applications were customized to provide the most useful suite of planning tools. The apps were built using a combination of 2D and 3D geospatial and remote sensing data. They provide renderings of the current cityscape and allow users to visualize changes in the city with different planning policies.

The tools can be found on the Atlanta City Design (ACD) website, which hosts the Atlanta Interactive Design (AID), City Viewer, and City Editor applications.

The Atlanta Interactive Design application allows users to explore different growth scenarios and build-out possibilities, and view resulting statistics.

The City Viewer allows users to visualize buildings based on height, volume, growth type and texture.

The City Editor offers an editing tool for the creation, change, and visualization of potential buildings in the city.

The tools were created by Gordon Zhang, a research scientist at CSPAV and the 2017-2018 research scientists of the year in the College of Design.

Besides Giarrusso, who is a senior research scientist in the Center, Director Subhro Guhathakurta worked on the project, serving as principal investigator. The Center’s IMAGINE Lab helped construct the 3D building facades.

This project showcases CSPAV research connecting cutting edge cloud solutions to traditional planning problems, and can increase productivity and availability of digital tools and location-based assets accessed through a user friendly web-based interface.

DuBose is the associate director of the SimTigrate Design Lab and was previously a senior research associate.

Describing DuBose, Craig Zimring, director of the SimTigrate Design Lab, said, “Jennifer is unique in her drive to make the world better using research, and in her commitment to building systems and partnerships to do that. She’s great.”

As noted in her promotion packet, DuBose “has consistently demonstrated a high level of scholarly achievement and technical, managerial, and entrepreneurial productivity. She has established a program of healthcare design research that seeks to bring academic evidence to the practice of design in order to improve healthcare outcomes.”

DuBose said, “The promotion process takes a lot of effort, but it feels good to look back over the sum of my work at Georgia Tech and have my accomplishments recognized by my peers.”

The promotion process begins at the unit level. The candidate must assemble and submit a CV, a package of their work, and three external letters of recommendation. The package is subject to peer review and the unit director adds a recommendation. The package then moves up through several committees until it reaches the president, who makes the final decision.

As the associate director of SimTigrate, DuBose is responsible for the operations of the Lab as well as project development and research. SimTigrate is an interdisciplinary Lab that is at the forefront of design research, and is working to create a better built environment, particularly in healthcare.

At SimTigrate, DuBose has created a research team comprised of faculty and students, from undergraduate to doctoral levels, to conduct high-impact research. She has stitched together funding from multiple sources to build a research program in evidence-based design. At the same time, she often manages several projects at once.

Nancey Green Leigh, the associate dean for research in the College, said DuBose’s “years of experience and contributions to advancing the field of healthcare design are nationally recognized and have been validated through external peer review.” She has 11 refereed publications

DuBose “has been the PI or co-PI on more than $4.5 million in research projects, mentoring over 40 students involved in center research. She has also made significant service contributions to the College, including mentoring other research scientists,” Leigh said. She called DuBose’s promotion well-deserved.

Among DuBose’s recent research is her work on the areas of light and sleep for inpatient settings and the space layout and teamwork in outpatient clinics.

The Lab’s light and sleep research began with an exploration of the impact that disruptions in hospital environments have on patient sleep and the resulting harm. Her work has explored the range of disruptions and her publications have presented strategies to improve sleep for patients. She has also contributed to the study of light’s impact on daily biological rhythms and how it works in healthcare environments.

Several projects examining space layout and teamwork under DuBose’s leadership have led the way in understanding how design can support the growing trend in collaborative teams in outpatient clinics. Through field research, analysis of occupant behavior and workspace layout, and a review of the literature, her team has developed recommendations for successful implementation of shared team rooms that support collaboration and communication.

Reflecting on her work, DuBose said, “I feel fortunate to have been able to collaborate on research projects with academic faculty and many different students over the years. It is really nice to have such a close connection with the academic mission of the College.”

At the College of Design, which she joined in 2007, DuBose took a lead in forming and growing the SimTigrate Design Lab, which works with Emory Healthcare, Mayo Clinic, Positive Impact Health Centers, Mercy Care, the Pacific Northwest National Lab, and many other partners to use the built environment to improve health and healthcare.

She has a career of more than 18 years at Georgia Tech, including five years at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

Long committed to improving the lives of people through direct action and by environmentalism, DuBose in the 1990s served in the Peace Corps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, worked for the Georgia Tech’s Center for Sustainable Technology getting sustainability incorporated into the curriculum, and worked for Interface, Inc. – a carpet company -- where she established their carbon accounting program and the first corporate carbon neutral product.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Oglethorpe University and an MS in Public Policy from Georgia Tech. She joined the College of Design (then the College of Architecture) in 2007 after working in the Sustainable Facilities and Infrastructure group at GTRI.

On a personal level, DuBose also does her part to improve the world with her small organic garden in Intown Atlanta, where she grows cotton, peanuts, and vegetables.

In December 2017, students from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Architecture proposed an origami design that earned them an opportunity to travel to Japan to learn from Tomohiro Tachi, a widely-known origami expert and associate professor in graphic and computer sciences at the University of Tokyo.

Master of Architecture students, Leila Moghimi (’18) and Kashmira Ranadive (’18), enrolled in an origami-focused civil engineering course in fall 2017 semester, a course taught by Glaucio Paulino, Raymond Allen Jones Chair and professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“The reason that we opted for this class,” Ranadive said, “ was because it was parallel to our studio project. Almost the entire studio was in our class except maybe three students. It was kind of like a collaborative exercise between Daniel Baerlecken and Glaucio Paulino.” Moghimi, Ranadive, and their classmates were encouraged by Daniel Baerlecken, associate professor in the School of Architecture, to take the class as it related to the origami-based coursework in his design and research studio.

For the full story, click here. 

Connell earned his Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 1953 and completed his Master of City Planning in 1955 from Georgia Tech. After earning his degrees, Connell moved to Columbus, Ohio to serve as the principal planner for the Columbus City Planning Commission. At that time, he also worked as an associate professor of urban planning at The Ohio State University from 1957-1963. In the 1960s, Connell taught at Columbia University and the University of Virginia before returning to Tech to teach classes in urban planning and renewal and historic preservation in the School of Architecture.

“When you look through the Georgia Tech archives, you will see Pat Connell‘s name on all the unsung committee reports from the 1970s that were instrumental in establishing the Master of Architecture degree at our school,” said George Johnston, professor in the School of Architecture. “What’s even more impressive is that Pat had an incredibly vibrant second career and maybe even third after he retired from Georgia Tech. What a great example he was.”

Beyond the classroom, Connell put his passion for historic preservation into action. Shortly after returning to Atlanta, Connell served as chairman of the Atlanta Civic Design Commission. As chairman, Connell helped co-found the Atlanta Landmarks, a group of progressive politicians, civic leaders, and celebrities who joined forces to lead the “Save the Fox” campaign to prevent the demolition of Atlanta’s Fox Theatre.

Of Connell’s influence in saving the Fox Theater, Lane Duncan, senior lecturer in the School of Architecture said, “Pat Connell’s efforts in forming the Atlanta Landmarks in the early seventies not only ‘Saved the Fox’ but became a rallying cry for generations of historic preservation initiatives in the state of Georgia.

Connell was also instrumental in the preservation of the Pasaquan site in Buena Vista, Georgia and Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill preservation and the Sweet Auburn neighborhood revitalization.

Alongside his late wife, Martha, the Connells had an impressive collection of contemporary crafts and fine arts objects. Together, they co-founded the Great American Gallery, Atlanta’s unique contribution to contemporary crafts and fine arts objects. Many of the works that they curated now reside in leading museums and private collections around the U.S.

In 2016, Connell made a generous contribution to Georgia Tech to create the Connell Workshop. This course, taught in the spring semesters by Duncan, explores a wide range of issues in hand drawing, including tone, line, contour, gesture, composition, iterative geometry, and the humanistic forces that shape them. These drawing and critical thinking investigations are divided into two general categories—perception, the way we see the world, and conception, the way we attempt to order the world. 

Of the importance of hand drawing, Connell said, “Drawing requires that all the sensory apparatus of the body participate in the process of creating an image of the observed or imagined stimulus. Unlike the camera, which records only a split-second view of the object, the act of drawing is not time-dependent. The act of image-making informs and instructs the brain to keep looking for all the messages being sent. The image-maker always decides when to make changes and when the work is ‘finished.’ The Gestalt is there for the taking by anyone.”

Duncan remembers Connell as, “A true scholar who believed that hand drawing is a vital ‘technology’ to seeing and understanding the world around us and that it is an essential tool for the architect no matter what generation.” He added, “His contributions to drawing and thinking live on in the work of every student that has taken the class.”

As Scott Marble, Chair of the School of Architecture, reflected on Connell's contributions to the School, he said, "At a time when our entire experience in seeing and creating the physical world is mediated through digital technology of one sort or another, Connell’s commitment to the bodily nature of drawing reminds us, both faculty and students, that thinking and discovering through drawing has enduring value in architectural education."

Reeves, who has been responsible for media relations at Johns Hopkins for the last decade, was selected for the Georgia Tech appointment after a national search. As assistant vice president, she will lead the department responsible for managing the Institute’s news production, media relations activities, campus communications and special events, social media channels, economic development and research communications, as well as leadership communications programs. She succeeds Lisa Grovenstein, who retired earlier this spring after a 34-year career of service to the state of Georgia, with more than 12 years at the Institute.

Reeves will assume her new role at Georgia Tech Sept. 1.

Reeves has been with Johns Hopkins in her current role since 2008. Prior to higher education, she was at The Washington Post serving as a staff writer, chief of the Anne Arundel and Prince George's bureaus, and assistant Maryland editor. Previously, she was a national and regional reporter for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, and a reporter for the Providence Journal and New Bedford (Mass.) Standard-Times.

She has been a Casey Journalism Center Fellow and a Knight Center for Specialized Journalism Fellow and, as a Knight-Ridder reporter, covered the U.S. Congress, federal agencies, transportation, and the military. While with Knight-Ridder, she traveled the country extensively to write about health care and children and family issues for publication in a number of Knight-Ridder newspapers. She was part of an award-winning team for Knight-Ridder that produced a series about the perils of health care among African Americans and other ethnic minorities nationwide. Reeves shared in the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service awarded to the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald in 1998 for its coverage of the Red River Flood.

Reeves is a graduate of Illinois State University, where she received a Bachelor of Science in Mass Communications/Journalism. She is a member of the executive committee of the Association of American Universities Public Affairs Network, Council for Advancement and Support of Education, Public Relations Society of America, and the National Association of Black Journalists. 

She and her husband, Ben, currently reside in Columbia, Maryland, with their twin sons, Cameron and Matthew.

As part of that celebration several students were recognized for their achievements. Among those awards was the new CREATE-X Industrial Design award, created to encourage more ID students to participate in the CREATE-X initiative.

CREATE-X has many components, but this award ensures students a place in their summer Startup Launch program. It comes with $20,000 for students to spend on their project, along with mentoring, legal advice, and more.

The first winner of this new award is Team Undertone: Kristin Andreassen and Leyla Larsson. Their winning product is a wearable that detects cervical cancer at a precancerous stage.

Other industrial design winners headed to the CREATE-X summer Startup Launch are:
Team Jennys: Laura Sierra Otalvaro

Her product is underwear that helps women manage their menstrual cramps through portable/re-chargeable heating pads.

Team Mod+Duo: Sarah Hamer and Maggie Parsons

They designed sporty business casual wear so that women can go from work to working out in one step, in order to save on time and money.

Also new this year were the Industry Awards. Representatives from the Atlanta design community reviewed student works and selected designs from each of the class years -- first year, sophomore, etc. through graduate -- to bestow awards in three categories, gold, silver, and bronze.

The “Best in Show” award went to second-year student Francis Lin for a lighting design called “The Creature.”

Judges were Elayne DeLeo of the Atlanta Design Festival, Tim Effler from Kids II, Larry Lee of Plastech, Russel Kroll of Formation Design, and Jeff Smith of Autodesk.

Here are the other award winners

Orange Sparkle Ball | Make 10 Awards

This award is sponsored by Orange Sparkle Ball and Prototype Prime with Steve Chininis’s Make 10 class. Winners receive cash prizes and 3 months free use of Prototype Prime. This year’s jury awarded these prizes:

1^st Place and $500 to Tiffany Hsu for her RX Slim Pillbox

2^nd Place and $250 to Calvin Zhou for his Earbud Case

3^rd Place and $150 to Shana Farkas for her Big Book of Games

College of Design ADVANCE Woman of Excellence Undergraduate Award

The College of Design ADVANCE  Women of Excellence awards are presented to women in the College who have distinguished themselves through professional leadership, mentoring, academic excellence and sustained service on behalf of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the College of Design.

This year’s winner: Lucy Kates who received a certificate and $500.

Richard John Livingstone Martin Humanitarian Design Award

The is award honors the memory of Dick Martin, a professor of Industrial Design, and founder of the Center for Rehabilitation Technology now known as CATEA, the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access. It supports excellence in humanitarian design for undergraduates in the School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech.

This year’s winners are:
1^st Place: Allie Haydon; she receives $1,000

Her project is Makes Sense

2nd Place: Abby Tan, Belinda Zhang, and Valerie Koh; they will split $600

Their project is Brain Health: 100 Day MCI Starter Kit

3rd Place: Victoria Chiang, Jinah Huh, Tayler Carter; they will split $450

They are the designers of DOSE

Honorable Mention: Laura Sierra Otalvaro

For her Project: Jennys

Listen here. Their talk starts about 35 minutes into the show.

Each year, Georgia Tech submits several teams to the competition. This year eight teams and 40 students participated. The finalist projects are called “Absorption” and “The EArL,” standing for the Eastern Arts Link.

The Absorption team included Coston Dickinson (MSUD), Justina Everhart (MCRP), Tara Garland (MRED) Trent Miller (M.Arch), and Carley Rickles (MSUD), advised by Lecturer David Haddow and Greg Catoe of Selig Enterprises.

“In December when we were forming teams, I had no idea what to expect,” said Justina Everhart, MCRP student on the Absorption team. “As I reflect on the whirlwind of the two-week competition period, I am so proud of my team for persisting through the challenge. The competition is structured in a way that demands innovation, collaboration, and enthusiasm. It revived my creative interests and gave me the privilege of learning from four exceptionally talented, interdisciplinary teammates who have since inspired me to pursue more creative, unconventional projects.”

The EArL team included Miram Alzaabi (MSUD), Jonathan Franklin (M.Arch), Clare Healy (MCRP), Zach Lancaster (MCRP), and Paul Steidl (M.Arch/MCRP), advised by Associate Professor Sabir Kahn and Tim Perry of North American Properties.

“We are thrilled to learn that we have been selected as one of four finalists in this year’s competition,” said Zachary Lancaster, MCRP student, on behalf of the EArL team. “We want to thank the faculty, staff and volunteers from the College of Design for all their support and feedback in the process of developing our submission, in particular we want to thank our advisors Sabir Khan and Ellen Dunham-Jones. We are excited to represent Georgia Tech in the finals and look forward to taking our vision of a diverse, high density cultural district in Toronto's emerging east side further.”

The ULI Hines Student Competition brings together students from different disciplines to envision a better built environment. Each team of five students has to have at least three disciplines represented. Teams are tasked with creating a development program for a real site in a North American city, with this year focused on an area near the mouth of Don River in Toronto. The teams have two weeks to compile designs, market-based financial data, and related narratives in a final proposal.

The final round will be held in Toronto on April 5. Students are invited to present to a jury panel and the final winner will be announced. In the weeks to come each team is given the opportunity to expand on their initial proposals, adding more detail. Each finalist team will receive $10,000 and the winner will receive $50,000. To see the official announcement from the ULI, click here. For more information on the ULI Hines Student Competition, click here.

“It’s both an exciting and a frightening prospect to share research on one’s hometown in one’s hometown,” said Jones. “Atlanta is full of examples of suburban retrofits and I won’t be able to point out the pros and cons of all of them – but I’m honored to try!”

The Atlanta Studies Symposium will be held on April 20, 2018 at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. This year’s symposium focuses on the theme, “Atlanta: City + Region.” To see the official announcement from the Atlanta Studies, click here. For more information on this year’s symposium and to view the full program, click here.

He said between 2008 and 2014 there wasn’t much change in the overall canopy. “But as we got on the ground and started to look at things, we noticed a lot of the things that we saw as gain were not true gain,” the station quoted him as saying.

Those gains in trees, the station reported, were mostly in what Giarrusso called “pipe farms.” He described those as places that were cleared for development, never got developed, then fast-growing pine trees sprouted up. They can’t replace the old hardwoods, he said.

Giarrusso is expected to release his final report in the next few weeks.

Read the full WABE article.

PEDS has honored several people and places on an annual basis with the ‘Golden Shoe’ award. This year the award also honored Marian Liou for advocacy, Darin Givens for journalism, Walgreen’s for redeveloping the historic Olympia Building, and the City of Sandy Springs for its suburban retrofit. PEDS was founded in 1996 and is a small advocacy group dedicated to making Georgia communities pedestrian friendly.

Ross described the makeup of Bottom’s team as “a good indication of the broad-based, inclusive, creative, and innovative approach to being mayor. This is what attracted me to want to be involved.”

Ross brings decades of experience in planning and transportation to the team. She said infrastructure is important to our city economy and continued growth and prosperity.

Ross is an internationally recognized expert on transportation systems planning, urban planning, and quality growth. She also currently is deputy director of the National Center for Transportation Systems Productivity and Management. She has extensive experience in both the public and private sector, and served as executive director of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) from 1999 – 2003.

Ross called it a “privilege and honor to be asked to help. We all care about our city and want to make it better. When you are called to help it really is a chance to move Atlanta forward. That resonates with me. City planning is in my blood.”

“I have loved theme parks for a long, long time,” said Forbes, who is graduating this semester with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Georgia Tech’s College of Design. “I was the weirdo who would build attractions out of his Lego sets.”

He didn’t like just building the rides. He wanted to create the park.

Read his story