The global ranking represents a substantial advance from 2024, when Georgia Tech was placed in the 126–150 band. The latest results position Georgia Tech among the world's top 100 universities for psychology and among the top 40 nationally. Georgia Tech is also the highest-ranked university in Georgia for psychology, ahead of both public and private institutions in the State.
The recognition follows improvements in several measures of research and education, particularly research quality, teaching, and international engagement.
“This recognition is encouraging, not simply because of the ranking itself, but because it reflects the collective efforts of our faculty, students, postdoctoral researchers, staff, and collaborators,” said Tansu Celikel, professor and chair of the School of Psychological and Brain Sciences. “Our focus is on asking important questions, conducting rigorous research, and preparing the next generation of scientists. It is gratifying to see that work gain greater international visibility.”
One of the most notable developments is Georgia Tech's improvement in research quality, which rose from 77.2 in 2024 to 86.5 in 2026 on THE's 100-point scale.
The 2026 research quality score also compares favorably with other leading universities in Georgia. Emory University received a score of 68.3, while the University of Georgia scored 74.8.
THE's research quality indicators consider citation impact, research strength, research excellence, and research influence. Together, they provide a multidimensional assessment of scholarly contributions and their influence on subsequent research.
Georgia Tech also recorded gains in teaching, with its score increasing from 32.3 to 43.9, and research environment, which rose from 34.6 to 40.0. Its international outlook score increased from 56.1 to 59.3.
“These rankings offer one perspective on academic performance, and no single measure can capture the full value of a research and educational community,” Celikel said. “What matters most is that our work contributes meaningful knowledge, creates opportunities for our students, and helps address important questions about the brain, mind, and behavior.”
The School's research and educational mission spans five complementary programs: Cognition and Brain Science, Adult Development and Aging, Engineering Psychology, Quantitative Psychology, and Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology.
Together, these programs address fundamental and applied questions about human experience.
Cognition and Brain Science investigates the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying sensation, perception, learning, memory, attention, and decision-making. Adult Development and Aging examines how cognition, behavior, and everyday functioning change across adulthood and later life.
Engineering Psychology focuses on the interaction between people and technology, including the design of systems that support human abilities, performance, and safety. Quantitative Psychology develops and applies statistical, mathematical, and computational methods to understand complex behavioral and psychological phenomena. Industrial/Organizational Psychology studies behavior in workplaces and organizations, including employee well-being, teamwork, leadership, and performance.
These areas provide complementary perspectives on how people think, learn, work, interact with technology, and adapt throughout life. They also create opportunities for collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries.
“Our five programs reflect the breadth of psychological science and the different ways it contributes to understanding people and the world around us,” Celikel said. “What makes our School distinctive is not only the strength of these individual areas, but also the opportunities for them to work together and connect with Georgia Tech's expertise in engineering, computing, and the sciences.”
The School's position within a leading science and engineering institution creates unique opportunities to advance psychological and brain sciences through interdisciplinary research, technological innovation, and collaboration.
Research at PBS spans experimental, computational, theoretical, and applied approaches, connecting discoveries about neural circuits and cognitive processes with research on human development, decision-making, workplaces, and human-centered technologies.
Over the past four years, PBS has significantly expanded its research infrastructure by establishing three Centers of Excellence focused on Navigation, Computational Cognition, and Human, Robot & AI Teaming, alongside new core facilities supporting the multimodal observation and control of brain and behavior.
These investments bring together expertise across psychology, neuroscience, engineering, computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence, creating new opportunities to investigate fundamental questions about how brains and intelligent systems perceive, learn, decide, and act.
The Centers of Excellence provide complementary platforms for interdisciplinary discovery. Research on navigation connects spatial cognition, neural mechanisms, and adaptive behavior. Computational cognition brings quantitative and computational approaches to understanding how minds and brains process information. Human, Robot & AI Teaming examines how people and intelligent technologies can interact, coordinate, and collaborate effectively.
Complementing these initiatives, the School's core research facilities support integrated approaches to studying brain and behavior across multiple levels of analysis. By enabling multimodal measurement and experimental control, these capabilities help researchers connect neural activity, cognitive processes, and observable behavior within increasingly sophisticated experimental settings.
Together, the centers and facilities strengthen the School's capacity to pursue ambitious scientific questions, support collaborative research, and provide students and early-career scientists with access to advanced research methods and technologies.
“We are working hard to create an environment where researchers can pursue questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries,” said Celikel. “Our Centers of Excellence and shared research facilities are investments in people and possibilities. They help us bring different perspectives together, support our students and colleagues, and pursue scientific questions that would be difficult to address within any single discipline.”
These developments reflect a broader commitment to building a collaborative research community in which fundamental discoveries about the brain, mind, and behavior can inform, and be informed by, advances in technology and computational science.
The 2026 THE psychology rankings evaluated 694 universities across 64 countries and territories using 18 performance indicators organized into five categories: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry engagement, and international outlook.
While these rankings assess institutional performance rather than individual academic schools independently, they provide an international benchmark for Georgia Tech's development in psychological and brain sciences.
For PBS, the milestone offers an opportunity to recognize the contributions of its community while maintaining a focus on the scientific questions, educational mission, and collaborations that drive its work.
“We appreciate this recognition, but our ambitions extend well beyond rankings,” Celikel said. “Our priority is to foster an environment where talented people can pursue important scientific questions, collaborate generously, and produce research that advances our understanding of the human brain and behavior. If we do those things well, recognition will follow.”
Learn more through the 2026 Times Higher Education Psychology Rankings, the ranking methodology, and the PBS graduate programs.
]]>Georgia Tech’s School of Psychological and Brain Sciences rose to No. 82 worldwide and No. 36 nationally in the 2026 Times Higher Education psychology rankings, reflecting improvements in research quality, teaching, and international engagement, alongside expanded interdisciplinary research through its five academic programs, three Centers of Excellence, and advanced research facilities.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study, “Neuromodulatory control of cortical function: Cell-type-specific regulation of neuronal information transfer,” reveals that dopamine and acetylcholine, two chemical messengers essential for learning, attention, and cognitive flexibility, can fundamentally alter how neurons encode and transmit information.
The international research team, led by Tansu Celikel of Georgia Tech's School of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Fleur Zeldenrust of Radboud University in the Netherlands, found that these chemical signals influence different types of neurons in distinct ways. Their effects extend beyond changes in individual neuronal responses to reshape how multiple functional properties are organized and interact.
Neurons process incoming information and communicate through electrical impulses known as action potentials. For decades, scientists have investigated how neuromodulators such as dopamine and acetylcholine influence this process, often focusing on whether these chemicals increase or decrease neuronal activity.
“Changes in neuronal activity alone do not necessarily tell us how effectively neurons process information,” explains Dr. Celikel. “A neuron that fires more frequently is not necessarily transmitting more useful information about its inputs. Likewise, a neuron that becomes less active may still play an important role in shaping how information is represented in the brain.”
The new study moves beyond conventional measures of neuronal activity by examining how neuromodulators affect multiple interacting properties, including the electrical characteristics of neuronal membranes, the generation of action potentials, adaptation to sustained stimulation, and sensitivity to incoming signals.
“Rather than acting like simple volume controls that turn neuronal activity up or down, dopamine and acetylcholine function as reconfiguration signals,” says Dr. Celikel. “They change not only how individual neurons respond, but also how the different components of neuronal information processing work together.”
To investigate these effects, the researchers analyzed electrical recordings from excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the somatosensory cortex of mice, a brain region involved in processing sensory information, including touch.
Excitatory neurons generally promote activity within neural circuits, while inhibitory neurons help regulate and constrain that activity. The balance between these two populations is essential for normal brain function.
The researchers examined how activating three specific receptors, dopamine D1 and D2 receptors and the acetylcholine-sensitive muscarinic M1 receptor, influenced how neurons encode and transmit information.
Their findings revealed striking differences between neuronal populations and receptor types.
“Activating D1 receptors increased the amount of stimulus information transmitted by inhibitory neurons, while activating M1 receptors significantly reduced information transfer in excitatory neurons,” explains Dr. Celikel. “D2 receptor activation produced more modest effects, some of which were comparable to normal experimental variability.”
These findings challenge the assumption that increasing neuronal excitability necessarily improves information processing.
“What matters is not simply how much a neuron fires, but how effectively its activity represents incoming information,” adds Dr. Celikel. “Our results suggest that neuromodulators can selectively redistribute information processing across different neuronal populations.”
Another important finding challenges traditional assumptions about how neurons are classified according to their functional characteristics.
Scientists commonly group neurons into functional categories based on properties such as their electrical activity, membrane characteristics, and responses to stimulation. These classifications are often treated as relatively stable.
However, the researchers discovered that activating neuromodulatory receptors reorganized how neurons clustered according to these properties.
Neurons that were functionally similar under baseline conditions could become more distinct following receptor activation, while previously dissimilar neurons could develop more closely related functional profiles.
“Our findings suggest that a neuron's functional identity is not entirely fixed, but depends in part on the chemical environment in which it operates,” says Dr. Celikel. “Rather than belonging to rigid, discrete functional categories, neurons may occupy a more flexible continuum of functional states.”
The researchers also discovered that neuromodulation reorganized the relationships among neuronal properties in different ways depending on the cell type.
Across the recorded populations, inhibitory neurons generally showed greater statistical coordination among their functional characteristics following receptor activation. Excitatory neurons, by contrast, exhibited a more selective reorganization, including greater independence between their sensitivity to incoming signals and other intrinsic properties.
This distinction suggests that neuromodulatory signals can shape the functional organization of neuronal populations in fundamentally different ways.
Together, the findings point to an additional dimension of neuronal regulation: brain chemicals influence not only individual cellular properties, but also how those properties relate to one another, potentially expanding the range of computational states available to neural circuits.
Dopamine and acetylcholine play essential roles in attention, learning, memory, and behavioral flexibility. Disruptions in neuromodulatory signaling are also implicated in neurological and psychiatric conditions, including Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia.
Understanding how these chemical systems reorganize neuronal information processing may help researchers develop more comprehensive explanations of how the brain adapts to changing behavioral demands and how these processes may be altered in disease.
The findings also highlight the importance of studying neuronal function beyond conventional measurements such as firing rates or excitability. By examining how different neuronal properties interact, researchers can gain a more complete understanding of how chemical signaling influences the brain's computational capabilities.
The current study examined individual neurons in isolated mouse brain tissue rather than measuring cognition or behavior directly. Further research will be needed to determine how these cellular changes influence the activity of larger neural networks and behavior in living animals.
Nevertheless, the findings establish a framework for understanding neuromodulation as a dynamic process that reorganizes neuronal computation rather than simply increasing or decreasing activity.
By demonstrating that dopamine and acetylcholine can reshape information transfer, functional classifications, and the relationships among neuronal properties, the study provides new insight into the cellular mechanisms that may enable the brain to adapt its information processing to changing conditions.
Publication information
Article: “Neuromodulatory control of cortical function: Cell-type-specific regulation of neuronal information transfer”
Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Publication date: October 19, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2609893123
]]>As interim dean, Collard will represent a college that is home to more than 3,000 students, 500 faculty members, and six internationally ranked schools.
Collard joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 1991. His research program has focused on understanding how interactions between molecules influence the properties of materials, ranging from electrical conductivity to biological responses. As an instructor he has received awards for teaching excellence and outstanding use of educational technology.
“David’s thoughtful approach and deep affinity for the college make him ideally suited to help steward this transition period,” said Raheem Beyah, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “We are grateful for his willingness to provide continuity of leadership for a college that has achieved tremendous growth in size and reputation over the past seven years.”
A national search for the College’s next dean will commence, led by College of Engineering Dean Mitchell Walker. Information regarding the search committee and key dates will be posted to provost.gatech.edu.
]]>David Collard, senior associate dean for the College of Sciences and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has accepted an appointment to serve as the interim leader for the College of Sciences.
]]>Georgia Tech alumnus and President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough was struck by the beauty and ecological significance of this region during a trip to Cumberland Island.
The South Georgia native decided to transform his sense of wonder into a multiyear exploration of the coast’s natural history, flora, and fauna. Along the way, he met some of the people studying and working to protect its ecological and cultural heritage.
The result is his new book, The Ever-Changing Georgia Coast: A Natural History of Its Creation, Transformation, and Future. Described as “part travelogue, part natural history, and part nature guide,” the book examines the past, present, and future of Georgia’s coast and reflects on the forces, both human and natural, that continue to shape it.
Clough will share stories and inspiration from his latest book during a special conversation on Friday, Oct. 23, from 3 to 5 p.m. in the West Lobby of Scheller Tower. Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair, will moderate the conversation, which will be followed by an audience Q&A and a book signing reception.
The event is free and open to the public. Copies of Clough’s new book will be available for purchase and signing.
RSVP to attend and be entered into a drawing for one of 14 signed copies of his book, one for each of Georgia’s major barrier islands.
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