As manufacturing systems become more connected, the cyberthreat grows with them. Saman Zonouz has spent years documenting how vulnerable smart manufacturing environments are. He’s an associate professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he co-leads the Cyber-Physical Security Lab with Raheem Beyah, Georgia Tech’s provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. 

Instead of becoming steadily stickier as they are pulled apart, soft hydrogels first become less adhesive and then more adhesive as the pulling speed increases, revealing a previously unknown "sweet spot" where detachment is easier. The discovery challenges a long-held assumption in adhesion mechanics and reveals a new physical mechanism that governs how soft materials attach and detach.

"We expected the adhesion to increase continuously with pulling speed, as predicted by classical theories," said Yuhang Hu, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "Instead, we found the exact opposite over a broad range of speeds. That told us there had to be a completely different physical process at work."

Read the full story.

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

"One of the goals of the program is to give students the time and support needed to make meaningful progress on their dissertation research while helping them understand the broader policy, economic, and societal implications of their work," said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter.

The stipends enable participants to focus exclusively on clearly defined research goals. The program also supports peer discussions, communication training, and interdisciplinary learning opportunities designed to strengthen both their research and professional development.

This year's cohort explored topics ranging from electricity markets and air pollution to critical mineral supply chains and grid modernization, highlighting the breadth of energy-related research taking place across Georgia Tech.

Exploring Complex Energy Challenges

Ana Mazmishvili, who studies environmental and energy economics, used the summer to examine how climate policies affect communities across state lines.

"My research measures who is actually exposed to pollution from power plants when some states adopt climate regulations to cut emissions while neighboring regions do not," Mazmishvili said. "Because air doesn't stop at state borders, the key question is what happens once the pollution is emitted, and who ends up breathing it."

Her work focuses on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program in the Northeast, and investigates whether the benefits and burdens of emissions reductions are distributed equitably between regulated and neighboring states.

Mazmishvili said the program provided valuable time to focus on her job-market paper, a central component of her dissertation.

"The regular meetings with the program director and other fellows create useful accountability checkpoints and let me hear perspectives from people in very different fields," she said. "We're also learning how to make academic research understandable to a general audience, a skill I expect to use well past this summer."

Industrial and systems engineering doctoral student Faeze Fahimi Aghda spent the summer developing an optimization model for the U.S. gallium supply chain, a critical component of many advanced technologies.

Her research uses mathematical modeling to examine where and when domestic gallium processing facilities should be established under the threat of supply disruptions.

"Working on my research through EPIcenter has taught me to look at my problem from a policy point of view rather than focusing only on the math," Fahimi Aghda said. "The feedback within the meetings helped me improve my model."

Ryan Anthony, in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, explored how one of the largest oil shocks in U.S. history affected electricity customers and whether utility ownership influenced the impact on consumers.

"So far, my research suggests that it mattered a lot,” Anthony said. “Municipal utilities held rates down and absorbed many of the costs, while private, investor-owned utilities passed more costs through to their customers."

Anthony said the program provided critical support for the archival research required for the project.

"My project depends on data that only exists in old government reports, and that kind of archival work is difficult to fund," he said. "EPIcenter gave me the time and space to do it properly."

Connecting Research to Real-World Impact

For Samin Alipour, the summer provided an opportunity to explore how electric grids can adapt to growing numbers of distributed energy resources.

"Most electric distribution systems were built like one-way roads, carrying power from a substation to homes and businesses," Alipour said. "Rooftop solar, batteries, and electric vehicles are turning those roads into two-way systems."

Her research examines how these emerging technologies can be coordinated to increase grid flexibility and clean energy adoption while maintaining safety and reliability and ensuring that costs and benefits are distributed fairly.

With support from EPIcenter, Alipour focused on the economic and policy dimensions of those challenges. "I did not want my research to remain only a technical model," she said. "The program has helped me connect the technical results of my dissertation to economic value, reliability, equity and compensation policy."

One study developed during the summer was accepted for presentation at a specialized power systems conference, an achievement Alipour credits in part to the opportunity to focus on the broader implications of her work.

Building the Next Generation of Energy Scholars

Beyond advancing individual research projects, the Summer Research Program encourages students to engage with colleagues from different disciplines and develop skills for communicating complex ideas to broader audiences.

“Through regular cohort meetings, participants build a community of accountability, discuss research challenges, explore interdisciplinary energy topics, and develop communication skills,” said Gil Gonzalez, program support coordinator for EPIcenter. “Students also write a research-focused blog post for EPIcenter and present their work at the program's fall workshop, which allows them to share their research with the broader Georgia Tech energy community.”

As EPIcenter continues to support interdisciplinary energy scholarship at Georgia Tech, the Summer Research Program equips future leaders with the tools to address complex energy challenges through technological innovation, informed policy, and economic analysis.

Read more »

Join Georgia Tech undergraduate Harrison Burnside on this latest episode of Engineered at Tech as he tours Katherine Graham's lab and discovers how to track pathogens in the Chattahoochee River. The goal is to help local agencies pinpoint sources of pollution in rivers and reservoirs to protect public health. 

Watch the video on the COE News page

Launched in 2025, INNS serves as a hub for neuroscience and neurotechnology research, connecting researchers across disciplines to advance discovery, innovation, and societal impact.

“A core part of INNS's mission is helping people find one another, connect around shared interests, and build something bigger than they could accomplish alone,” says Executive Director Christopher Rozell. “Simon has spent his career bringing together people, perspectives, and disciplines to tackle complex challenges. I can't think of a better person to help lead our interdisciplinary research efforts and support the next generation of collaborative neuroscience research.”

A longtime leader in Georgia Tech's neuroscience community, Sponberg helped shape the institute's early foundations through the Neuro Next Initiative, which evolved into INNS. As associate director, he will help guide research strategy, foster new collaborations, and support interdisciplinary work across the neuroscience ecosystem.

“Neuro-related research touches so many fields that we inevitably have a problem of finding all the potential right people and opportunities to tap into,” he said. “A core responsibility of this role is helping catalyze the ideas of new teams of talented researchers, educators, and trainees from inception to realization.”

Sponberg is the Glen Robinson Professor in Complex Systems with appointments in the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences, where he directs the Agile Systems Lab. His work also connects him to the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) and the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM), underscoring the cross-disciplinary approach that defines both his research and leadership.

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2014, he has built a highly collaborative research program spanning neuroscience, biology, physics, engineering, and robotics while helping foster interdisciplinary connections across campus. He currently leads a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) that brings together neuroscientists and engineers from five universities to understand how brains achieve fast, flexible perception and decision-making in complex sensory environments. He also co-leads the Integrative Movement Sciences Institute, an NSF Biological Integration Institute focused on understanding movement and muscle function across scales.

His contributions have been recognized through numerous honors, including a Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Neuroethology, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in the Neurosciences, and the Leddy Family Dean’s Faculty Excellence Award.

As associate director, Sponberg will focus on helping researchers identify new opportunities for connection and collaboration. In addition to overseeing seed funding programs, he hopes to create pathways for researchers to build teams, access support resources, pursue ambitious interdisciplinary research ideas, and team with Georgia Tech’s undergraduate and graduate neuroscience degree programs.

“I look forward to being a resource for our community when people are looking for help in building teams or finding opportunities to support their ideas,” he said. “Bring your best ideas and please reach out if you want to talk about ideas in the interdisciplinary neuro space that you want to see realized.”
 

Counterfeit and out-of-spec components are entering U.S. defense supply chains through thousands of small and midsized suppliers that make up the lower tiers of the industrial base. Researchers at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) say the fix isn't just better parts, but better proof: verified digital records, secured against tampering, that travel with each component from raw material to installation.   

The high cost of renting and buying homes in U.S. cities is no secret. But this affordability problem isn’t limited to urban regions – it affects rural areas as well.

Rural areas, home to about 25% of Americans, benefit from federally supported rental housing programs – particularly a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to provide affordable homes for low-income residents.

The USDA’s Section 515 program is the primary way that the U.S. government finances affordable rental homes in rural communities. Since its inception in 1963, the program has supported the construction of over 533,000 apartments, townhouses and other small, multifamily rental homes.

The program offers below-market-rate loans to private and nonprofit developers who build and manage residential housing for low-income residents in small towns and rural counties. The terms of the deal between property owners and the government obliges these landlords to keep rents affordable for their occupants for decades, generally restricting rent to about 30% of tenants’ income.

Last New Loans Were in 2011

People who live in Section 515 housing typically pay around US$325 per month. That’s much less than rural market-rate rents, which typically run $800-$1,100 per month for modest homes.

Because the USDA stopped issuing new Section 515 loans in 2011, this arrangement is phasing out now as existing loans mature.

Loans for about 90% of all remaining Section 515 homes will mature by 2045, according to the Housing Assistance Council, a national nonprofit that supports affordable housing efforts throughout rural America. By 2050, the owners of nearly all properties currently in the program’s portfolio are projected to have paid off their mortgages.

And once most of the owners of these homes exit the Section 515 program, it will have been fully phased out.

An Often-Overlooked Housing Program

As a public policy professor who studies housing, I wanted to understand what happens when Section 515 loans mature. I also was interested in what determines whether properties remain affordable or leave the program after the loans are paid off.

To find out, I worked with three other housing policy researchers on a national study that was peer-reviewed and published in Housing Policy Debate in September 2025.

As of 2024, these loans were still supporting some 400,000 homes on almost 13,000 properties across 87% of all U.S. counties.

The roughly 750,000 Americans in those homes are among the nation’s poorest. The average household income of someone living in Section 515 housing in 2023 was just about $16,000 per year, which was only about one-fifth of the national median household income, which hovered around $76,600 during the same period in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars.

In addition to having a very low income, more than 60% of the people enrolled in the program are over 62, have disabilities, or fall into both of those categories.

Market-Rate Options After Maturity

The vast majority of these affordable rental homes were built in the 1970s through the 1990s and financed with USDA loans that last between 30 and 50 years.

By 2050, there will be no Section 515 housing left.

The owners of these rental properties no longer have to keep rents affordable once they have paid off their loans. And their owners and tenants may also lose access to a USDA rental assistance program, which helps keep tenants’ housing costs low.

They can refinance the homes or sell the properties. They also can continue to charge affordable rents to occupants or convert those units to market rate. Because of this flexibility, a large share of rural affordable housing units could soon be converted to properties rented at market rates.

What the Data Shows So Far

For this study, our research team analyzed data from nearly 15,000 of the Section 515 properties throughout the country, which have been placed in service since 1963 – including many that are no longer providing rural affordable housing.

We found that the largest factors determining whether a building remains affordable after a Section 515 loan matures are who owns and manages that property. Buildings owned by for-profit companies are far more likely to leave the program than those that belong to nonprofit housing organizations.

Nonprofit-owned buildings, after accounting for building age and local market conditions, are 30% to 40% less likely to convert formerly Section 515 affordable housing into market-rate properties after the owners pay off their loans.

After analyzing this data, we also concluded that buildings run by small property management companies are more likely to leave the program than those managed by larger ones. Properties where the owner manages the homes are also more likely to exit.

Landlords owning more residential properties were also more likely to exit the program. This indicates that larger landlords may be able to afford the renovations and upgrades required to turn their buildings into market-rate housing once restrictions end.

Why Subsidies and Local Markets Matter

Having subsidies through other government programs can help keep affordable housing units from being converted to market-rate housing.

One-third of Section 515 properties also get support from other programs, including Section 8 vouchers and low-income housing tax credits. Those tax credits are another federal incentive that’s provided to developers who build and rehabilitate affordable rental housing while allowing lower rents for low-income tenants.

Those properties are more likely to remain affordable, even years after some of these tax incentives expire.

Local economic conditions can play a role too. In areas with high unemployment rates, large military populations and low housing inventory, properties are also more likely to exit the program.

That means the same rural counties experiencing economic or demographic pressures are often the most likely to have a decline in affordable housing units when owners pay off their Section 515 loans.

Steps That Can Be Taken

Congress and the USDA have taken some steps to slow the loss of affordable housing in rural areas.

For example, the USDA has funded preservation efforts such as the Multifamily Housing Preservation and Revitalization pilot program, which provides grants, loan restructuring and other financing tools to help repair aging Section 515 properties and extend their affordability.

These efforts have helped preserve some buildings and support ownership transfers from private sector landlords to nonprofit housing groups. But they spend only tens of millions of dollars per year and focus mainly on maintaining existing properties rather than building new housing.

Researchers estimate that about $5.6 billion in repairs would be needed to preserve the affordable housing currently tied to the Section 515 program.

Some lawmakers have proposed reforms aimed at doing more than chipping away at the loss of this kind of affordable housing. The bipartisan Rural Housing Service Reform Act, first introduced in 2023 and reintroduced in 2025, would modernize USDA rural housing programs and allow certain rental assistance contracts to continue after mortgages mature. As of early 2026, the bill remains under consideration.

Over the next two decades, most of these landlords will pay off their Section 515 loans. Unless the government reinvigorates the program or replaces it with something else, much of rural America’s affordable rental housing could gradually disappear as owners convert all Section 515 properties to market-rate housing.

Whether rural communities retain affordable housing will depend not only on what the federal government does, but also on the properties’ owners.

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

The U.S. has seen its printed circuit board market share plummet to 4% while becoming dangerously dependent on foreign rare earth processing. Now, with global supply chains fracturing, defense industrial capacity under pressure, and adversaries looking to dominate advanced production, the country is in a race to rebuild — and to rebuild smarter. 

The Air Quality Index (AQI) measures how clean or polluted the air is. A healthy AQI is between zero and 50, but when wildfire smoke blows in and settles over cities, the AQI can reach levels of 500 or more. Poor air quality changes where and how people spend their time and money, reduces productivity (even for those working indoors), and increases healthcare costs.

“Environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act dramatically improved our air quality over the past 40 years, but as wildfire season becomes the new normal, wildfire smoke is eroding those gains,” Wichman said. According to recent research, wildfire smoke has erased about a quarter of the progress made over previous decades, and more than half in many western states. 

Read Full Story on the IAC News Page

--Written by Anne Wainscott-Sargent

From a single Atlanta church to a growing network across the Southeast, Georgia Tech engineer Sofía Pérez-Guzmán is connecting communities and researchers to support resilience in extreme weather events. 

For researchers in Georgia Tech's Cyber-Physical Security (CPSec) Lab, however, the vulnerabilities behind many of these incidents are far from new.

Associate Professor Saman Zonouz leads the CPSec Lab and has studied programmable logic controllers (PLCs) for years. These devices automate critical infrastructure, including water treatment facilities, power grids, manufacturing plants, and transportation systems. The lab’s work has revealed widespread internet exposure and software vulnerabilities that leave many industrial control systems vulnerable to cyberattacks.

"Out of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, four are considered lifelines," Zonouz said. "Of those four, communications, energy, transportation, and water, the water sector is the most vulnerable, which is why it is so often targeted."

PLCs serve as the brains of industrial operations, monitoring sensors and controlling equipment that keep essential services operational.

"Imagine you have a thermostat that controls the temperature of your house. That is a type of controller," Zonouz explained. "The professional version does the same thing in industry."

When these controllers are directly accessible from the internet, attackers can exploit them to disrupt operations, manipulate industrial processes, or interfere with the systems that deliver essential services. Controllers may be intentionally exposed to allow operators to monitor equipment remotely. They can also be unintentionally accessible online because of configuration errors.

However, internet exposure is only part of the problem.

The CPSec Lab maintains a collection of PLCs that researchers reverse engineer to better understand their firmware, communication protocols, and security weaknesses. Their research has found that many controllers contain vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit once they gain access.

"Not only can the attackers see the house they want to rob, but the doors are also left unlocked," Zonouz said.

In 2024, Zonouz and his collaborators presented PLCHound at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), introducing an automated system that identifies internet-connected PLCs hidden within massive internet-scale datasets collected by services such as Shodan and Censys. The work was led by Ph.D. student Ryan Pickren. Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Raheem Beyah, Assistant Professor Frank Li, and Research Scientist Animesh Chhotaray are co-authors of the study. 

Rather than relying on traditional scanning techniques, PLCHound identifies subtle network signatures that reveal industrial devices that prior methods often missed. Using the system, the researchers conducted one of the largest studies of publicly reachable PLCs from major manufacturers.

Their findings showed that previous estimates undercounted the number of internet-accessible industrial controllers by as much as 37 times. Even more concerning, nearly 96% of the identified devices exposed protocols linked to recently disclosed critical vulnerabilities.

The researchers did more than document the problem. After identifying exposed devices, the team launched a large-scale notification campaign, contacting more than 7,000 industrial operators to alert them that their systems appeared vulnerable. The effort enabled many organizations to investigate and address security issues before they could be exploited.

The recent attacks on municipal water systems reinforce concerns researchers have raised for years: many critical infrastructure operators continue to rely on operational technology designed primarily for reliability and performance rather than for cybersecurity.

Improving those defenses, Zonouz said, will require more than simply patching individual vulnerabilities.

The researchers cite the energy sector as a model. Compared with other critical infrastructure sectors, electric utilities generally operate under more mature cybersecurity requirements and undergo routine compliance audits, providing organizations with greater visibility into the devices connected to their networks and the risks they pose.

Implementing those improvements will not be easy. Many municipal water utilities operate with limited budgets and aging infrastructure, leaving little funding available for cybersecurity investments. As attacks on critical infrastructure become more frequent, the researchers argue that gaining visibility into operational technology assets and strengthening oversight are essential first steps to protect the systems communities rely on every day.

The CPSec Lab is a collaborative laboratory within the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy as well as the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

As during previous editions, this year’s conference featured more than two dozen scientists, engineers, policy experts, and thought leaders from Georgia Tech and beyond, illustrating how collaboration across fields – from science and engineering to public policy and international affairs – helps to advance strategic research priorities. 

“Frontiers is about discovery and connections across disciplines and generations,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair. “This edition provided an inspiring glimpse into the future of space exploration and the many ways Georgia Tech is contributing to research and missions seeking answers to what lies beyond our planet.” 

Commitment to Space

Space research is a key institutional priority at Georgia Tech, which is home to numerous academic and research programs in planetary sciences, robotics, mission design, space policy, and other areas. 

The recently established Space Research Institute (SRI) serves as the central hub connecting the broad range of space-related research across campus. Led by Jud Ready, who also serves as principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, SRI has expanded support for space research and commercialization through initiatives such as the CreationsVC Space Fellows Program and Centers, Programs, and Initiatives seed grant program.

SRI’s efforts are in line with Georgia Tech’s long-standing contribution to space exploration. Hundreds of Yellow Jacket alumni work in the space sector, including several graduates who are playing key roles in the Artemis program. To date, more than a dozen Georgia Tech alumni have traveled to space.

Exploring the Final Frontier

The conference featured a series of panels and discussions led by faculty and researchers from the Colleges of Sciences and Engineering as well as the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. 

Sessions explored how researchers are studying the processes and conditions that support planetary habitability, seeking to answer one of humanity’s greatest questions: Does life exist beyond Earth? Speakers also examined how analog fieldwork in Earth’s extreme environments can inform space exploration, and how space research, in turn, can deepen our understanding of our own world.

Additional conversations centered on building better space missions through improved understanding of team and individual resilience, data collection, navigation, and the development of advanced technologies like the robots developed through the NASA LASSIE Project. 

Frontiers also highlighted Georgia Tech’s commitment to preparing the next generation of space scientists, engineers, and leaders. Student training and engagement were recurring themes throughout the day, with speakers emphasizing opportunities for student-led and student-run missions and research. A panel of Georgia Tech alumni shared their own STEM career journeys, challenging the idea of “one right path” to success — and acknowledging the resources and opportunities available at the Institute. 

A highlight of the conference was a fireside chat with Atlanta-native, retired U.S. Army Colonel and NASA Astronaut R. Shane Kimbrough (M.S. Operations Research 1998). Kimbrough, who spent a total of 388 days in space and performed nine spacewalks across three missions, reflected on his career and the evolution of spaceflight. He emphasized the expanding role of public-private and international partnerships in advancing ambitious goals, such as creating a permanent human outpost on the Moon. 

Policy and Public

The conference also explored how policy influences space discovery and innovation, with discussions touching on such issues as space security, access, governance, sustainability — and the influence of technology and science fiction on public perception and policy. 

Panelists described current policy frameworks governing outer space as struggling to keep pace with rapidly advancing technologies and expanding activities. According to these experts, increasing tensions among commercial, research, and recreational uses of space call for greater coordination among private and government entities to balance competing priorities while maximizing opportunities for innovation and exploration. 

The conference was punctuated by a networking lunch connecting attendees with Atlanta’s public astronomy community – including partners at several universities and the Georgia Tech Astronomy Club, which set up telescopes for attendees to safely observe the sun. Later that evening, the Georgia Tech Observatory hosted its Public Night, welcoming the broader Atlanta community to campus for telescope views of Jupiter, the Orion Nebula, and other celestial bodies. 

The Observatory Night was a fitting conclusion to a full day focused on Georgia Tech’s commitment and contributions to inspiring future generations of space explorers through research, education, and outreach. 

Experience the Frontiers conference in pictures on the College of Sciences’ Flickr account.

With a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and as a former trainee in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB), it’s no surprise that Georgia Tech alumnus and serial entrepreneur Chris Lee loves numbers. One in four. Eighty percent. Five times.  

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

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

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

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

Beyond Conventional Fracture Testing

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

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

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

An Honest View of Sustainability

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

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

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

From Cracks to Circularity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rethinking Hurricane Risk

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

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

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

Physics-Informed AI: Street-Level Flood Warnings

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

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

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

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

Targeting Georgia’s Coastline 

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

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

Building Climate-Resilient Power Grids and Cities

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

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

The event concluded with the announcement of two rounds of seed funding, offering up to $500,000 annually for three years. The first round, announced in September 2024, provided planning grants to six teams to support their initiatives in the fall.  

Recipients of the second phase of seed funding have now been announced. This phase will provide research support in the spring, with an option for additional funding through the 2025-26 academic year. 

“This seed funding initiative by SEI and GTRI is a significant step toward advancing national security through innovative energy solutions. We believe this support will empower the funded teams to explore critical intersections between energy infrastructure and security, fostering groundbreaking advancements for a safer energy future,” said Christine Conwell, SEI’s interim executive director.  

Seven interdisciplinary projects by team members from Georgia Tech and GTRI have been selected for the second phase, also known as Category B (Table 1). 

“The seed grant initiative is supporting energy and national security collaboration among researchers from multiple units across the Georgia Tech campus,” said William H. Robinson, interim chief technology officer and deputy director for Research in GTRI’s Information and Cyber Sciences Directorate. “We are very pleased to see the teamwork of these faculty members as they address important issues facing our nation.”

A follow-up workshop will be held this summer to bring together the awardees of the seed grant program. Additionally, a lunch and learn seminar series is planned in the fall to showcase the research progress of the seed grant program. For updates, visit the Strategic Energy Institute event webpage.

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

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

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

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

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

Read more »

Read more »

Read more »

Read more »

Read more »

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Assistant Professor Amirali Aghazadeh and Ph.D. student Daniel Saeedi have developed AstroAgents, an AI system that analyzes mass spectrometry data — detailed chemical compositions from meteorites and Earth soil samples — to generate novel hypotheses about the origins of life on the planet. 

What sets AstroAgents apart is its use of agentic AI. Unlike traditional AI systems that perform fixed tasks, this agentic system is designed to pursue a scientific goal. It draws from astrobiology literature, interprets complex data, and proposes original ideas that researchers can investigate further. 

Their paper, recently featured in the journal Nature, is opening new possibilities for how scientists explore questions that have remained unanswered for decades. 

In a special Q&A, Aghazadeh and Saeedi explain how AstroAgents analyzes space chemistry, what it’s revealing about the possible origins of life on Earth, and what they hope to explore next.

READ THE Q&A

Read more »

Read more »

It’s not glamorous. It’s not trendy. In fact, it’s downright grubby. But the work that a Georgia Tech researcher and his students are doing is improving campus sustainability, one pound of food waste at a time. 

Read more »

Read more »

Read more »

Read more »

Read more »

The initiative included Phase 1 or Category A grants that allowed researchers up to $10,000 in seed funding to understand the viability of their research concepts. The multidisciplinary proposals that won the Category A grants include:

Project Title: Energy Infrastructure Security and Risk Assessment Through Interactive Wargaming
Primary Investigator(s)
Dimitri Mavris (School of Aerospace Engineering)
Scott Duncan (School of Aerospace Engineering)
Michael Balchanos (School of Aerospace Engineering)

Other Investigators
Adam Stulberg (School of International Affairs)
Jenna Jordan (School of International Affairs)
Margaret Kosal (School of International Affairs)

Project Title: International Workshop on Nuclear Cybersecurity: Strengthening Global Leadership and Collaboration

Primary Investigator(s)
Fan Zhang (Nuclear and Radiological Engineering)
Steve Biegalski (Nuclear and Radiological Engineering)
Valerie Thomas (School of Industrial and Systems Engineering)
Alexander Miranda (Electrial and Computer Engineering)

Other Investigators
Guenevere Chen (Electrial and Computer Engineering) (University of Texas San Antonio)

Project Title: Robust Energy Systems Planning by way of Novel Systems Engineering (RESPoNSE)

Primary Investigator(s): Comas Haynes (GTRI)

Other Investigators
Matt McDowell (School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Materials Science and Engineering)

Project Title: Shielding and Microreactor Arrangement Innovation (Samμrai)

Primary Investigator(s)
John Brittingham (GTRI)
Bojan Petrovic (School of Mechanical Engineering)

Other Investigators
Helen Works (GTRI)

Project Title: The Strategic Mineral Economy: Challenges and Opportunities for Critical Resources

Primary Investigator(s)
Bobby Harris (School of Economics)
Matthew Swarts (GTRI)

Other Investigators
Dylan Brewer (School of Economics)
Kevin Caravati (GTRI)
Laura Taylor (School of Economics)
Micah S. Ziegler (School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, School of Public Policy)

Project Title: Trustworthy AI for Critical Power Grid Infrastructure Resilience
Primary Investigator(s): 
Glen Chou (School of Cybersecurity and Privacy)
Yatis Dodia (GTRI)
Saman Zonouz (School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Phase 2 or Category B of the initiative includes up to $500,000 in seed funding to fund team research proposals, with funds likely to grow to $1.2 million in the coming years. Please note that teams must largely consist of those who participated in or expressed interest via the July workshop. 

Georgia Tech researchers and faculty are encouraged to submit the Notice of Intent for Phase 2 (Category B) submissions. While this is not a requirement of the proposal, it will provide the initiative with insights that will help with internal logistics. If you have any questions regarding the Category B Notice of Intent and the grant, please contact the Strategic Energy Institute at connect@energy.gatech.edu.

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

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

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

Learn more >>

Whether it's paper used in packaging or metals designed for structural applications, manufacturers rely on testing to understand how materials will perform before they reach the real world. 

The SCC is home to seven student engineering competition teams and provides workspace, tools, and resources to help students apply classroom learning to real-world engineering challenges.

In his new role, Simmons will provide strategic leadership and operational oversight for student competition teams, facilities, staff, budgets, sponsorships, and safety programs. He also will teach and mentor students through engineering design and experiential learning courses, helping connect classroom instruction with project-based experiences.

“Richard brings a unique combination of industry experience, research leadership, and deep commitment to student success,” said Carolyn Seepersad, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair. “As an accomplished engineer and a Georgia Tech alumnus, he understands the value of experiential learning and is well-positioned to lead the Student Competition Center.”

Simmons, ME 1993, joined Georgia Tech in 2016 after spending the first 20 years of his career leading research, technology, and business development initiatives in the automotive industry, energy sector, and federal government. After graduating from Tech, he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Purdue University and later became a licensed professional engineer.

Over the past decade, Simmons has held several leadership and research positions within Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute, including founding director of the Energy Policy and Innovation Center and, most recently, director of Research and Studies. He has also taught a variety of courses at the Woodruff School, including ME 2110, Capstone Design, Energy Systems, and Renewable Energy.

Read Full Story on the ME News Page

Blending engineering challenges, field experiences, and team-based design projects, the weeklong program in June gave students a dynamic introduction to energy, sustainability, and engineering innovation and a rare opportunity to engage directly with the technologies, infrastructure, people, and ideas that help power the world.

“Our goal is to get outside of the classroom, have fun, and demonstrate how a STEM education can literally help turn on lightbulbs,” said SEI’s director of Research and Studies, Rich Simmons, who also directs Energy Unplugged. “Through hands-on learning, field trips, and real-world experiences, these creative students are learning that everyone can play a role in our energy future. Along the way, they are gaining a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs and challenges engineers face and learning from experts about pathways to an energy career.”

Mousetrap-Powered Cars
Putting those ideas into practice from day one, the camp began with an engineering challenge in which students designed and constructed mousetrap-powered cars. Using the stored potential energy of a mousetrap spring to propel their vehicles, participants explored how energy is converted from one form to another and identified sources of friction and inefficiency that affect the distance traveled. The activity encouraged students to think like engineers, iteratively testing and refining their designs to improve results.

Engineering Optimization and Tradeoffs
Similar problem-solving skills were put to the test during an RC car optimization challenge. Equipped with a battery-powered vehicle and energy-monitoring systems, students were tasked with completing a driving course while maximizing their score by balancing speed, energy consumption, safety, and cargo capacity. Participants had the option to add weights and tennis balls to increase potential points, but doing so increased the risk of penalties from dropped cargo, missed obstacles, or vehicle rollovers. The exercise highlighted the tradeoffs engineers routinely face when optimizing systems under competing constraints.

“The overall interest in green energy among youth is increasing, so having demonstrations and experiments as well as some high-level lectures on the actual science was a great way to engage the students,” said student assistant William Nudd, a senior in mechanical engineering who assisted with the camp. “When I was in their shoes, I had never attended a physics class, so the camp was definitely getting them a step ahead and did a great job introducing and showcasing key concepts related to energy: How does my home get electricity? Where does energy come from? How do power plants operate?”

Trivia, Demos, and Scavenger Hunts
Additional activities throughout the week included energy-themed trivia competitions, a steam engine demonstration, a solar microgrid exercise, and a campus scavenger hunt. Together, they reinforced classroom concepts through interactive learning and encouraged students to connect technical principles with practical applications.

Field Trips to Power Plants
While these activities taught foundational concepts, a highlight of the camp was a series of field trips that allowed students to observe large-scale energy infrastructure in operation. Participants toured the Georgia Power McDonough-Atkinson Plant, where they learned how combined-cycle power plants generate electricity using both gas and steam turbines to improve efficiency. Students also visited the Morgan Falls hydroelectric facility, getting an up-close view of the massive generators and equipment used to convert the energy of flowing water into electricity.

Campus Tours
In addition to exploring regional energy infrastructure, students were introduced to Georgia Tech’s innovation ecosystem through visits to campus makerspaces and research facilities, including the Flowers Invention Studio and The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design. Students explored one of the nation’s most advanced examples of sustainable building design during a guided tour of The Kendeda Building, which generates 200% of the energy it consumes. Here they learned how energy efficiency, renewable generation, and resource conservation can be integrated into the built environment.

Final Projects 
To bring together the concepts explored throughout the week, students worked in teams on a final design challenge centered around a solar-powered disaster relief trailer on loan from the Footprint Project. Equipped with photovoltaic panels and battery storage, the trailer was originally designed to provide off-grid power during emergencies. Students were challenged to identify additional uses for the system during periods when disaster response was not required. Many teams proposed sustainable food truck businesses powered by the trailer’s solar energy system.

Teams also evaluated cooking technologies such as pressure cookers and slow cookers, comparing energy consumption, power requirements, efficiency, and operating costs. Students examined how energy demand aligned with available solar generation and battery storage while conducting economic analyses to determine business viability and profitability. The project integrated engineering, economics, and sustainability principles while encouraging creative thinking and collaborative problem-solving. 

“Energy Unplugged is an inspiring demonstration of how hands-on engineering experiences can spark curiosity and passion in the next generation of STEM leaders,” said student assistant Alvaro Hucker, a senior mechanical engineering student. “Working with this group and seeing the fun they were having brought back fond memories of my own childhood. It was an amazing experience.”

Student Contributors: Alvaro Hucker, Senior, Mechanical Engineering and William Nudd, Senior, Mechanical Engineering.

Georgia’s $41 billion forest products industry needs a transformation, and a Georgia Tech research team is reimagining how pulp mills use energy and what they can make from their byproduct streams. 

The Petit Center is made possible by a transformational commitment from technology entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Georgia Tech alumnus Parker H. "Pete" Petit.

Since 1980, Petit has provided significant philanthropic support across campus, including the naming of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB), one of Georgia Tech’s 11 Interdisciplinary Research Institutes. IBB is an interdisciplinary hub for transforming biological discovery into real-world health impact, bringing together engineers, scientists, and clinicians to accelerate innovations in diagnostics, therapeutics, medical devices, and biomanufacturing. With more than 300 interdisciplinary faculty researchers, 13 research centers, and 1,300 trainees making unprecedented discoveries and generating innovative technologies, IBB is a catalyst for innovative bioengineering and bioscience research. 

The success of IBB led Petit to make his latest investment, which will build on Georgia Tech’s broader commitment to medical innovation: applying engineering, computing, AI, biosciences, and systems thinking to health challenges that require more than any one field can solve. The Petit Center’s work will strengthen the tools, partnerships, and research pathways needed to help more discoveries move from the lab toward real-world patient care. 

A key goal of the Petit Center will be to use AI to build more precise models of how disease works in the body. Its first research initiative will focus on creating virtual models of human cells. Led by Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor and Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, researchers will use those models to study how diseases progress and to identify treatments that may work best for individual patients. 

By modeling disease at the cellular level, researchers can test ideas faster, uncover links among different diseases, and focus on therapies most likely to help patients based on their unique biology. The work could expedite the discovery of new therapies for some of the hardest-to-treat diseases, including pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. 

“Medical innovation is one of the fastest-growing areas in Georgia Tech’s research, and Pete Petit’s commitment will help us further shape the future of medicine," said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “This new research center will find new ways to harness the power of AI to accelerate critical medical discoveries and move them into clinical settings so patients can get the care they need. We’re deeply grateful for Pete's support, and we’re excited to get started.”

The Parker H. Petit Center for AI-Driven Health Innovation will operate under the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) and bring together researchers from across Georgia Tech to advance AI-driven approaches to human health. Researchers affiliated with the Petit Center will work across fields and with clinical and healthcare organizations to help close the gap between discovery and practical use. Over time and with additional investments, the Petit Center’s work will expand into areas such as cancer biomarker discovery, healthy aging, advanced cellular therapies, and AI-supported healthcare systems. 

"Georgia Tech has the expertise to redefine what is possible in healthcare through AI," said Skolnick. "By combining advanced computational methods with biological and medical insights, we can create powerful new approaches to predicting disease, identifying treatments, and improving patient outcomes." 

Petit’s commitment will support advanced computing infrastructure, graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, seed research grants, and annual programs that will bring together leading researchers from around the world working at the intersection of AI and health. 

Petit hopes this investment will inspire others to support interdisciplinary research at the Institute. "Georgia Tech has long demonstrated its ability to solve complex challenges," said Petit. "I believe artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape healthcare, and I am excited to support a center that can help accelerate discoveries to improve and save lives." 

This transformative commitment is included in Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech and is propelling the comprehensive campaign’s success.  

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

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

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

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

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

That dichotomy is part of what drives the field of synthetic biology: where scientists apply engineering principles to learn from and carefully adapt nature’s biological systems to address human problems. By understanding biological systems, scientists can carefully redirect them when natural processes cause harm.

This principle has shaped my work as a biomedical engineer for over two decades. My lab studies how to program cells in order to better understand their behavior and ultimately use them as medicine. The goal is not to discard or replace nature, but to learn from biological principles and use that knowledge to responsibly help society.

Researchers announced on July 2, 2026, that they had created the first synthetic cell built from purified, nonliving components.

The lab’s cell-like system, dubbed SpudCell, raises key questions: What does it take to build a cell from scratch? If scientists assemble something that feeds, grows, copies genetic material and divides, have they created life?

How to Create Cells From Scratch

Natural cells are astonishingly complicated. Researchers want to use synthetic cells to learn more about how life works, and they are doing this by rebuilding some of life’s basic features in a simpler, more understandable form.

Earlier designs of minimal cells, used to test which components are necessary for lifelike behavior, began with existing living cells and reduced the size of their genomes. A minimal cell is useful because it is simple, but that simplicity comes at a cost. It may reveal which parts are needed for lifelike behavior, but it usually lacks the autonomy, resilience, metabolism and evolutionary capacity of natural cells.

Instead, synthetic cells are built through a bottom-up engineering approach. Scientists start with a simplified compartment – a kind of biological “box” – and ask what must be added for it to behave more like a living cell. A membrane separates the inside from the outside. Genetic material stores instructions. Molecular machinery reads those instructions to make molecules. Energy sources power reactions. Other components can allow growth, division and adaptation.

A useful way to think about synthetic cells is to compare them with technologies society already depends on. The radio wasn’t invented all at once. Engineers learned how to combine an antenna, tuner, amplifier, power source and speaker to convert invisible electromagnetic waves into sound. A car is not just a metal shell; it becomes transportation only when a frame is connected to wheels, brakes, steering, an engine, and transmission and control systems. A computer began with switches and strings of ones and zeros that could be assembled into circuits capable of storing and processing information.

Similarly, SpudCell was assembled from the bottom up with purified, nonliving parts. Researchers used lipid molecules to create a cell-like membrane, DNA molecules to store genetic instructions, purified enzymes to copy and read those instructions, and other molecular machinery to help build proteins and other molecules from small chemical building blocks, such as amino acids and nucleotides.

SpudCell is exciting scientists because it appears to bring several features of life together in one system. The researchers describe it as capable of feeding, growth, genome replication, genetically encoded division and something close to evolution. These features resemble a biological cell cycle.

Close to Life, But Not Quite

While SpudCell is an important milestone in the field, it stops short of being a fully synthetic living cell. A membrane-bound compartment containing DNA is not automatically a living cell, just as a pile of car parts is not a car.

SpudCell can carry out several life-like processes, but it is not independent. It still relies on carefully controlled laboratory conditions and on researchers to supply its molecular machinery. It doesn’t reliably pass on its genetic material or spontaneously evolve the way natural cells do.

To approach life, a synthetic cell must coordinate many processes at once. NASA describes life as a “self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution,” meaning it must independently use energy, copy information, grow, divide, respond to its surroundings and persist over time. Natural cells do this with extraordinary reliability because they are the products of billions of years of evolution.

SpudCell still falls short of that standard. It depends on researchers to continuously supply it with the molecular machinery to function and to physically help it divide. It also cannot reproduce indefinitely outside a carefully controlled laboratory environment. In other words, SpudCell may have been built rather than born, but it is not yet autonomous life.

That limitation does not make the achievement unimportant. In fact, it is scientifically valuable precisely because it exposes what is still missing to create life. Which parts are essential? Which processes must be coordinated? How much complexity is necessary before chemistry begins to look like biology?

Why Create Synthetic Cells?

Those questions have practical importance. Answering them can help scientists and engineers design safer biological systems for a wide range of industries.

Synthetic cells allow scientists to more cleanly test how the surrounding membrane separates the inside of a cell from its environment, how genetic instructions are read, how energy is used, and how growth and division are coordinated. These cell-like systems could eventually become simplified test beds for studying biological circuits, disease mechanisms and the origins of life.

They could also help scientists build safer systems for making medicines, fuels or materials, detecting environmental toxins, or delivering therapies without relying on fully living organisms.

More broadly, synthetic biology connects medicine and biotechnology: Viruses can be redesigned into vaccines or gene therapy, immune cells can be reprogrammed to recognize cancer, and microbes can be engineered to make useful molecules, such as insulin, or detect pollutants.

Similarly, researchers could use synthetic cells to deliver a drug only to diseased tissue, or create microbial systems that detect toxins or pathogens in water. They can also act as simplified biological factories that can make medicines without requiring a fully living organism, or as biosensors providing early warning of dangerous threats, such as bioweapons.

Creating Life Responsibly

The philosophical question “Is SpudCell alive?” may not have a simple yes or no answer.

Depending on whether your definition of life emphasizes metabolism, reproduction, evolution, autonomy or cellular organization, the boundary between living and nonliving can look very different.

Life is not defined by one property alone. Viruses contain genetic information but depend on host cells to reproduce. Mitochondria perform essential metabolism but cannot live independently outside of cells. A seed can remain dormant for years before resuming growth.

When synthetic biology is guided by a strong sense of responsibility, scientists can learn how to redirect harmful processes, build safer tools and help society. This requires not only asking whether biological systems can be built, but also whether their creation should be controlled, where they should function and what safeguards are needed.

Over the past two decades, scientists have built many kinds of biological kill switches – that is, genetic circuits that can shut down engineered cells under specific conditions. Some researchers have made cells dependent on a specific nutrient. Others have created cells that can survive only in a particular environment or activate self-destructive pathways when conditions change.

Kill switches are not magic off buttons and do not replace careful regulation, physical containment or public oversight. But they are an important example of synthetic biology’s moral compass: to not only build useful biological tools, but to build them with safety, accountability and humility in mind.

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

The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) is pleased to announce new leadership and membership for its External Advisory Board, which provides strategic guidance to help advance the institute's mission of accelerating interdisciplinary research and innovation. 

Corrosion remains a critical challenge across pulp and paper operations as well as a wide range of manufacturing processes and materials. It directly impacts the performance and longevity of equipment such as recovery boilers, digesters, reactors, storage tanks, piping systems, and paper machines. At the Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI), Jamshad Mahmood leads efforts to evaluate and mitigate these challenges through laboratory testing and field analysis. 

For years, scientists studying the human gut have relied on a material that most people would never expect: a jelly made from mouse tumors. Called Matrigel, it is used to grow tiny, patient‑derived versions of the intestine that help researchers understand disease, test new drugs, and explore future therapies. However, since this material comes from animal tissue, it’s unpredictable, difficult to control, and limits medical applications. 

Colleagues and friends remember Shelton as a dedicated mentor, collaborator, and educator, whose curiosity, generosity, and sense of humor left a lasting impression on students and peers.

“Sam exemplified the very best of Georgia Tech, and his legacy will continue to inspire generations of engineers and educators,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. “I am deeply grateful for his friendship, mentorship, and leadership. My heartfelt condolences go to his family, and to the many students, colleagues, and friends whose lives he touched.”

A nationally recognized leader in energy systems, Shelton founded SEI as an interdisciplinary organization that brought together engineers, researchers, policy experts, and industry leaders to advance high-impact energy solutions. That vision remains central to SEI’s mission and continues to guide its work today.

“Sam was the quintessential engineer and innovator, whose vision was always accompanied by the development and demonstration of actual products instead of leaving them as promising concepts,” said Srinivas Garimella, Hightower Chair in the College of Engineering and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “He had the rare ability to see through nebulous ideas and claims and get to the fundamental engineering truths. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to seek his advice, which he freely gave. I will miss his friendship and counsel very much.”

During a career of more than 35 years, Shelton made lasting contributions to sustainable energy and engineering innovation. His work spanned combustion research, solar energy technologies, and offshore wind systems. He secured more than $30 million in research funding, held eight patents, founded two energy-focused companies, and helped translate research into real-world energy solutions.

In addition to his research, Shelton was deeply committed to education. During his academic career, he developed undergraduate and graduate courses in energy technology, teaching both in person and online. His Energy 101 course reached tens of thousands of learners through a massive open online course platform, covering topics such as energy supply, independence, economics, and society’s energy demands.

“When I first started at SEI in 2016, Sam and I would meet for lunch to discuss the latest research, consider how far we've come since the Carter administration, and grapple over the world’s energy problems,” said Rich Simmons, SEI’s director of Research and Studies. “Sam was genuine and objective, not working backward from a preconceived notion, but working forward with an open mind to understand, appreciate, and apply the first and second law. He was also colorful and witty! We are all privileged to pay these lessons forward to future energy students.” 

Beyond academia, Shelton’s engineering expertise reached a global stage as the designer of the Olympic torch for the 1996 Atlanta Games, an enduring symbol of innovation recognized worldwide. “The Olympics represented world peace, mankind coming together, and overcoming adversity. It was an amazing event to think about, to witness, to live through, and be a part of helping to create it,” Shelton said in a 2016 interview.

Shelton is survived by his daughters, Suzie and Stacy, three granddaughters, and a wide network of students, colleagues, and collaborators. His legacy continues through the programs he built, partnerships he fostered, and the people he helped.

A memorial service celebrating Shelton’s life will be held Aug. 1 at 1 p.m. at The 57th Fighter Group Restaurant in Atlanta. The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, memorial gifts be directed to Roll Call, Georgia Tech’s Fund for Excellence. Donations may be made at gtalumni.org/SamShelton.

Housing and transportation are top priorities for many city mayors, policymakers and public policy researchers—including Brian An, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. But in February 2021, soon after Winter Storm Uri wreaked havoc in Texas, an eight-hour power outage at his Atlanta home became an epiphany.

“While housing stability had long been on my mind, losing power drove home the importance of another piece of urban infrastructure: reliable access to electricity,” says An, an EPIcenter faculty affiliate and co-director of the Center for Urban Research. “It sparked my interest in studying the intersection of energy and urban policy to help make cities and communities not only socially equitable but also resilient to extreme weather.”

Read Full Story on the EPIcenter News Page

Six years after demonstrating that membranes could separate crude oil at the molecular level, Georgia Tech researcher Ryan Lively is part of an international team that has taken the concept a significant step further.

The team, including investigators at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), discovered that a membrane material widely believed to be non-selective for molecules as small as those found in crude can in fact selectively separate crude oil into lighter and heavier fractions in a way researchers did not expect. 

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

A Community Asking Questions for Decades

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building on Community Momentum

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

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

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

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

Community Voices at the Heart of the Work

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

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

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

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

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

Community partners also see the center as a turning point.

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

“We are honored and truly humbled to be partners in this project,” said Jill Gambill, executive director of the CEAR Hub and senior research associate for the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech-Savannah. “The residents of Glynn County have been asking hard questions about their health and environment for a long time. This center is our opportunity to put Georgia Tech's resources and expertise to work directly for the community.”

Investing in Education, Engagement, and Local Capacity

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

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

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

A Model for the Nation

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

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

Communities across Georgia and the nation are navigating a range of economic and energy-related pressures. Gas prices, inflation, and the rapid growth of data centers are shaping the cost of goods and services, influencing everyday household financial decisions.

At the same time, ongoing geopolitical tensions are driving fluctuations in global oil markets and fuel prices. The expansion of AI data centers is also increasing demand for land, power, and water resources. And conflicts involving energy infrastructure in parts of the Middle East and Europe have affected supply stability.

Responding to these challenges requires careful analysis of emerging trends, supported by strong research in policy and economics. Faculty Affiliates of Georgia Tech’s Energy Policy and Innovation Center study these complex, interconnected issues affecting energy systems, costs, and access. They analyze emerging trends, evaluate policy options, and identify practical pathways forward.

Read Full Story on the EPIcenter News Page

Jie Wu, an engineering graduate student, was studying a type of striking white beetle found in Southeast Asia and attempting to figure out how to mimic its brilliant color when an unexpected discovery upended the experiment.

Jie and I had been hoping to identify naturally occurring whitening pigments that could be used in paper and paints. The beetle’s white exoskeleton is made from a compound called chitin, which is a type of carbohydrate – one that is also commonly found in crab and lobster shells.

Read the full article in The Conversation here: https://bit.ly/4uBteYr

T1D is caused by the autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells, requiring individuals to manage their blood glucose levels through lifelong insulin therapy. Transplanting pancreatic islets has long been investigated as a potential curative treatment, but long-lasting success in extrahepatic sites has been limited—particularly when islets are transplanted beneath the skin—due to poor blood vessel formation, immune rejection, and cellular stress following transplantation.

Vlahos’ research addresses these limitations by combining synthetic biology and tissue engineering in a new way: engineering cells to actively reshape their local environment after transplantation to make it more hospitable for the graft. Rather than relying solely on biomaterials or porous structures to support transplanted cells, the project focuses on programming the cells themselves to sense stress and respond dynamically.

Read the full story.

The workshop is part of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pathways (AMP) program, a collaboration between the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which connects rural educators with hands-on manufacturing training. This particular training was delivered through a partnership between GTMI, STEM@GTRI — GTRI’s K-12 outreach program — and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, leveraging the facilities and expertise of the Montgomery Machining Mall to provide teachers with direct experience in modern manufacturing. Building on GTRI’s Rural Computer Science Initiative, the program expands access to high-skill, high-wage career pathways across rural communities. The initiative is supported through state funding.

The workshop comes at a time when demand for skilled manufacturing workers continues to grow nationwide, particularly in roles requiring precision, technical expertise, and problem-solving.

Read the full story on the Georgia Tech Research news site. 

It affects up to one-third of the human population and can create symptoms severe enough to lead to hospitalization, yet much about what causes it remains a mystery. It’s rarely discussed in public, often goes undiagnosed, and remains a consistently underfunded and understudied area of science.  

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

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

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

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

The grant will support building a robotics and AI ecosystem for dexterous and mobile manipulation, enabling robots to move through environments, interact with objects, and adapt to changing conditions.

Ye Zhao, LIDAR director and associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, leads the project, with Anqi Wu, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, serving as co-principal investigator.

Read the full story on the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering website.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino likened the scale of each game to that of a Super Bowl. The success of a tournament that large will rely heavily on technology, affecting everything from the players on the pitch, all the way to viewers at home.

On top of the state-of-the-art technology used at many large events, this World Cup will also see the debut of new technology. At the center of much of it will be electrical and computer engineering.

Experts from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) weigh in on how the field is enabling the technology behind the world’s largest sporting event.

Read Full Story on the ECE News Page

The workshop is part of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pathways (AMP) program, a collaboration between the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which connects rural educators with hands-on manufacturing training. This particular training was delivered through a partnership between GTMI, STEM@GTRI — GTRI’s K-12 outreach program — and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, leveraging the facilities and expertise of the Montgomery Machining Mall to provide teachers with direct experience in modern manufacturing. Building on GTRI’s Rural Computer Science Initiative, the program expands access to high-skill, high-wage career pathways across rural communities. The initiative is supported through state funding.

The workshop comes at a time when demand for skilled manufacturing workers continues to grow nationwide, particularly in roles requiring precision, technical expertise, and problem-solving.

Inside the Machine Shop 

The training took place June 3 – 5 in the Montgomery Machining Mall, where staff provided access to facilities, equipment, and technical expertise that made the immersive learning experience possible.

Teachers designed and manufactured a metal meat tenderizer and a metal coaster etched with both the Georgia Tech logo and their name. For many, this was their first exposure to advanced manufacturing tools and processes, and a glimpse into high-skill, high-wage careers within reach for their students.

“Many of these teachers have never been exposed to any advanced manufacturing,” said Sean Mulvanity, a program manager for STEM@GTRI and project lead for this workshop. “By the time they walk out of here, they’ve actually created and manufactured physical items they can take back to their students.” Unlike traditional professional development, the workshop places teachers directly in the machine shop, working on heavy equipment. 

For AMP program leaders, this pilot was a way to build momentum for school districts that may add advanced manufacturing courses and to make the machine shop feel less intimidating in the process. 

“One of the biggest misconceptions about modern manufacturing is that it is inaccessible or limited to specialized factory environments,” said GTMI Deputy Director Steven Ferguson. “Today’s manufacturing combines hands-on skills, digital technologies, AI, and problem-solving in ways that are relevant to students across many career pathways. By giving teachers direct experience in the machine shop, we help them bring that excitement back to their classrooms and show students that they can design, build, and innovate in their own communities.”

From the Shop Floor to the Classroom 

One of the workshop participants is James Beveridge, who teaches computer science for grades 6-12 in the Chattahoochee County School District, a small, rural district south of Columbus. He has participated in multiple Georgia Tech-led training programs, and he runs a full computer science pathway for 450 middle and high school students. This fall will mark his third year in the Rural Computer Science Initiative and teaching computer science after two decades in industry.

Beveridge had some informal experience with tools growing up — his father taught him basic carpentry and welding — but he had never done formal machining work before the AMP workshop.

“Working with metal is different than working with wood, obviously, but it’s been really interesting to see the precision involved,” he said. “With wood, you can be off by a sixteenth of an inch, and nobody cares. When you’re machining metal parts, it has to be very, very precise. Learning to use the precision measuring tools has been eye-opening.”

For Beveridge, one of the biggest benefits of his ongoing work with Georgia Tech through the Rural Computer Science Initiative and related programs is that he never leaves empty-handed.

“Every time I come up here to learn something new, they send me home with the equipment to teach it with,” he said. “The first time, I left with a classroom set of robots so my students could learn to program. Another time, it was a more advanced humanoid robot with artificial intelligence. Now, I’m going back with new skills in machining and a physical project I can show my students.”

Another participant, Juone Brown, teaches high school computer science and AI to students at Dooly County High School in Vienna, Georgia. This is her second year in the rural computer science partnership and her fourth year teaching at Dooly. Previously, Brown was a professor for 25 years at Fort Valley State University. 

Like Beveridge, Brown has no formal machining background but said the way workshop instructors broke down each step — especially the math behind the cuts — made the work feel approachable.

“It has been fantastic and really well-paced,” she said. “We all come from different backgrounds, but the way they present the information makes it click. We know the math, but when you’re on the machine, and they show you easier ways to get the cut you need, it’s very encouraging.”

She’s already thinking about how to translate that feeling for her students, many of whom prefer building things to writing code. “I’m always telling them that skills pay the bills,” Brown said. “A lot of my students are hands-on. Now I can connect what we’re doing in class to real parts and jobs.”

Bringing Advanced Manufacturing to More Georgia Classrooms 

After the workshop, teachers are expected to integrate machining concepts into existing courses or help build new manufacturing pathways at their schools.  

AMP program leaders intentionally kept this pilot cohort small. The team plans to repeat the workshop several times over the coming year, expanding to more schools and districts across Georgia, building local champions who can help launch advanced manufacturing programs in their communities.

About the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI)

The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) convenes industry leaders, government partners, and top researchers to collaborate on the grand challenges facing manufacturing today: accelerating technology development and deployment; creating, maintaining, and filling quality jobs; ensuring global competitiveness; and advancing economic and environmental stability. 
Our vision is to ensure rapid innovation that secures U.S. dominance in advanced manufacturing. Through the design and development of artificial intelligence systems, secure digital manufacturing, additive and subtractive processes, and large-scale production enterprises, GTMI stands at the forefront of manufacturing innovation — leveraging state-of-the-art facilities, including the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility, to turn research breakthroughs into market-ready solutions. 

About the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 3,000 employees, supporting eight laboratories across more than 20 locations nationwide and performing more than $919 million in problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Zhang joins a select group of past recipients whose work has shaped modern understanding of energy systems and thermal sciences. The medal is considered one of the most prestigious awards presented by ASME.

“I feel deeply honored to be listed alongside distinguished scholars in the field of thermodynamics research and education, including some of my own teachers and mentors,” Zhang said.

ASME recognized Zhang for his “pioneering study of radiative thermal power generation and electroluminescent refrigeration, especially on the application of second-law analysis to these systems while accounting for photon entropy and chemical potential.”

Read Full Story on the ME Newspage

The Summer Carbon Management Fellows Program launched with an in-person kickoff at Georgia Tech, giving students an opportunity to connect with one another, learn more about the program, and begin exploring the role of carbon management in energy, sustainability, and industry innovation. The student group included Georgia Tech Graduate Assistants and students from Kentucky State University, Tennessee State University, Florida A&M University, North Carolina A&T State University, Tuskegee University, Southern University Law Center, and Southern University and A&M College.

Read Full Story on the Ben T. Zinn Lab News page

For most, that heart-pounding uncertainty ends the moment the foot finds solid ground. But for many individuals living with conditions like stroke or spinal cord injury (SCI), that sense of disconnect is a permanent reality.

“These conditions of course have a huge effect on our ability to move around and be independent — but the other side of it is the sensory feedback that we lose,” says Matthew Flavin, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Most rehabilitation treatments primarily focus on restoring movement, but “even if you have motor control, if you can’t feel when your foot's touching the ground it can be really hard for you to move around safely.” 

In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Flavin and an interdisciplinary team of researchers introduce a way to bridge this gap: a wearable “sensory substitution” system that translates foot pressure into high-tech patterns of heat and vibration they can feel elsewhere. 

The system uses high-resolution pressure-sensing insoles designed by the team, which are placed inside a user's shoes to record how their weight shifts in real-time. This data is streamed via Bluetooth to a flexible, skin-conformable array of haptic receivers worn on the forearms, a part of the body that often retains sensation in SCI. The receivers give quick pressure feedback through vibration, while also alerting the user to longer-term pressure “hotspots” through heat. 

“One of the limitations of a lot of approaches in haptics is that you're having to map a missing sense onto a completely different sense,” says Flavin. “We’re keeping the type of information that we're missing, which is the distribution of pressure, and we're just basically putting it on a different part of their body.”

Rerouting the lost sensation was key to making the device intuitive to learn. Participants were able to correctly identify the “feel” of the ground through their arms with high accuracy within a mere two-hour session. When tested with a small group of participants with stroke or SCI, the wearable significantly improved standing balance and led to steadier walking.

“What’s encouraging about these early results is that participants appeared to use the feedback in ways that supported balance and walking,” says John Rogers, a materials science and engineering professor at Northwestern University who collaborated on this study. “Our study suggests that providing pressure information through another part of the body could be a practical path for helping people compensate for lost sensation.” 

While vibration provides immediate feedback for walking and balance, the team views the thermal feedback as a tool for long-term health. Heat is a slower, low-frequency signal that could alert patients to pressure hotspots, potentially preventing diabetic foot ulcers or pressure injuries for those who are bedridden or use wheelchairs.

The small, lightweight system is completely untethered, making it suitable for use during daily activities in and outside the clinic. It’s also highly adaptable to different injury types, which is ideal for conditions as variable as stroke, SCI, and diabetic neuropathy. Placement of the haptic receivers can be adjusted based on where a patient has the most sensation, and the sensitivity of the insoles can be tailored to each patient. 

As a member of several of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Institutes — the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society, the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences — Flavin credits the project’s success to an interdisciplinary effort and deep engagement with clinicians and patients.

“This reinforces the importance of really engaging with your stakeholders very early on,” says Flavin. “If you're not continually refining that concept with those stakeholders, you quickly find that they might be looking for something that your device isn't delivering.”

With new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the team is now working to make the technology even smaller and more reconfigurable, moving closer to a standard wearable for daily clinical use.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2536577123

As metro Atlanta becomes a magnet for hyperscale data centers, the region faces a twin challenge: securing enough water to cool these facilities while ensuring that wastewater reuse doesn't introduce new public health risks. At Georgia Tech, Katherine Graham, assistant professor of environmental engineering and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Faculty Fellow, is working at exactly that nexus, using viruses, bacteria, and advanced analytics to understand how water reuse and cooling systems can support data center growth without compromising community health.

"Data centers are important, and so are their cooling needs. I don't think they're going away," she said. "But there needs to be a lot of investigation to develop guidelines for operating these facilities based on how microbes behave so that we can get the economic benefit and protect the communities where they operate."

Tracing Viruses Across Georgia's Water Systems

Through a Sustainability Next Seed Grant project administered by the BBISS, Graham's lab focuses on water reuse safety, particularly in Georgia communities facing water stress. Her team works with municipal reuse facilities, where, she said, “We look at what comes out of wastewater treatment plants, what exists in the natural waters they discharge treated water into, and what comes into downstream drinking water plants at their intake." Her team is especially interested in pathogens such as viruses and phages.

Phages — viruses that infect bacteria rather than humans — pose no direct human hazard. Still, because they travel through water systems similarly to viruses that can harm people, they serve as powerful ecological markers. "They can be good surrogates for human viruses," she said.

This work builds on Graham's wastewater surveillance experience dating to 2018, which became central during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her lab helped develop actionable public health guidelines to show how wastewater can be used to monitor for mpox outbreaks.

From Cooling Towers to Data Centers: A Proactive Public Health Lens

While Graham's Sustainability Next Seed Grant project isn't exclusively about data centers, the connection to their cooling systems is direct. Data centers need to dissipate massive quantities of heat — typically with water-hungry cooling towers — and are increasingly turning to treated wastewater as a supply.

"Reuse can supply more water of sufficient quality for these cooling systems," Graham said. But beyond the quantity issue lies an underexplored dimension: microbial risk.

Cooling towers have long been linked to Legionnaires' disease, with documented outbreaks occurring miles downwind of a source. "For most healthy people, it may not be a problem," Graham noted, "but for the immunocompromised and elderly, it can be a really big problem." What makes this especially concerning is how little is known. "It's not well quantified. It's not well characterized," she said. "There's been no national study collecting cooling-tower waters and looking at the prevalence of these bacteria."

There is currently no systematic, national effort to characterize the prevalence of Legionella and other opportunistic pathogens in any cooling towers — let alone the potential additional risk of building more cooling systems to accommodate the needs of hyperscale data centers.

BBISS has been central to sharpening her focus here. Exposing Graham to colleagues working on energy and water quantity challenges helped her connect the microbiology dots. "A lot of the data center ideas I've started to think about have been generated by BBISS faculty presenting their own work," she said. "Given that cooling towers are already a problem in pre-AI settings, it seems like a good proactive idea to be aware of the problem going into the age of AI."

Graham is now writing proposals to study microbial communities in cooling towers, analyzing water, air, and biofilms under different operating conditions. Her call to industry is direct: Partner early. "I would be extremely happy to collaborate with anyone interested in this problem. Industry buy-in would be critical — and so helpful — to get it done."

Heat Waves, Infrastructure, and Legionella

Graham's lab also examines how climate-driven extreme heat affects drinking water systems. Working with utilities in the Southwest, her team studies how prolonged heat waves warm distribution-system water, accelerate disinfectant loss, and shape the persistence of microorganisms in drinking water distribution systems.

"We were able to see temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit) — with a maximum of 52 (126 degrees Fahrenheit) — which is very warm," she said. "Most of the literature refers to testing conducted at much lower temperatures, like room temperature." Such elevated temperatures, combined with nutrients and stagnation, can allow opportunistic pathogens to thrive.

Teaching and Outreach

Graham teaches undergraduate environmental engineering and graduate courses in quantitative microbial risk assessment and public health microbiology. She serves as associate editor for Water Research and has hosted a microbiology outreach workshop for K-12 students through Georgia Tech’s  Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC).

The through line across her work is consistent: science that anticipates risk and informs action. "As we expand this data center infrastructure, a proactive approach should be taken to understanding concerns that, maybe, haven't been fully addressed yet."

In a region and a world betting big on AI, her research offers a timely reminder: Progress depends not just on computing power, but on ensuring that the water that keeps these systems from melting down remains safe for the communities living alongside them.

The continued recognition highlights Georgia Tech’s research leadership in advancing energy solutions across technology, science, policy, and economics and in delivering technically advanced solutions that is scalable, secure, and sustainable for the future.

“The scale and integration of our energy ecosystem is among Georgia Tech’s great strengths,” said Executive Vice President for Research Tim Lieuwen. “A defining part of that ecosystem is the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), our interdisciplinary research institute that brings together the talents of researchers from across disciplines to accelerate energy innovation and deliver real-world solutions.”

SEI integrates energy activities at Georgia Tech by connecting more than 1,000 researchers across the entire energy value chain and enabling collaboration with industry, government, communities, and nonprofits. SEI is deeply engaged in building community, developing resources, promoting thought leadership, and marshaling the full resources of Georgia Tech around tackling the tough energy and environmental problems and opportunities society faces.

“Georgia Tech’s energy leadership is built on the depth of our research and the breadth of our collaborations,” said Yuanzhi Tang, SEI’s executive director. “By connecting expertise across the full energy value chain, we are advancing solutions that enhance affordability, reliability, security, and sustainability.” 

U.S. News & World Report evaluates the academic research performance of universities in 51 subject areas using indicators such as publications, citations, and global and regional research reputation. Georgia Tech was assessed among 292 institutions in the U.S. and continues its strong standing in the rankings, claiming the No. 32 spot overall in the nation and No. 9 among public universities.

Jenny McGuire, an associate professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, is building a regional blueprint for safeguarding biodiversity in the southeastern United States while drawing insights from half a world away in Denmark. She is the Harry and Anna Teasley Professor in Ecology and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) faculty fellow. She is currently on faculty development leave in Copenhagen where she is sharpening her work with fresh perspectives from European conservation practice.

McGuire, winner of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award, describes herself as a spatial or landscape ecologist, rather than a traditional wildlife biologist. She currently leads Georgia Tech’s Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab, whose motto is “learning from the past how to conserve the future.” She uses modern, historical, and paleontological specimens to identify how communities of plants and animals move across landscapes over long time scales in response to past climate shifts. Her goal is to identify strategies to conserve as much biodiversity as possible in the face of an increasingly volatile climate.

Twice awarded with Sustainability Next Seed Grants by BBISS, most recently in 2025, McGuire is using that support to knit together scientists, conservation groups, agencies, and students to understand how plants and animals are moving in response to both climate and land-use change.

“I’ve been wanting to pivot to a more regional approach toward this work,” McGuire said. “The Southeast, and especially the Atlanta region, is really critical because we sit at this important geographic point where southern Appalachia and the Piedmont come together.”

As species track cooler temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, many are expected to move upslope into the southern Appalachians, even as Atlanta’s urban and suburban footprint continues to expand northward. “There’s a lot of competing stressors on the regional environment,” she said. 

Building a Regional Conservation Community

One of McGuire’s Sustainability Next Seed Grants, in collaboration with Nicole Kennard, BBISS Assistant Director for Community Engaged Research, supports a partnership with Roots Down, an innovative urban land-use nonprofit working with the cities of Avondale Estates and Atlanta to understand how native plant restoration affects ecosystem health. Georgia Tech students established protocols to survey sites before and after restoration to track changes.

The other seed grant McGuire received enabled her to convene a conference that brought together nonprofit conservation organizations, government agencies such as Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources, and academics from across the Southeast. The group formalized their collaboration as the Wildlife Ecology in the Piedmont and Appalachia (WEPA) coalition. They agreed to survey the resources, such as data,  projects, and people, that would support a regional wildlife conservation effort. Over the past semester, her team compiled those resources and shared results back with partners in a second virtual conference.

Early indications from this survey show a strong focus on mammals in urban Atlanta, including 11 camera-trap projects. Two of these projects follow transects from urban cores to suburbs to see how animals move across the city. This group has conducted extensive studies on how wildlife use roadside drainage structures, such as culverts, to move beneath roadways, and how animals are shifting to more nocturnal activity to avoid traffic.

Making connections among current and ongoing studies reveals knowledge gaps where both contemporary and historical data are sparse. Although historical records are held by regional museums, including the Georgia Museum of Natural History, many collections across the broader region remain undigitized. “Those historic distributions exist somewhere, but they’re really difficult to access,” McGuire said. Identifying these data sets is “critical to establish a baseline of where things lived in the past so we can understand how human landscapes and climate change are affecting things today and into the future.”

She’s also working with Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow (GT²), a new College of Sciences initiative focused on regional impact. The program is hiring a postdoctoral fellow whom McGuire will supervise to jumpstart a collaborative research agenda around biodiversity dynamics.

McGuire’s work is increasingly collaborative, drawing on expertise across Georgia Tech and partner institutions like Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum.

Benjamin Freeman, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, focuses on bird ecology to detect shifts in diversity and species ranges. In a new North Georgia Bird Project, with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, he is resurveying bird communities across 13 mountain ridges, concentrating on about 40 forest bird species. His research tests projections that a rapidly warming climate could leave Georgia with very different plant and animal communities within a few human generations. “There’s no substitute for going out there and seeing what is actually changing,” says Freeman.

In a May 2026 Nature Reviews Biodiversity paper co-authored with McGuire, he combines his field-based bird surveys with her paleo-ecological analysis of fossil and pollen records.  

“We make models that predict how species and biological communities will respond to warming, then we go into nature to test those predictions, and finally refine our models when reality doesn’t match what we expected,” he says.

Another Georgia Tech faculty member, Steve Mussman, assistant professor in the College of Computing, brings a different skill set to the project. “I’m a computer and data scientist. I can help with the technical modeling aspects to make the analyses valid and useful,” he says. 

One of the ways he does this is to identify “sampling bias” in camera-trap and citizen science data, which may not be uniformly sampled from the animal population. “I’m really excited to bring machine learning and statistics to a very practical problem,” he adds.

Together, these collaborations support WEPA’s overarching goal: to integrate past and present data into tools that help decision-makers prioritize conservation actions under climate uncertainty.

Lessons From Denmark

For the past nine months, McGuire has been on faculty development leave in Copenhagen, using the time to think deeply about habitat connectivity and how species move across altered landscapes. There, she found a natural comparison point.

“The entire country of Denmark is about the same geographic size as the region we’re interested in,” she noted. “And population-wise, it’s smaller than the Atlanta metro area.”

What struck her most was how thoroughly human activity has reshaped Denmark. “There’s no part of the entire country that hasn’t been very heavily modified by humans,” she said. “At this point, all conservation is gardening.”

By contrast, she sees the Southeast as having retained a foundation of the historical ecology. Forests in the Appalachians have been heavily affected, “but not nearly for as long, or to the same extent, as in Europe,” she said. “It’s kind of nice to think about how we still have a slightly more natural landscape to start with that we can then maintain moving forward.”

In Denmark, McGuire has been learning from conservation biologists who are developing tiered metrics to assess restoration success, from basic, low-cost measures such as tree diameter and understory volume to more advanced tools like genomic analyses. She hopes to adapt similar frameworks to help southeastern land managers and communities assess ecosystem health under tight budgets.

From Appalachia to Berkeley to Georgia Tech

McGuire grew up in southern Virginia, where her love for biodiversity and the southern Appalachians first took root. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she deepened her focus on how species and ecosystems respond to environmental change over long time scales.

She then completed postdoctoral research at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and at the University of Washington, where she expanded her quantitative and interdisciplinary toolkit — experience that now underpins her work at Georgia Tech, bridging ecology, paleontology, data science, and conservation planning.

“From my perspective, there’s an ethical imperative to maintain the world around us,” she said. “Being in nature and recognizing that we’re being good neighbors and good partners to the other species on the planet is just incredibly rewarding. We must leave the next generation a planet that is at least as healthy as the one we inherited."

Life Beyond the Lab

Beyond research and mentoring, McGuire enjoys hiking and biking. Much of her free time during her Copenhagen sabbatical has revolved around her young daughter, who turns 4 this summer.

McGuire looks forward to the occasion, which follows a cherished Danish school tradition: The child circles a picture of the sun once for each year of their life, holding a small Earth, while a parent holds up photos and tells a story from each year. 

Returning Home

As she prepares to return to Georgia Tech in August after a year away, McGuire will resume her fieldwork and continue her conservation initiatives throughout the Southeast. She hopes to draw in collaborators from all across Georgia Tech to help build a truly regional, interdisciplinary effort around biodiversity and climate resilience.

“Within WEPA, we’re really excited to bring more people into this work. For anyone interested in conservation modeling, sensors and AI, policy, or how nature supports communities,” she said, “there’s a place in this regional effort to understand and protect biodiversity.”

The seed grant program, administered by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), reaches faculty members from a diverse array of disciplines due to the generous support provided by broad-based partnerships in addition to the funds provided by the Sustainability Next committee. This year’s partners are the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the College of Design, BBISS, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, and the Institute for Data Engineering and Science.

The goal of the program is to nurture promising research areas for future large-scale collaborative sustainability research, research translation, and/or high-impact outreach; to provide mid-career faculty with leadership and community-building opportunities; and to broaden and strengthen the Georgia Tech sustainability community as a whole. The call for proposals was modeled after the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research’s Moving Teams Forward and Forming Teams programs.

This year’s seed grant awards align with the four main thematic areas in which BBISS aims to enhance Georgia Tech’s research to address some of our most pressing sustainability challenges:

• AI and Sustainability, and the Sustainability of AI Infrastructure.
• Climate Science, Technology, and Solutions.
• Healthy Environments and Sustainable Resource Use.
• Resilience and Regeneration.

The 2026 Sustainability Next Seed Grant awards are:

Forming Teams:

• Actualize Shallow Geothermal Systems for Decentralized Heating. Principal Investigator (PI): Sheng Dai.
• Building Community University Research Capacity for PFAS Testing and Treatment. PI: Ruth C. Yow. Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs): Joe Bozeman, Yongsheng Chen, and Ahmed Ibrahim Yunus.
• A Global Sustainability Analysis of Places “Urbanizing from Within.” PI: Gregory Randolph. Co‑PIs: Sabina Dewan, Yiyi He, John Taylor, and Celine Vacchiani‑Marcuzzo.
• Creating a Refusal Taxonomy to Explore Alternate Computing Practices. PI: Richmond Wong. Co‑PIs: Heidi Biggs and Carl DiSalvo.
• Demystifying Data Centers: Examining Georgia Tech’s Coda HPCC in the Context of Sustainability and Resilience. PI: Scott Duncan. Co-PIs: Jung-Ho Lewe and David Solano Sarmiento.
• Physical Transport of Sunlight‑Exposed Dissolved Organic Carbon in the New Arctic. PI: Lilian Dove. Co‑PI: Jennifer Bowen.

Moving Teams Forward:

• Agentic AI Digital Twins for Hurricane Resilience in Coastal Georgia. PI: Ali Sarhadi.
• CLEAR‑SE: Co‑Creating a Center‑Scale Network for Advancing Collaborative, Long‑Term Action Research on Community‑Led Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction in the Southeast. PI: Sofía Pérez‑Guzmán. Co‑PI: Jennifer Hirsch.
• Data Center Effects on Communities in Georgia’s Black Belt. PI: Cindy Kaiying Lin. Co‑PIs: Joe Bozeman, Anthony Harding, Allen Hyde, Nicole Kennard, Jung-Ho Lewe, and Ahmed Saeed.
• Reimagining Southern Forests: Enabling Cost‑Effective Sustainable Production of High‑Value Climate‑Ready Southern Pines. PI: Caitlin Petro. Co‑PIs: Lucas Clay, Ulrika Egertsdotter, and Joel Kostka.
• Human‑Technology Collaborations: Towards Sustainable and Inclusive Food Systems. PI: Rosemarie Santa Gonzalez. Co‑PIs: Ashutosh Dhekne, Sylivia Janicki, Nicole Kennard, Yaman Sangar, and Abigale Stangl.
• Guiding Transportation with Community Action through Research, Education, and Service (GT‑CARES). PI: Rounaq Basu. Co-PIs: Sofía Pérez‑Guzmán, Jennifer Hirsch, and Scott Moffat.
• Instability‑Resolved Ocean Mixing for Climate Prediction and Climate Solutions. PI: Suhas S. Jain. Co‑PIs: Mohammad Mohaghar, and Donald Webster.
• Buildings Next: Forming a Transdisciplinary Consortium for Sustainable Building Innovation. PI: Paula Gomez. Co‑PI: Allison Bridges.
• Paper and Natural Dye Living Exhibition. PI: Anna Doll. Co‑PI: Virginia Howell.

Growing up in the Bahamas, Javaz Rolle noticed something that would later shape his research career. 

Whether it's paper used in packaging or metals designed for structural applications, manufacturers rely on testing to understand how materials will perform before they reach the real world. 

It was Ferguson’s own first manufacturing industry job at Glidden Paint in high school that tipped a row of dominoes, clearing his way out of poverty. Following next in the Hall County native’s favor was his receiving the Pell Grant and HOPE Grant, which led to his associate’s degree and first job in education.

Since then, Ferguson has spent the better part of three decades advancing workforce preparation and education access in Georgia, first as chief information officer for the Technical College System of Georgia, and now through his current roles at Tech.

“Access to higher education changed the trajectory of my life. The question now is how we build systems that create those same opportunities for others — whether someone starts their career right out of high school, earns credentials while working, or returns later to pursue advanced technical education or engineering. We need to create flexible pathways that develop talent at every stage of life.”

Steven Ferguson

Forged in Manufacturing

Ferguson was born into a family of “makers,” who got by on odd jobs and money from their small bait and tackle shop on Lake Lanier and later peddling a variety of goods. At a young age, Ferguson learned salesmanship and picked up the tinkering spirit.

“My dad was always entrepreneurial, and I think you might even consider us manufacturers, always making fishing equipment or other things,” said Ferguson. “From a very young age, I was out making jig heads, tying flies, and bagging hooks or sinkers. It was definitely in my blood.”

When he was in 10th grade, a teacher nominated Ferguson for a new youth apprenticeship program. That opportunity ultimately led to his role as an information technology apprentice at Glidden Paint, which became Ferguson’s first job in the manufacturing industry. The job was a perfect fit for Ferguson, who enjoyed learning more about the manufacturing process and the practical outlet for his computing knowledge.

He continued working there until he began studying computer science at North Georgia College and State University. Later, he transferred to Gainesville College (GC) to participate in a joint enrollment program designed to lead to eventual enrollment for a bachelor’s degree at Tech.

However, before Ferguson completed his time at GC, he had an associate’s degree and, more importantly, a job offer. GC wanted him to train others for careers in information technology.

Read Full Story on the Enrollment Management News Page

“It’s not just about creating jobs, it’s about filling them,” says Tom Kurfess, Regents’ Professor in mechanical engineering and executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI). “To do that, we need to show students how exciting and innovative manufacturing can be. Manufacturing has really changed over the past few years. Today, going from an idea to a physical part is much easier to do. It is fun and exciting to bring ideas to life and to actually hold the results in your hands.”

GTMI is working to reignite student interest in the art and science of making through its new K–12 initiative: the Advanced Manufacturing Pathways (AMP) Program. Modeled after Georgia Tech’s Rural CS Initiative, AMP empowers schools with faculty expertise, cutting-edge equipment, and a hands-on curriculum to give students early exposure to the tools, technologies, and creativity behind modern manufacturing while building a pipeline of future talent ready to thrive in high-tech careers.

Funded by the Southwest Georgia Regional Commission (SWGRC), AMP is kicking off in three school districts this fall — Decatur County, Thomas County, and the city of Thomasville  — with plans to expand to additional schools in the spring of 2026. The program will start by engaging more than 200 students through hands-on learning, virtual instruction, and in-person lab experiences led by Georgia Tech researchers and faculty.

“Here in Southwest Georgia, we believe that opportunities like this are vital for integrated learning in schools and for growing our future workforce,” says Beka Shiver, economic development and transportation planner for SWGRC. “Workforce development and K-12 integration are at the heart of our Southwest Georgia Ecosystem Building Project, and we are so pleased to be able to provide funding for this program.”

The launch of the AMP Program is centered around Design, Build, Race, a course putting a modern spin on the classic pinewood derby. Students will use digital design, 3D printing, and machining to build and race custom cars, while also learning how to collect and analyze performance data to improve their designs and predict outcomes. The course blends engineering with data science, sparking curiosity and showing students how modern manufacturing is powered by both technical skills and smart data. 

“This program delivers real-world industry experience to students while strengthening the talent pipeline that drives innovation, competitiveness, and resilience in advanced manufacturing”, says Steven Ferguson, interim director of operations at GTMI and one of the project’s leaders. “After more than 20 years of driving education and workforce development innovation, I’m more energized than ever to help launch the AMP program to open doors for students and advance U.S. manufacturing leadership.”

Building the Blueprint

Before it evolved into the AMP Program, Design, Build, Race was a course developed by GTMI research engineer Kyle Saleeby in 2023. Originating in GTMI’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF), the course was designed to introduce Morehouse and Georgia Tech students to the possibilities of modern manufacturing through digital design, 3D printing, machining, and competitive creativity.

“Even after the first week, it was powerful to watch students discover how exciting it is to design and manufacture a competition-ready car in a matter of hours,” said Saleeby. “That’s when I knew we were onto something special.”

Saleeby teamed up with Ferguson to transform the course into a broader initiative. The duo engaged colleagues from STEM@GTRI and secured funding from SWGRC to modify the curriculum and scale the course for a high school audience. 

“We are thrilled that we have been able to take the lessons learned during the development of the Rural Computer Science Initiative and expand opportunities for students in Southwest Georgia,” says Sean Mulvanity, a senior research associate in the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Mulvanity is one of the founders of the initiative and has been a key contributor to the AMP Program. “We hope this program can grow and expose students across the state to the field of advanced manufacturing.” 

Though granted by the SWGRC, funds for the program were provided by Georgia Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing, a statewide initiative founded by GTMI and Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute to advance AI-driven manufacturing.

To bring AMP into classrooms, Southern Regional Technical College helped set up labs and provide technical support, ensuring schools were ready to launch. 

“At all levels, the community has rallied around this program,” says Saleeby. “Providing students with a unique experience learning advanced manufacturing technologies will open countless career opportunities. I cannot wait to see where they go.” 

They’re in our TVs, refrigerators, and washing machines, helping us live comfortable lives. They also help us stay alive as part of the medical network, used in pacemakers, blood pressure monitors, and MRI machines, among other things. Also, our national economic and defense systems rely on them. Basically, semiconductors control and manage the flow of information in the machinery that keeps the world going.

And right now, at Georgia Tech, researchers are working to innovate chip technology to ensure that U.S. semiconductor development is globally competitive, reliable, sustainable, and resilient, today and in the future.

“If you look at semiconductors, or the whole area of computing, it spans across Georgia Tech — across many different schools and disciplines,” said Arijit Raychudhury, professor and Steve W. Chaddick Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “Starting with physics and chemistry, where we essentially learn how different types of materials will react, to materials science and engineering, to electrical engineering and computer engineering, to computer science.”

It's a diverse, multidisciplinary enterprise from bottom to top, Raychudhury noted. And there is still plenty of room at the bottom, as theoretical physicist Richard P. Feynman famously said more than 60 years ago, predicting that one day we’d be making things at the atomic level. We are. It’s a familiar realm to Victor Fung and his lab, where they are designing new materials for semiconductors from the ground up, atom by atom.

“We are interested in exploring how to translate the latest advances in AI and machine learning to aid in accelerating computational materials simulations and materials discovery,” said Fung, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science. “We’ve been developing methods which can accurately predict a wide range of materials’ properties, to greatly facilitate high-throughput materials screening.”

Fung’s lab is using AI to discover previously unstudied materials with the electronic properties to build into chips. This approach to creating “designer” semiconductors would be significantly faster and cover more of the materials space than current methods.

Improving the Landscape

Smaller, more efficient, and more powerful are all part of the constantly evolving landscape in semiconductor research and development. It’s a very expensive landscape. While many chips are about the size of a fingernail, they are among the most complex human-made objects on Earth. Just building a semiconductor fabrication factory costs billions of dollars.

For a chemical engineer like Michael Filler, that sounds like opportunity.

“Chemical engineers think about how we produce products on a massive scale,” said Filler, associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and associate director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN).

Filler, whose research involves the growing of semiconductor components, like transistors, from seed particles, is aiming to help democratize the process of chip development, bringing down the cost substantially while maintaining performance. In a not too distant future, that could mean an individual at home printing a chip on a machine similar to a 3D printer.

“Imagine a laser printer that can literally spit out custom electronics in a matter of minutes,” Filler said. “We’re big believers in the individual’s ability to be creative and know what they want to build for their applications. Ultimately, we’re interested in giving makers and prototypers opportunities to customize electronics.”

He’s in the right place for the far-reaching research he has in mind, adding, “We are so blessed with great facilities at Georgia Tech. It would be hard to imagine working somewhere else, because very few places have the diversity and quality of tooling we have here.”

IEN, which facilitates much of the semiconductor research at Georgia Tech, is based in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, with its state-of-the-art micro/nano fabrication facilities such as the shared cleanroom space and a laser machine lab for micromachining.

But it is the range of expertise and creativity among faculty and students who are making IEN and Georgia Tech a thought leader in semiconductor research. This is evidenced by Tech’s recent grant of $65.7 million from the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Defense Research Projects Agency to launch two new interdisciplinary research centers.

Events like Georgia Tech Chip Day (May 2) and Nanowire Week, an international gathering happening in Atlanta in October, also speak to Tech’s growing influence in this area.

Answering the Call

The Covid-19 pandemic clarified just how difficult it can be to make more chips. A shortage of semiconductors affected the supply of phones, computers, and other commonly used items during the global shutdown. Increased demand, depleted reserves, and too few manufacturing plants and workers significantly crippled the supply chain.

“The high degree of geographic concentration in certain parts of the semiconductor supply chain has recently created a heightened risk of supply interruptions,” said Chip White, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). “Such interruptions and resulting wild fluctuations in semiconductor demand can threaten the nation’s public health, defense, and economic security.”

With that in mind, translational supply chain research is going on in several places on campus, White said, including the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute and the NSF AI Research Institute for Advances in Optimization. White and his colleagues are developing software platforms for stress testing manufacturing supply chains. The goal is to identify vulnerabilities and risk mitigation procedures to design and operate next generation supply chains for critical industries such as the semiconductor industry, to improve global competitiveness and strike a balance between market forces and national security.

In an effort to address and feed the next generation demand for chips, the Biden administration recently launched a massive effort to outcompete China in semiconductor manufacturing, offering $39 billion in funding incentives for companies seeking to build plants in the U.S.

Another related area of importance in the ongoing development of semiconductors is growing the workforce of the future, and that includes a new wave of researchers. This is a role that Jennifer Hasler takes seriously.

“I have a strong interest and belief in mentoring,” said Hasler, ECE professor and founder of the Integrated Computational Electronics lab at Georgia Tech. She’s proven, theoretically at least, that the technology already exists to build a silicon-based version of the human cerebral cortex (which would cost billions of dollars to design and build), but one of her favorite roles is working with new, young faculty.

“It’s a personal thing for me, but it’s one of the coolest things I’m involved in,” she said. “When they come to Georgia Tech, they see how big this place is, bigger than a company. I like to say to them, ‘Let’s calm down, take a breath, you’re good, so let’s go make some cool stuff. Let’s get some momentum going.’”

For Raychowdhury, director of the new Center for the Co-Design of Cognitive Systems (part of the JUMP 2.0 program), developing the skilled workforce of the future means answering the call of the nation.

“This is one of the largest ECE departments in the country, with many, many talented students,” he said. “And given the need and shortage of skilled professionals in this particular area, I think it’s critical for us to create that kind of pipeline.” Last year, ECE undergraduate students started taking a new, two-semester course, sponsored by Apple, in which they actually build microprocessors from scratch.

“This is completely new,” Raychowdhury said. “It’s expensive to offer this course, but we plan to keep doing it and we’re in conversations with other companies that want to invest in workforce development. So, in addition to doing fantastic research, we want to be sensitive to the needs of the country and a new generation.”

As data center development accelerates across Georgia and beyond, understanding the relationship between AI infrastructure and water systems is becoming increasingly urgent. The BBISS Demystifying Data Centers Insights Series on March 27 focused on this issue, bringing together perspectives from engineering, utilities, and infrastructure planning. Moderated by Ameet Pinto, BBISS faculty director for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration, the discussion highlighted the water impacts of data centers and the need for systems thinking and collaboration across disciplines.

Why Systems Thinking Matters

A recurring theme was the mismatch between AI infrastructure and water systems. AI services are ubiquitous and scalable, while water resources are local, physically constrained, and managed by regionally fragmented utility systems. Data centers can be deployed rapidly, but water infrastructure evolves slowly. These differences complicate how impacts are measured and managed.

Water usage is more complex than it appears. While discussions often focus on water used directly for cooling, this represents only part of the total footprint. Significant water is used indirectly through electricity generation and the manufacturing of the computing hardware and cooling systems installed in data centers. As noted by Akanksha Menon,  assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, distinguishing between direct, indirect, and embodied water use shows that impacts extend far beyond individual facilities.

These complexities make isolated solutions insufficient. Reducing water use in one location doesn’t necessarily reduce overall demand. For example, Douglas County’s collaboration with Google, as presented by Brian Keel, deputy director of Engineering for Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority, has invested in alternative water sources, such as treating wastewater from the Sweetwater Creek facility for non-potable cooling.

Yet the growing energy and water demands driven by accelerating AI use remain a major challenge. In particular, managing water as a finite resource becomes increasingly important because energy can be generated through different methods, but water cannot simply be created. Such complexity highlights the need for a systems approach to navigate overlapping and conflicting issues.

Why Collaboration Is Essential

The session also underscored that no single discipline or entity can fully address these challenges. Douglas County’s partnership with Google highlights not only collaboration between local agencies and industry, but also the need for coordination beyond individual jurisdictions, as water used for power generation or sourced outside the immediate region can create indirect pressures elsewhere.

John Ikeda, chief mission officer for the Water Environment Federation, discussed governance challenges associated with data center water use. Ikeda underlined the challenges in measurement and governance, noting that water impacts can be counterintuitive. While efforts that appear water-saving, such as avoiding on-site water use, can increase indirect water demand through additional electricity use, water-based cooling may reduce total systemwide demand. These complexities reveal the limits of single metrics and the need for frameworks that account for direct, indirect, and life-cycle impacts. Governance challenges can arise from complex practical issues, including rural communities’ limited experience working with industrial partners and broader social resistance to AI and AI infrastructure, which once again calls for large-scale collaboration.

The broader takeaway is that the challenges linking AI and water are deeply tied to structural mismatches between digital AI infrastructure and physical water systems: ubiquitous AI services versus physically constrained water resources; rapid data center growth versus the slower development of water infrastructure; and global digital demand versus regionally concentrated environmental impacts.

As these gaps complicate measurement, planning, and governance, the discussion highlighted the need for broader, systems-level perspectives and collaboration across disciplines and sectors, including engineering, computing, utilities, policy, and community stakeholders. Sustainable data center development depends on perspectives that consider water, energy, infrastructure, and community resilience together.
 

The Earth and Atmospheric Sciences 2026 Clough Lecture, co-sponsored by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, featured Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and author. Marvel opened a space for conversation about how we understand, feel, and communicate climate change and sustainability.

The evening opened with remarks from Georgia Tech College of Sciences Dean Susan Lozier, who recognized President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough for his support in making the lecture series possible. Alexander Robel, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, then introduced Marvel, describing her work as being at the intersection of climate science and public communication. Robel highlighted Marvel’s “warmth and fearless honesty” in her insistence “that science and feeling are not opposites.”

Based on her recent book Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, Marvel’s lecture questioned a long-standing assumption in science: that objectivity requires emotional distance. She argued instead that climate science is not only about data and models, but also about human experience. Scientific inquiry, she suggested, does not exclude emotion; rather, it can be informed and motivated by it.

Marvel began by reflecting on Earth’s uniqueness as a habitable planet, shaped by a delicate balance of atmosphere, temperature, and position in the solar system. The sense of awe inspired by the planet’s unique position, she noted, is often the starting point for scientific curiosity as well as a sense of commitment to a sustainable Earth. From there, she moved to consider the more difficult emotions, including anger and guilt, that may arise as the stability of that system becomes increasingly uncertain.

To illustrate how understanding of climate evolves, Marvel walked through a range of potential explanations for changes in the Earth’s climate — from orbital shifts and solar variation to volcanic activity and deforestation. What stood out was her skillful interweaving of science and storytelling. For example, she noted how the atmospheric conditions created by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia influenced European artistic expression. Citing the hyper-real intensity of the sky’s color in Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting, The Scream, Marvel highlighted the role of human feeling and imagination in making sense of complex environmental change. 

Next, Marvel also suggested that climate modeling is not simply a technical exercise. It can be deeply intertwined with narratives about the future. Different assumptions about human behavior, policy decisions, and technological development produce different climate outcomes. In this sense, models reflect not only data, but also the stories societies tell about where they are headed and what future they would like to have.

The lecture concluded with Marvel emphasizing the importance of framing climate challenges in ways that connect with lived experience and a sustainable future, suggesting that storytelling can help inspire more meaningful communication and action. She pointed to the “hero’s journey” as one framework for climate storytelling — one in which moments of difficulty and uncertainty are inseparable from growth, purpose, and joy, and where action becomes central to moving toward a better future.

Marvel now works with Project Drawdown, who have developed the Drawdown Explorer, an open-access platform that helps individuals and governments assess everyday decisions and public policies in terms of climate outcomes. The Drawdown Explorer frames daily practices as part of a broader journey toward a more sustainable future.

The lecture offered an engaging and inspiring perspective, encouraging the audience to think more actively about how sustainability is communicated, what stories are told, and how emotional engagement can contribute to meaningful climate action.

As an energy economist, I am often asked about what contributes to gas prices and what different policies can do to affect them.

The price of a retail gallon of gas is the sum of four things: the cost of crude oil, refining, distribution and marketing, and taxes.

In nationwide figures from January 2026, crude oil accounted for about 51% of the pump price, refining roughly 20%, distribution and marketing about 11% and taxes about 18%. That mix shifts with conditions: When crude oil prices spike, that can drive more than 60% of the price; when the price drops, taxes and logistics are larger shares of the cost.

Crude Oil is the Biggest Ingredient

Because the price of crude oil is the largest element, most of the price at the pump is derived from the global oil market.

Usually, big swings in crude prices come mainly from shifts in global demand and expectations – not from supply disruptions, according to widely cited research in 2009 by the economist Lutz Kilian.

But what is happening in early 2026 with the war in Iran is one of the exceptions: a classic supply shock. Severe disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on Middle East oil infrastructure have taken millions of barrels a day off the global market.

Most drivers generally can’t quickly reduce how much they drive or how much gas they use when prices rise, so gasoline demand doesn’t change much in the short run. That means a jump in crude costs tends to result in people paying more rather than driving less.

Refining, Regulations, and the California Puzzle

Refining turns crude into gasoline at industrial scale. The U.S. doesn’t have a single gasoline market, though. Roughly a quarter of U.S. gasoline is a cleaner-burning blend of petroleum-derived chemicals called “reformulated gasoline,” which is required in urban areas across 17 states and the District of Columbia to reduce smog.

California uses an even stricter formulation that few out-of-state refineries make. California is also geographically isolated: No pipelines bring gasoline in from other U.S. refining regions.

California’s gasoline prices have long run above the national average, explained in part by higher state taxes and stricter environmental rules. But since a refinery fire in Torrance, California, in 2015 reduced production capacity, the state’s prices have been about 20 to 30 cents a gallon higher than what those factors would indicate.

Energy economist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Severin Borenstein has called this the “mystery gasoline surcharge” and attributes it to the fact that there isn’t as much competition between refineries or gas stations in California as in other states. California’s own Division of Petroleum Market Oversight says the surcharge cost the state’s drivers about $59 billion from 2015 to 2024. It’s not exactly clear who is getting that money, but it could be gas stations themselves or refineries, through complex contracts with gas stations.

Getting the Gas Into Your Car

The distribution and marketing category covers the costs of everything involved in getting the gasoline from the refinery gate to your tank.

Gasoline moves by pipeline, ship, rail and truck to wholesale terminals, and then by local delivery truck to service stations.

At the retailer’s end, the key factors are station rent and labor, the cost to buy gasoline in bulk to be able to sell it, credit card fees of as much as 6 to 10 cents a gallon at current prices, and franchise fees paid to the national brand, such as Sunoco or ExxonMobil, for permission to put their branding on the gas station.

Most gas station operators net only a few cents per gallon on fuel itself – which is why many gas stations are really convenience stores with pumps out front. Borenstein and some of his collaborators have also documented that retail gas prices rise quickly when wholesale costs climb but fall slowly when wholesale costs drop.

The Question of Gas Tax Holidays

The federal government charges a tax on fuel, of 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.3 cents a gallon for diesel. States charge their own taxes, ranging from 70.9 cents a gallon for gas in California to 8.95 cents in Alaska.

When gas prices rise, many politicians start talking about temporarily suspending their state’s gas tax. That does reduce prices, but not as much as politicians – or consumers – might hope. Research on past gas tax holidays has found that consumers get about 79% of the reduction in gas taxes. That means oil companies and fuel retailers keep about one-fifth of the tax cut for themselves rather than passing that savings to the public.

Gas tax holidays also reduce funding for what the taxes are designed to pay for, typically roads and bridges. That pushes road and bridge upkeep costs onto future drivers and general taxpayers.

There is an additional problem, too: Taxes on gasoline are supposed to charge drivers for some of the costs their driving imposes on everyone else – carbon emissions, local air pollution, congestion and crashes. But Borenstein has found that U.S. fuel tax levels are already far below the true cost to society. Removing the tax on drivers effectively raises the costs for everyone else.

The Jones Act: A Small Number That Adds Up

The 1920 Jones Act is a federal law that requires cargo moving between U.S. ports to travel on vessels built and registered in the U.S., owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed primarily by U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Of the world’s 7,500 oil tankers, only 54 meet this requirement. Only 43 of these can transport refined fuels such as gasoline.

So, despite significant refining capacity on the Gulf Coast, some U.S. gasoline is exported overseas even as the Northeast imports fuel, in part reflecting the relatively high cost of moving fuel between U.S. ports.

Economists Ryan Kellogg and Rich Sweeney estimate that the law raises East Coast gasoline prices by about a penny and a half per gallon on average, costing drivers roughly $770 million a year. In light of the war’s effect on gas prices, the Trump administration has temporarily suspended the Jones Act requirements – an action more commonly taken when hurricanes knock out Gulf Coast refineries and pipeline networks.

What Moves the Number

The result of all these factors is that the price that drivers see at the pump mostly reflects the global price of crude, plus a stack of domestic costs, only some of which are inefficient.

Tax holidays give a partial, short-lived rebate. Jones Act waivers trim pennies, though permanent repeal may cause more fundamental changes, such as reduced rail and truck transport of all goods, which could lower costs, emissions and infrastructure damage associated with cargo transportation. Harmonizing fuel blends across states and seasons may lower prices somewhat, but likely at the expense of increased emissions.

Ultimately, the best protection against oil price shocks is a more efficient gas-burning vehicle, or one that doesn’t burn gasoline at all. In the meantime, the best I can offer as an economist is clarity about what that $4.30 actually buys.

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

Marta Hatzell to Lead BBISS External Partnership Efforts

Marta Hatzell has been appointed as faculty director for Strategic Engagement and Partnerships. Hatzell is a Woodruff Professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Her research builds the foundation for sustainable food, energy, and water systems through electrified catalysis and separations.

Across institutes, research centers, federal agencies, national laboratories, and industry partnerships, Hatzell’s work has operated at the intersection of research, infrastructure, policy, and implementation. She has worked closely with power utilities, industry partners, and federal sponsors. In this role, Hatzell will help shape BBISS’s external-facing strategy involving federal agencies, national laboratories, and university partners. She will bring her experience and expertise to steward strategic partnerships and strengthen large-scale collaborative research efforts, working closely with Ameet Pinto, faculty director for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration.

Xiao Liu to Advance AI and Resilience Research at BBISS

Xiao Liu has been appointed as faculty director for Resilience and AI. Liu is the David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research advances statistical methods and machine learning, with applications spanning wildfire risk analysis, climate and environmental modeling, infrastructure systems, and data-driven resilience research.

Liu’s appointment is part of BBISS’s growing focus on connecting AI, resilience, and sustainability research across disciplines, particularly in areas related to sustainable AI and AI for climate and sustainability science. His work on wildfire ignition risk quantification for power delivery networks, wildfire spread modeling, and remote-sensing analysis of wildfire aerosols demonstrates a commitment to using machine learning and AI to address complex environmental and infrastructure challenges. In this role, Liu will lead efforts to advance AI-driven approaches to resilience and will co-steward the AI, Sustainability, and Resilience Initiative in partnership with Josiah Hester, faculty director for Civic Innovation and AI.

Matthew Realff to Lead BBISS Education Initiatives

Matthew J. Realff has been appointed as faculty director for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education. Realff is a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he has served on the faculty since 1993. Realff’s decades of research and education leadership center on advancing sustainable systems, with an emphasis on integrating process systems engineering with environmental and economic analysis. He has contributed to the development of sustainability policy, environmentally informed design, recycling systems, and industry standards.

Realff’s appointment supports BBISS’s ongoing efforts to strengthen interdisciplinary graduate education and workforce development aligned with Georgia Tech’s broader sustainability strategy. His commitment to sustainable systems education and his prior leadership roles, including chair of the Sustainability Education and Curriculum Committee, position him to expand interdisciplinary training and pathways for students who want to tackle sustainability challenges across boundaries.

Beril Toktay, BBISS executive director, said, “I’m delighted to welcome Marta, Xiao, and Matthew to the BBISS faculty leadership team. These appointments greatly expand BBISS’s capacity to address sustainability challenges crossing disciplinary, institutional, and sectoral lines.”

The Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI) at Georgia Tech hosted its Spring 2026 Workshop, “Resilient Forests to Renewable Futures,” on May 11 and 12. The workshop brought together university researchers, scientists, and industry partners to discuss new developments shaping the future of the bioeconomy. 

The $250,000 funding award, made through GRA’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) program, supports the translational work of Ankur Singh, Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Andrés García, Regents’ Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Executive Director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Singh and García are collaborating to develop functional human antibodies against some of the most difficult-to-treat diseases. While antibody therapies already benefit an estimated 20 million patients worldwide, fewer than 10 percent of discovery efforts ultimately yield candidates suitable for clinical use.

This shortfall spans major disease areas — from oncology and autoimmune disorders to heart and metabolism-related conditions and neurological and infectious diseases — limiting therapeutic options for patients. The challenge lies not only in identifying candidate antibodies, but in engineering them to function reliably in the human body.

“The I&E program exists to bridge the gap between a discovery that works in the lab and one that can anchor a company,” said Justin Burns, Chief Innovation Officer and Vice President for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at GRA. “Singh and García are tackling a problem the field has faced for decades: A significant fraction of drug targets remains inaccessible to antibody-based therapies. Our goal is to help move bold, high-potential science toward real-world impact.”

GRA’s model targets a well-known bottleneck in translation. While university labs generate promising technologies, many stall before reaching the marketplace due to a lack of validation and early-stage development. 

Singh and García aim to overcome this barrier by using a proprietary antibody-engineering framework developed in Singh’s laboratory, and supported by an earlier GRA grant. The objective is straightforward: Increase the success rate of discovery efforts so more antibody candidates can advance toward clinical use.

“The implications extend well beyond our laboratory,” said Singh. “By expanding the pipeline of functional human antibodies, we can begin to address diseases that currently lack durable treatment options. GRA’s support is transformative — not only for advancing the science, but for positioning Georgia as a leader in biotechnology innovation.”

The project is built with real-world use in mind, aiming to turn the research into a new company and eventually a clinical product. By testing the idea early and lowering risk, the team hopes to attract investment and move the technology quickly beyond the Institute. 

García emphasized the translational vision of the work. 

“This is a transformative platform technology that overcomes major bottlenecks in antibody discovery and will accelerate and increase the efficiency of this powerful class of therapeutics,” he said.

“This effort is about rethinking how we design antibodies from the ground up — integrating biological insight with engineering principles to produce molecules that are not just viable, but clinically meaningful,” he said. “With GRA’s support, we can de-risk early discovery and create a clearer path from promising concepts to therapies that reach patients.”

 Tracey Mullen, a seasoned biopharma executive, entrepreneur, and antibody discovery and engineering leader currently serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Mosaic Biosciences, is advising the team on translational strategy, commercial development, and company formation. 

“The ability to rapidly generate functional human antibodies in physiologically relevant systems could meaningfully change how therapeutic discovery is approached,” Mullen said. “By moving beyond largely empirical, animal- or screening-heavy workflows and incorporating human-specific, mechanism-informed evaluation earlier in the process, this platform has the potential to generate more relevant antibody candidates and create a stronger path from discovery concept to translational development.”

As global demand for advanced therapeutics grows, efforts like this reflect a broader shift in how innovation moves from bench to bedside — one driven not only by scientific ingenuity, but by targeted investment at critical early stages.

With more than 150 attendees from industry, academia, and research organizations, the event’s high-level engagement underscored the urgency of critical issues facing the energy sector today, including the surging electricity demand, resiliency of the grid, and evolving supply chains, as well as the value of a dedicated space for candid, solutions-oriented dialogue.

“INTERSECT 2026 demonstrated the power of bringing together leaders who are actively shaping the future of energy,” said Laura Taylor, director of EPIcenter. “What began as a forum to explore emerging ideas has grown into a critical platform for aligning perspectives and advancing actionable solutions across the Southeast.”

This year’s program focused on real-world implementation challenges, including managing large-scale load growth and coordinating infrastructure investments to meet demand reliably and affordably. Panels featuring leaders from utilities, global energy corporations, and research organizations emphasized the importance of aligning strategy across sectors to ensure that the Southeast remains competitive and resilient.

Chris Womack, chairman, president, and CEO of Southern Company, delivered the keynote address, highlighting the unprecedented scale of current energy demands. 

“Meeting this moment requires us to think differently — serving growth while ensuring reliability, resilience, and long-term value for our customers and communities,” said Womack.

Launched in 2017, the inaugural INTERSECT conference marked the launch of EPIcenter itself and established Georgia Tech’s commitment to connecting research, industry insight, and policy development. It focused on the need to bridge the gap between rapidly advancing technologies and slower-moving regulatory and market frameworks, a theme that continues to shape its mission today. 

As INTERSECT 2026 concluded, participants pointed to a shared takeaway: With its industrial base, growing population, and integrated energy systems, the Southeast is uniquely positioned to lead in the next phase of the energy transition. With AI-driven power demand and grid infrastructure playing a significant role going forward, it is imperative to bring together the right voices to shape policies and strategies that will connect ideas to action.

The highly competitive Laboratory Placement program is a paid opportunity offered through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships. It provides students from a wide range of disciplines an opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge research at leading facilities, including Argonne National Laboratory, Ames National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Laboratory of the Rockies, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Savannah River National Laboratory.

The program’s 2026 cohort includes 16 Georgia Tech students from disciplines such as artificial intelligence, materials science, aerospace engineering, nuclear engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and physics. Their research placements reflect the interdisciplinary nature of today’s scientific challenges, with projects covering bioinformatics, high-energy and condensed matter physics, accelerator science, environmental management, and advanced materials.

Many of the internships are closely aligned with national energy priorities, with students working in research areas including nuclear energy, hydrogen and chemical systems, materials for energy applications, plasma and fusion sciences, and complex engineered systems.

“Georgia Tech’s deep engagement with the national laboratory system creates unparalleled opportunities for our students to contribute to the future of energy,” said Yuanzhi Tang, executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute. “By connecting interdisciplinary talent with world-class research environments, we are not only advancing discovery but also shaping the next generation of leaders who will drive secure, sustainable, and resilient energy systems.”

Working alongside national lab scientists, students will not only gain access to world-class facilities but benefit from mentorship and professional networks, while contributing to research critical to national security, economic competitiveness, and a more sustainable energy future. 

“These internships demonstrate the strength of Georgia Tech’s relationships across the federal research ecosystem,” said Robert Knotts, executive director of Federal Relations in the Office of Institute Relations. “They provide a direct pathway for students to engage in public service through mission-driven research at national laboratories — while strengthening connections that are vital to advancing national priorities in energy, security, and innovation.”